Jann Haworth: Guys and Dolls and Teaching the Band To Draw

Jann Haworth is an American born artist and sculptor of international renown and influence. She was the co-designer of the Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band LP cover art along with Peter Blake for which she received a Grammy award for her contribution. She is identified with the British Pop Art movement of the 1960′s but her talents are not limited to this genre and encompass work of diverse mediums making her art difficult to categorize. Pop art appears to be an element or point of departure for Haworth since her work reaches well beyond  the scope of that style’s reliance on  images of consumerism and popular culture.

Haworth-Toon Scandal 2008

 Jann Haworth has also worked with film strip, comic animation, altered art, book illustration as well as the sewing arts and other elements of mixed media. Her current work involves large scale abstract sewn canvasses. These sometimes involve using the comic ”frame” convention of the graphic novel and film strip.

Haworth is also an art educator of distinction. Her multidisciplinary talents have been instrumental in forging a vision of art instruction that utilizes diverse teaching techniques such as Nicholaides and Betty Edwards that is contrarian to most views: ”I believe everyone can draw. I don’t believe in talent, I believe in determination and time”. Haworth was the founder of the Looking Glass art school in England. She founded the Sundance Artshack Studio in Utah and holds the position of Visual Arts Director. She has authored three books on artistic training and teaching for children.

50ft x 30 ft Salt Lake City Mural

Haworth was a child prodigy who showed early talent and originality in the creation of soft sculptures and large cloth figurative art. Her mother, Miriam, was a ceramicist, fine art silkscreen printmaker and painter. She taught Jann Haworth sewing and needlework and exposed her to painting influences such as Matisse, Picasso and Bauhaus color theory as well as collage art. Her art education in London beginning in 1960 brought her face to face with institutional chauvinism and gender bias that left a deep impression and forced a conscious decision on her part to recover her identity by retreating into a feminine world by incorporating fabric arts into her work.

Haworth’s father,Ted, was an Oscar award winning Hollywood production designer who showed her larger than life cinematic composition : ”This influenced my work in the 1960′s. I thought of the installations that I did as film sets.The concept of the stand-in, the fake, the dummy, the latex model as surrogates for the real, came from being with my father.” The concept of Her early work made references to fast food, newspapers and Hollywood. Throughout her career there has been an element of three dimensionality to her work with the aspect of texture and relief being particularly prominent features and has allowed her to incorporate other interests such as smaller sculpted pieces and jewelry within the compositions.