The Art of Roy Cross E-Book

Roy Cross

• Herausgeber: Crowood
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

Roy Cross RSMA GAvA began work as an illustrator in Fairey Aviation during World War II. Over the next thirty years, he progressed from line illustration, via colour artwork, to top-class advertising art for the aircraft industry and other companies, including Airfix, for whom he produced many hundreds of artworks to adorn model kit boxes over a ten-year period. His illustrations for Airfix included superb depictions of aircraft, cars, ships, spacecraft, armoured vehicles and dioramas. Though Roy is perhaps most famous for his Airfix box art, his work has encompassed book and magazine illustrations, including highly detailed cutaways and other technical drawings. In more recent years, Roy has concentrated on the production of his magnificent maritime paintings.

Leseprobe

The Art of

ROY CROSS

The Art of

ROY CROSS

Roy Cross

First published in 2019 by The Crowood Press LtdRamsbury, Marlborough Wiltshire SN8 2HR

[email protected]

www.crowood.com

This e-book first published in 2019

© Roy Cross 2019

All rights reserved. This e-book is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication DataA catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 1 78500 642 5

PAGE 2: The profitable de Havilland Heron Series 2, one of a series of excellent post-war British designs that it was hoped would attain ascendancy over the American commercial types enhanced by mass production during the recent war.

PAGE 3: The incomparable but unprofitable British-French supersonic Concorde airliner.

Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Early Days

Wheels

The Comics

Books

Space

The Airfix Decade

Other Work

Marine Painting

Recent Aviation Pictures

The Sea and the Coast

Index

Another popular post-war design, the BAC One-Eleven.

Acknowledgements

I have enjoyed and acknowledge the encouragement and support of several people during a long career, in particular Leonard Taylor, James Hay Stevens, the Airfix management, and of course friend, advisor and agent Malcolm Henderson. Not for the first time I must mention the help that Airfix has given in permitting me to reproduce here and in other books a number of boxtop pictures themselves, because the original colour transparencies have not come to light. Reproductions from Eagle and Swift appear with the permission of Dan Dare Corporation Ltd.

This book could not have been as complete as it is without the help and encouragement of my son Anthony, and my dear granddaughter Jojo has done the typing. My thanks to them both.

Tim Hall, modern cutaway artist supreme, supplied the cutaway of the Saunders-Roe SR/A1 and to him and the management of Aeroplane Monthly and to Jeremy Brook of Constant Scale, again, my thanks.

The Crowood Press has always been of great help with layout, cover, and so on and are acknowledged here with many thanks, and Arthur Ward’s books on Airfix I have often used to jog the memory.

Introduction

Since 1942, when my line drawings of aircraft first appeared in print in a war-time magazine, until the present day (2018) I have made a good living, firstly as an illustrator and after about 1973 as a fine art painter specializing in the marine field. There was no abrupt change of technique, rather of attitude, dealing with a West End picture gallery instead of commercial outlets. Much earlier I had struggled with colour renderings, first in gouache and then in oils, a gradual process over many years. As an old acquaintance used to say, where does illustration end and fine art begin? By 1973 my colour work was up to being displayed in a fine art gallery and I made the subtle transition, with hard work but few problems. It was just a different market, and to my mind offered increased prestige, possibly better rewards, and perhaps making a name for myself in my chosen area of historical marine painting. At a fair age now, looking back I have come a long way from those first line drawings, working first as a freelance commercial artist and then progressing as a painter, as will be seen, with an astonishing variety of work, from cutaways to oil paintings over a great choice of subject matter. ‘Never turn a job down’ was my motto, though I had my failures to work upon and improve.

Another fine British design, the 1,132mph Fairey FD 2 supersonic research machine with a delta wing and a drooping nose for a better view on take-off and landing, later adopted for the Concorde.

The super-performance rocket-powered North American X-15 reached 4,534mph in 1967.

Early Days

The young cadet Roy Cross in a newspaper photograph.

One reads about artists great and less so who were producing masterpieces at fifteen or younger, like Picasso and Mozart. The few early crude sketches I still possess from my own teens are hardly worth reproducing here and show no evidence of potential genius. One is of a Spanish galleon however, and another of an aeroplane, a portent of things to come. At my senior school, my stay at which was halted early in 1940 after evacuation, because I was learning nothing and my father said I might as well come home and start earning a living, we did have an art class and I was surprised to learn in my leaving report that I was quite good at art.

Before World War II many periodicals were published for boys (also girls) especially, as I remember, featuring the railways, exploration, ocean liners and record breakers on land and sea and in the air, all ideal to appeal to youngsters. Pocket money was too scant for me to buy these regularly, but at our local market at the Elephant and Castle in south London where I lived, there was a stall covered with second-hand copies of a variety of magazines, including Modern Wonder, Boy’s Own Paper and many similar to feed a boy’s imagination in all branches of engineering wonders. I seem to remember a space magazine that sparked an interest in out-of-this-world adventures.

I mentioned my first crude aeroplane drawing. My interest must have been aroused because of copies of aeroplane periodicals on the aforementioned stall and a similar shop at Camberwell Green, where we moved to later on. There I came across various aviation magazines, my favourites being Air Stories and Popular Flying. The American pulp publications like Flying Aces and War Birds were of inferior literary quality but had interesting photographic features, especially of World War I aviation, which I was interested in via Air Stories. Over past years I have bought back rare used copies of Air Stories and find my original instinct was correct: therein are some good adult yarns, which at least one of our top World War II flyers said influenced his flying and air combat experiences; most, after all, were written by ex-Royal Flying Corps and RNAS – and later, RAF – pilots. I’m sure those English air magazines influenced countless recruits to our air services in World War II.

Another influence on my early art activities occurred as follows. We could not afford many holiday excursions, but were lucky enough to have a relation of my father’s living at Smallford, a tiny village midway between St Albans and Hatfield in Hertfordshire. There we often heard and saw aeroplanes flying from the new de Havilland aerodrome and works at Hatfield, and my cousin Sidney took me on one occasion for a long walk to the boundary of the aerodrome where the annual garden party was in full swing with plenty of aeroplanes taking off and landing, a good treat for an air-minded boy.

Another facet of our long stays at Aunt Nell’s that had some influence in fostering an interest in the visual arts was poring on rainy days over several popular volumes, I believe published by Odhams Press at the time, featuring art in general and particularly the great late Victorian artists like Alma Tadema and Lord Leighton, with their almost photographic and romantic renderings of Roman and Greek scenes with voluptuous, languid women. I have always liked this sort of work because of its detail and sheer competence and verisimilitude, which seem out of kilter with the outlandish effects and sheer lack of artistic import obtaining in today’s premium art market.

The pre-war magazines that prompted me to scratch away at line rendering of aircraft in my spare time.

The results of those scratchings as published in the Air Reserve Gazette in 1942–43. TOP: The Westland Lysander; MIDDLE: The Bristol Beaufighter; BOTTOM: The Bristol Blenheim I.

Yet another influence on my blossoming interest in aviation was several visits with my mother to the annual Royal Air Force displays, held at Hendon before World War II, where I witnessed the last years of the silver-winged biplanes, which appeal to me to this day. Hawker Furies and Demons, Gloster Gauntlets and Gladiators – some can still be seen flying today at the Shuttleworth Collection’s air displays. The John Hamilton publication Popular Flying had a monthly photographic contest with some superb pictures of RAF planes that were ideal for copying, mostly in mapping pen and Indian ink rendering, but the cover often featured colourful paintings by an artist called Howard Leigh, which I found inspirational.