EXTRACTS: Don Lawrence Art (illustrators special) © 2018 The Book Palace (144 PAGES in Full edition)

W ith a population of only 200, the tiny village of Jevington nestles in a valley in East Sussex surrounded by woodlands and rolling green fields. To this idyllic rural setting in the South Downs came a Dutch documentary film maker named Rob Crawfurd. It was the summer of 1996 and Crawfurd was putting together a documentary celebrating the life of an eminent artist whose work was fêted in the Netherlands far more so than in his native England. The artist was Don Lawrence, who had spent many years living in nearby Eastbourne before moving to The Old Post Office in Jevington in 1982, an address so well known to European fans that they would sometimes drop in during holidays in Britain. In his makeshift studio, Crawfurd set about creating a record of Lawrence’s career whilst filming the creation of a cover from the roughest of pencil strokes to finished painting. Lawrence is white-bearded, his equally white hair short but unruly. He clutches a short pencil between the forefingers and thumb of his right hand and his concentration on the art board before him is so intense that he has allowed the cigarette in his other hand to burn unnoticed, a long stem of ash about a third of the cigarette’s length tilting precariously downwards, threatening to fall. The pencil drawing is of an intruder stealing jewellery and a gold figurine, a character who had first appeared 25 years earlier in the pages of the educational weekly Look and Learn in a story featuring a group of high-tech raiders who hide their faces behind almost featureless helmets. Two and a half decades on, Lawrence had been asked to paint a new cover for the thirteenth volume of Big Balloon’s Trigië reprint series and Crawfurd was on hand to record its creation. Two contrasting self-portraits produced by Lawrence for the covers of Don Lawrence—The Collection . in 1991 and 1997. Opposite: Red Revenge. Originally painted for the cover of a Dutch reprint volume in the summer of 1996, it was subsequently published as a limited edition lithograph in 1997. Half-title and title page: Original artwork for the feature ‘The Lawbreakers: The Bold, Bad Buccaneers’ in Look and Learn 485 (1 May 1971), later reprinted in Look and Learn Annual 1986 (1985). 5 © Don Lawrence / Don Lawrence Collection