Graham Percy

Graham Percy was a New Zealand-born artist, designer and illustrator. His work was the subject of The Imaginative Life and Times of Graham Percy, a major posthumous exhibition of his work which was shown at galleries throughout New Zealand including City Gallery Wellington, Gus Fisher Gallery Auckland, Sarjeant Gallery Whanganui, the Rotorua Museum and the Southland Museum and Art Gallery, Invercargill.

Graham Percy was an artist, designer and illustrator. He was born in Stratford, New Zealand and studied at Elam School of Fine Arts in Auckland. After graduating in the early 1960s, Percy worked as an illustrator for the New Zealand School Journal and collaborated with other Auckland-based writers and artists. He designed the typography for a number of Colin McCahon's exhibition invitations and set up one of New Zealand's first design consultancies with Hamish Keith. During this period he designed covers for The End of the Golden Weather and The Pohutukawa Tree by Bruce Mason. In 1964, Percy received a scholarship to study at the Royal College of Art in London. From late 1964 until the end of his life, he lived and worked in London as an illustrator and artist. He was the production designer on the 1973 animated film Hugo the Hippo. While working on the film he met his second wife, the photographer Mari Mahr.

For much of his career, Percy specialised in children's books, illustrating more than 100 works for children. In later years, he produced a body of his own independent art for adults. In 1994, Chronicle Books (San Francisco) published a book of his drawings for adults, Arthouse. In 2007, a further series of his drawings for adults, 'Imagined Histories' was published, supported by the Scottish Arts Council. Graham Percy died on 4 January 2008.

Text courtesy of Wikipedia, 2023