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AN ILLUSTRATOR and artist who possessed a ‘prodigious imagination and a meticulous and detailed technique’ has died aged 84.
Alan Cracknell, from Winchester, had a career spanning nearly 60 years, writes Bruce Edwards.
Alan produced images for a huge variety of publications and companies, yet he still found time to develop a personal and immediately identifiable style for his non-commercial work.
Alan’s first job was producing illustrations for catalogues. Work was done on an assembly line and he described himself at the very end “drawing the laces on the shoes.”
Two years later he joined the advertising agency Charles Hobson and Grey working mainly in monochrome for newspapers and periodicals, sometimes reflecting the Victorian engravings which fascinated him. By the mid-sixties he was getting enough work to go freelance and he had a studio in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, later working from his home in Muswell Hill.
Throughout this time, he was collecting Victorian and Edwardian ephemera which fed his imagination as his output became more colourful and more detailed. Fairground lettering and folk art attracted him. He was also influenced by early American illustrators like N C Wyeth, whose ‘Treasure Island’ illustrations were familiar, and his transatlantic contemporary Milton Glaser, whose covers for the Signet Classics Shakespeare edition he admired. He was prolific, producing several covers for ‘Radio Times’, dust jackets for Enid Blyton story-books and work for the Beatles’ Apple Corps.
He contributed to a series of Royal Mail postage stamps commemorating children’s books. However, although his work encapsulated the spirit of the 60s he never chose to identify wholly with Pop Art, feeling the need to keep ahead of the game if he was to continue being successful.
In 1968 he was approached by Jeanette Collins of The Times, who wanted a new style of newspaper illustration. Alan evolved a way of using pencil on tracing paper which, although ridiculed in some quarters, became very successful on the printed page. At about the same time the Sunday supplements were taking off and he got his first real chance to use colour creatively. The Sunday Times and Nova used his work and he often found himself illustrating the food pages – his detailed, ebullient style was more enticing than photographs.
Over this period he collaborated with many authors and publishers. Cookery books were particularly successful. Arabella Boxer’s segmented ‘First Slice Your Cookbook’ had been a novel experiment in 1964. Nanette Newman’s children’s book ‘The Fun Food Factory’, which later became a TV series, was from 1976 and ‘Fish and Shellfish’ by George Lassalle for Sainsbury followed in 1986, with Alan’s riotous, colourful illustrations.
In 2000 he and his family moved to Winchester where he all but retired.
Freed from commercial constraints he began to consolidate his own style which became more fluid and colourful, influenced by Medieval illumination and Elizabethan miniaturists like Nicholas Hillyard, blending extraordinary fantasy with a magic realism. He took on the occasional private commission: a portrait of Edward Elgar floats in the clouds with a musical quotation from ‘The Music Makers’ above a composite Worcestershire landscape with the Malvern hills, his birthplace cottage, Worcester cathedral and the composer wheeling his bicycle.
With more leisure time he pursued his interest in archaeology – particularly through metal detecting – and he occasionally worked for the Portable Antiquities Scheme, producing painstakingly accurate and detailed drawings of discovered artefacts from all over the county. Many finds made their way into his pictures: a mouse in a farmers’ smock and hobnailed boots races through the landscape spilling a basket of ancient coins. Keys, coins and other half-buried treasures are strewn underfoot.
He held successful exhibitions in Winchester but he and his wife lived quietly in a late Victorian suburb of the city. Although he exhibited for a time with a community collective, ‘Artful’, few of his neighbours were aware of Alan Cracknell the artist unless they chanced to glance up in passing at the first storey window of his house and spied him at work at his studio desk.
Alan Cracknell was born in Harrow, Middlesex, in 1937. From an early age he wanted to be an artist and his father encouraged him to consider art as a career, so he went to Harrow Art School. After National Service in the RAF at the end of the 50s, and while working at Technical Artists, he met Evelyn Valentine and they were married in 1960. Their daughter, Sarah, was born in 1963 and from 1964, until they moved to Winchester, they lived in Muswell Hill. In 2015 Alan was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease but the quality of his work remained unaffected. In February 2022 he was found to have a terminal cancer and he died at his home in April.
Alan was a gentle, affable and self-effacing man with a ready, quirky sense of humour. He was always interested in other people, but he knew his own worth and he took pride in his considerable achievements as an artist.
He is survived by Evelyn, Sarah and his sister Margaret.
Alan Ernest Cracknell, artist and Illustrator: 22 August 1937 – 20 April 2022
