Very sad to hear that my friend Richard Nye, the poster artist for my three short films, has died. He was seventy-two.
Richard was very much a peer when I met him in the trenches at TVC animation studio in London in 1985. He was the slightly grumpy assistant art director and lead animation checker on the floor above my cutting room during the production of When the Wind Blows.
Richard was a short fellow with a large red beard, a penetrating gaze, a big laugh, and a gregarious personality. He loved Hammer horror films, beer, and cigarettes – on two of those, we bonded. He was also a super artist with a gothic streak and a love of classic movie poster art, especially anything from the British horror genre.
For that reason, I got up the nerve to ask Richard to paint a poster for my 16mm short film, Board Game. I provided tiny clips of the film for Richard to peer at through a magnifying glass, and photos of my chessmen and my actors. He painted them in cutout watercolor layovers and applied text in rub-down lettering leftover from my end titles. Richard came up with the tagline – ‘Just a simple game…’ – because he deemed mine too wordy. I paid him £100 and he kept the master, while I had color copies made.
A few years later, when I got to make Dogplant, I came back to Richard to commission my next poster. I knew that neither Channel Four nor the production company was going to single out my short for special treatment in their Four Minutes series. I gave Richard a bit of money and a little sketch of a worm’s eye view of the dog looking at the plant. Richard ignored that completely. He told me he wanted it to feel like the Drew Struzan art for *batteries not included, with spores drifting past the bemused Labrador. A lovely idea. This time, Richard let me keep my tagline. That was something that I had wanted to appear in the sky at the end of the film, ‘Man’s Best Friend Doesn’t Grow on Trees.’ My editor Xavier Russell loved the finished poster and told me he was going to frame it in his cutting room.
Fast forward two decades, Richard was my only choice for the poster for The Glitch. I forget if I even bothered giving him a brief. I just told him the vibe and sent him a link to my rough cut with a handful of JPEGs. In one weekend, Richard knocked it out of the park with a painterly but appropriately digital rendering. And then, for a generous low fee, he pulled the elements around to make my DVD box art, which I still have in vast reserves!
That was all emails. I got close to rendezvousing with Richard for a celebratory pint on one of my journeys back to London, but sadly it was not to be. We last bantered online last year, while I was chortling at one of his Photoshop doodles. I didn’t know he was ill. Safe travels, old chum. I’ll raise a glass for you on Wednesday. Cheers.
A small selection of Richard’s art is below.
