Drawings of Alek Wek by Marc McGreevy

I also remember seeing Alek Wek for the first time.

I didn’t first encounter Alek Wek on a runway – I wish I had! – but in the pages of a fashion magazine. Wek is a wonderful model, with an unforgettable, unmistakable look. But back in the ’90s, for me as a reader, there was a sadder subtext to Wek’s  singularity.

As Marc remembers, the astonishing impact of the Yves St Laurent shows of the ’70s and ’80s were achieved – literally – on the back of the black women who walked his runway, and who wore his designs with an understanding, an intelligence, and an insouciance that made them universally covetable. And yet in 1995  it was still a rare treat to flick through the pages of the west’s most famous fashion magazine (UK edition) and find a ‘new’ black model featured there.

I give thanks that this is now changing, and that those cultural gatekeepers who seemed to believe that white mediocrity was more ‘commercially viable’ than excellence from people of colour are now having their arses handed to them every day. And I am grateful for this not because I’m P.C., or right-on (as my tedious detractors would like to believe), but because as a Gen X adult I’m still every bit as greedy for beauty and excellence in my cultural content as I was as a Gen X kid. 

These Alek Wek Images Are NEW … So Why Have I Tagged This Post as a #LockdownLifeline ?

Art and Illustration helped me to navigate the year-and-a-bit-and-a-bit-more of Corona, and the emotional, physical and material challenges that came with it. 

I read a lot during Lockdown. But for the first time in my life I couldn’t access a library and had no supply of supply of new-to-me fiction just five minutes from my house. I also faced more financial constraints than I ever have before. Consequently, whilst I did a lot of re-reading, and some borrowing, purchases were few, and very, very carefully considered.

But books about Fashion Illustration were regularly making it from wish-list to shopping basket to checkout … I became aware that my accounts category for ART showed a hefty balance, whilst the totals spent on CLOTHES and PRODUCT were at an all-time low.

Let’s state the obvious. I could probably live through many years of Clothes and Product Rationing without ever running out of either, given my unnatural appetites for both. But the less obvious reason for the increased spending on Art and Illustration is the immeasurable comfort and relief from stress that I’ve found in art, and more specifically, in enjoying drawn or painted representations of women. 

My fashion illustration purchases have simply been about enjoying the work of others. I don’t plan to learn how to manipulate lines and curves and light and shadow. I enjoy my own bafflement at how illustrators work their magic: the interplay of charcoal and emotion, ink and insight, to create in effortless lines, a wild and imaginative evocation, or an elegant, concise report. Words –  mine at least! – are so clumsy, when compared with what flows from an illustrator’s pen.

That’s All Well and Good, But How Exactly Has Illustration Been So Essential To Me?

I’ve spent the last ten days exploring these images, and  – at the risk of sounding a little bit stranger than you might have thought me to be – I’ve been expanding on a technique I developed to deal with long and sleepless nights. 

I’ve had moments of rage and fear in the last couple of years; sometimes both emotions together (thank you UK government), and that’s a heady and unpleasant mix. At such times, even reading couldn’t calm me. But I discovered that if I thought about a particular illustration, and recreated it in my mind’s eye, trying to remember the different elements, I could focus on that, and it was restorative. It didn’t matter if the illustrator was Marc McGreevy, Barbara Hulanicki, or Hilary Knight: I just had to allow the art that they had created to drift up from my subconscious, and then lose myself in it.

With these particular images of Alek Wek I have played a slightly different game. I’ve been happy and productive, but thinking about them a lot in the small hours of the night, because when things are good, those are my favourite hours for thinking. I’ve discovered that I can recreate these images of Alek Wek in my mind’s eye as a projection: a light show! I live on the fifth floor of a big red-brick block of flats, and I look out across the way onto another block, just the same. I imagine these images flickering on the wall opposite, fifty feet tall and incandescent – and it’s wondrous!

Drawings of Alek Wek by Marc Mcgreevy: the TLDR

My ‘education’ in Art finished in Secondary School, so I don’t have the technical knowledge to explain why I find these images of Alek Wek beautiful. If I tried to jolly this piece up with fine phrases, it would just read like a critic in the ‘inky’ music press trying to write about an album, and none of us need that.

I know that I like Marc’s work because for me it balances sweetness and strength. I find a light, active quality in his work that always suggests to me that his model or muse has been captured in movement, and I love this vibrancy. I feel I can sense which part of the model’s body will move next, be it hip, arm, shoulder, head … 

I also find tenderness and intimacy in Marc’s work, and it is these qualities in balance that attract me to his work. I often fail to be tender: I can judge harshly, and I’m wary of what I call acquiescent or performative femininity. Marc’s work reminds me that I can relax and be more gentle, and that since one of my favourite phrases is ‘out of the strong came forth sweetness’ I can afford to act up to that motto from time to time!

Writing this piece made me question why was it always illustrations that I sought refuge in during particularly stressful moments, and not photographs? I think it’s because photography is a modern art. We only developed the science for it quite recently, right? And technology now means that there doesn’t even have to be a human behind the photographic image. Boys have gone to prison on the strength of a picture captured on CCTV.

But the art of illustration is old. Illustration is found in caves, and when we see a bison, or a hand-print, we know that a person created that. I think it’s that human connection that made art and illustration  – including Marc McGreevy’s work – a Lockdown Lifeline for me.

The four illustrations in this post are the work of Marc McGreevy and the copyright is his.