“Wonder Workshop T-Shirts distilled the flamboyance of the early 70’s. Artists John Dove and Molly White started the label in 1971. Lou Reed, Mick Jagger, Marc Bolan and Paul McCartney were photographed in state of the art shirts like “Pin-up Girls” and “My Baby Loves The Western Movies”. Their hand-printed designs had a major influence on T-Shirt graphics. Sophisticated prints were realised through a pioneering use of photographic screens and photo-montage techniques that produced “Lips” and “Leopardskin Girls” in 1973 while the “Exploding Mickey” T combined skilled draughtsmanship with explosive colours to evoke the
American Dream gone berserk.”
From ‘The T-Shirt Book’ by Alice Hiller and John Gordon, Ebury Press, London 1988
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We were saturated by pop culture and the prevailing wind of change
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A New Beginning For Our Print Work
The montages stacked up through 1972 and 73 until a market could be found for the new prints. We would be working on an image for a straight 36 hours from start to finish. Translation of the image through half-tone colour separation gave the work the edge we 'd been looking for - an 'instant' processing where it could be quickly applied to screen and reworked on the print table. This deconstructed approach became the direction we would explore for the next decade. The 1973 Lips was one of the earlier Montage pieces but didn’t happen as a T-shirt until 1974 selling mostly through a few shops in Covent Garden and in Greenwich Village, New York. It marked the end of the Wonder Workshop Label’s Rock’N’Roll images and a new beginning for our print work. The Lips image, of course, is steeped in art history from the Dali image of Mae West, the Pop Art paintings of Tom Wesselmann and Andy Warhol to Joe Tilson’s Lips Clip-O-matic. In 1976, we dropped the yellow screen and remade screens to increase the red so the image was more stark - worked better with black. By 1977 the LIPS print became an important piece for us and formed a key part of the T-shirt collection produced over the following 20 years for Kitsch-22 and with BOY Blackmail.
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The Printed Denim was perfect for our 70’s collection of Modzart Jeans so we enlarged the separations and made a continuous repeat for the screens so Denim and Satin could be printed on the Buser machine at Ivo Prints in Southall at a rate of about 150 metres an hour.
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A little while after Malcolm Mclaren had returned from Paris, hanging out on the New York Dolls European tour, he and Vivienne came to see us at the studio in Villiers Road NW10. We talked about sex clothing and the overlapping images of pornography and Art. Vivienne said she would like our Lips and Leopardskin fetish T-shirts we had produced that spring for their new shop venture but we couldn't agree on a shape, a pattern or a label so we never struck a deal. We had a real good discussion about Punk Rock, Screen printing and the rest of the world for most of the afternoon and we did come up with the name for the shop - SEX.
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it always made sense to do them as fine art prints
In 2010, the LIPS was included in a mixed show of photomontages and collages called 'THE TERM REALITY' at the The Paul Stolper Gallery. It was the first time LIPS had been available as a multiple artwork. In August 2011, The Lightbox Gallery held a stunning exhibition of British Pop Art from the 60’s curated by Michael Regan called “Snap, Crackle & Pop”. It included all the Pop Art greats from Clive Barker and Peter Blake to Joe Tilson and Colin Self. The LIPS montage series was exhibited at the entrance to the exhibition with prints from the Paul Stolper Gallery. In September 2012 LIPS was included in our exhibition FACE TO FACE at The Paul Stolper Gallery. The BLUE LIPS was also first produced in 1978 as a print on denim for Modzart printed jeans.
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PRINTS 2010 - 2020
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MAUF
JOHN DOVE AND MOLLY WHITE x PALACEPalace is a unique concept store with more positive directions in Street Art, skateboarding and fashion than most other fashion companies.
How could we not be interested?
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