We are honoured to offer the collection of the late photographer and graphic designer Steve Allison in our forthcoming MODERN MADE: Modern, Post-War & Contemporary Art, Design, Craft and Studio Ceramics sale, spread over both the evening & day sessions. This rich and varied collection encompasses painting, drawing, printmaking and ceramics, and proves the maxim ‘always buy what you love’.
The photographer and graphic designer Steve Allison was born in Birmingham in 1948, although he spent his working life in Cardiff, where he’d pitched up in 1967 as an archaeology student. After graduation, he scratched a living as a concert promoter (putting on a 12-hour gig in Cardiff in 1970, headlined by Pink Floyd), stage manager, occasional bookbinder and jobbing lithographer, until one day in 1973, walking across a road in Manchester, he decided to become a graphic designer.
He started The Steve Allison Studio in 1974, in the midst of the worst economic situation since the Great Depression, balancing typography work with his own photographic practice, until deciding to focus on design full-time in 1980. The studio ran successfully for the next 30 years, mainly working within Cardiff’s theatre, dance and music scene – all of which were enduring personal passions of Allison (in a private memoir, written in 2014, he recalled owning nearly a thousand vinyl albums, although he’d removed all their covers, as he didn’t like their design). For fifteen years, Allison produced almost all the visual communication for the Welsh National Opera (WNO) – with some of the work he produced there having since been acquired by the V&A. Whilst at WNO, he worked with the writer Antony Peattie, the partner of the painter Howard Hodgkin – although, in typically diffident and cool style, Allison never once mentioned to Peattie that he collected Hodgkin’s work, until well after the painter’s death.