Belgian rock illustrator and cartoonist Guy Peellaert (previously profiled here) passed away on Monday, November 17th after a serious heart failure. He was 74 and still hard at work, creating a series of ten portraits of Belgian rock musicians for the Belgian media weekly Focus Knack.
As editor Karel De Graeve wrote on the Focus Knack blog, only eight of these portraits were published : Jacques Brel (including a cameo of the artist), van Soeur Sourire, Front 242, Soulwax, Arno Hintjens, dEUS, Plastic Bertrand and nineties dance sensation The Confetti’s. He had only heard of Brel before, but was very impressed by Soulwax and dEUS, whom he called his greatest discovery of late.
For the final illustrations, Peellaert wanted to portrait two female Belgian musicians – Marie Daulne and Axelle Red. It was supposed to be a double portrait with two dominating colors, red and black. He had just started working on the portrait when he broke both ankles in a serious ankles, “le truc le plus con au monde”, as he put it himself. Even then he continued working, but was not able to finish.
Peellaert was one of the most important, and least well-known Belgian illustrators of the past decades. Some of his work for albums by the Rolling Stones or David Bowie have become icons of rock history, and his comic, Pravda,still is one of the best pop-art comics ever created (and still gets imitated up to this day). He will be missed.
Tue, Nov 18, 2008
Art and animation, Comics and cartoons, From our Continental Correspondent