Desigual / Blog / Atypical Spanish Wear since 1984

“Humour is just the sugar that decorates the message to make it sweeter,” says David Shrigley on his website, perhaps inspired by Mary Poppins (you remember “A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down, the medicine go down …. in a most delightful way….”). Shrigley is… what exactly? an artist?, an illustrator? a humorist? a bad guy?… In fact, he is another one of those people who are quite unclassifiable.  Well, I’m not going to be the one who sticks a label on him, but one thing that’s clear is that Shrigley is a master at illustrating the darkest side of daily life, ridiculing people’s faults and glorifying banalities from a standpoint of absurdity and irony.

David studied at the Glasgow School of Art alongside recognized artists like Douglas Gordon and Simon Starling, winners of the prestigious modern art award, the Turner Prize. He uses a wide variety of formats to give full vent to his ingenuity, ranging from drawings, animations and photography, to a type of work with a low tech aesthetic that many other illustrators have dabbled in: doodles, childlike scribbles, a sloppy handwriting style of printing. One of the things I like best about David Shrigley is that he not only puts his work through museums or art galleries, you can also find it in music stores, in cinemas, on T-shirts and tattooed onto close friends!.

Shrigley has in fact worked with several musical bands, as in the following video, in which he creates an attractive story-line with just a hint of sadism for the track “Good Song” by Blur:

He also created an animated clip for Bonnie Prince Billie, for the song “Agnes, Queen of Sorrow”. And since he quickly grew attached to the idea of telling stories through animated film, he took the plunge and directed a short animation called Who I Am And What I Want, in which he tells the story of Pete, a somewhat disturbed individual who flees from the city to seek refuge living among the animals in the forest. Is there anyone alive who has not had this idea pass through their heads at some time or other?

In 2006 he published Worried Noodles a vinyl record sleeve …without the vinyl record. All it contained was a little booklet full of drawings and a series of song lyrics. A “joke” that went a long way, since twelve months later people like Franz Ferdinand, Deerhoof, Scoutt Niblet, Grizzly Bear, Dirty Projectors, Hot Chip and many others composed and recorded the 39 songs in the booklet, a real testimony to his talent. Such are the passions unleashed by Shrigley’s work that there is a whole community of fans who have been so inspired by his drawings that they have decided to mark their skin permanently with them, later finding themselves pictured by Shrigley on his website.

I need go no further than a colleague of mine who works on the same desk as myself, and who wanted to have a new tattoo done to cover up a “teenage error”. I persuaded her to have something really ingenious done and, although the tattoo artist grumbled a little – some of them are just a little bit special – we finally got him to do it, with the following result!

Good news, then, dear friends, Old School is out of fashion! Now it’s David Shrigley-type tattoos that are in, so join the club and send your pictures to his website!

Mauricia Blanquerna/ YProductions