Neal Fox - Le Gun

Neal Fox Official Website
Le Gun Official Website

Neal Fox is an illustrator/artist who co-founded the art journal 'Le Gun' whilst studying at the Royal College of Art. He has an impressive list of commercial clients who have used his illustrating skills, including Red Hot Chilli Peppers, Babyshambles, Dazed and Confused, Absolut, The Guardian and The Independent, plus many more.

Throughout Neal Fox's lecture he showed us different pieces of work either he has created on commission or for the annual art journal 'Le Gun'. One piece he showed was a video he had created for the band 'Babyshambles.' Link to Babyshambles Music Video I found this video particularly fun and enjoyable to watch, it also interested me how he has used a combination of both illustration and video together to create a interestingly clever, fun music video.

Still Image from BabyShambles Video 'French Dog Blues'

Neal Fox talked about how he had strong influences from his grandfather's past, who was a WW2 Bomber Pilot aswell as a writer, he illustrates tales from his grandfathers life, combining them with the mythology of pop culture that is so adverse today. It is common to see in his work famous idles we see in both the music, art and philosophy scopes of life. 

I believe I found Neal Fox's work interesting to me, mainly because of the people he included in his illustrations. People such as Francis Bacon, Jimmy Page, John Lennon, Hunter S. Thompson, Johnny Cash, and many more, all people I have an interest in already; so in turn I found it interesting to see Fox's use of these people in his own work and how he chose to interpret them. 

Fox's Francis Bacon Stain Glass Window

In 2011 Fox held a solo exhibition in the Daniel Blau Gallery, exhibiting a series of stain glass windows. He features in these windows people he believed to be 'anti saints', 'The figures who feature in the windows have all been in my drawings in the past. They are all iconoclasts, and they have an element of debauchery to them. I think of them of as kind of alternative saints, who have shaped the ideas of the people and culture that followed them by breaking the rules' (Dazed Digital 2011) 
This is possibly my favorite of Fox's exhibitions, I love how he has used his idea of alternative saints and but them in the format that is seen as saintly and religious. He has used this to create a controversial yet really fun exhibition. 

From not hearing of Neal Fox or Le Gun before he came to MMU as a guest speaker, I can now say that I am very interested in his work and also the art journal 'Le Gun'. I recently bought the 5th addition of 'Le Gun' , and was presently surprised when looking through it that it could be connected to my groups work. When thinking of creating a zine we wanted to contribute a range of both image and text. First assumptions of 'Le Gun', I expected there not to be much text involved at all, however there is a narrative throughout the journal that links in with the images if not in a loose but interesting manner. This allowing for focused interpretation yet still loose enough to leave self interpretation to the images. 

Cover of Edition 5 Le Gun