The composer Benjamin Britten was born in Lowestoft, Suffolk in 1913. I have been involved with Britten Pears Arts, formerly the Britten–Pears Foundation, since 2012, beginning with the run-up to his centenary year. Right: I designed a 50 banner tribute which was hung along Lowestoft’s seafront promenade in 2013 to mark the centenary. It featured artwork created at Lowestoft’s Benjamin Britten High School.
Music on the Mind was originally intended as a teaching resource for schools, but has also turned out to be a popular item for adult visitors to the exhibition shop at Britten’s final home, the Red House. It features artwork from Britten’s own collection.
Lucy Walker’s Britten in Pictures was a pictures and captions overview of his life and music, with an introduction which examined Britten’s equivocal relationship with canvas and camera.
‘Learning at the Red House’: a cover design for a teachers’ information guide, based on Britten’s handwritten notation.
‘Britten’s Words’: I designed the centrepiece panel for this 2015 exhibition which showcased Britten’s settings of poetry to music, in this instance ‘The Tyger’ from his The Songs and Proverbs of William Blake. As well as the type layout, I painted the Blake-style background and the ‘tyger’.
I created an illustrated site map for the Red House and its grounds which has been used in the 2019 version of the visitors’ information leaflet. I also painted three watercolours of Britten and Peter Pears for the other side of the leaflet.