Mike Hawthorne

Mike Hawthorne:  an artist based in London, born in 1954. He became fascinated by the engraved illustrations in American Civil War journals and the humorous graphics in the mid–1960s MAD magazines. In the 1970s he spent 8 seminal weeks in Kinshasa learning from Congolese sculptors and painters. African music, Soul, and Reggae became his chief subjects. In the 1980s, he began to work in colour with some good results in silk–screen printing. Nowadays, he finds himself attracted to pen–and–ink drawings; occasionally using charcoal and collages. Commercial success has always eluded him, but he never regretted choosing an artist’s life. In fact, it chose him. (See his Instagram page, hawthorne.mike, for examples of his work over the years.