Interview: 28th January 2025
Mark Wilkinson is a renowned artist. Having completed work for bands such as Marillion, Judas Priest, Iron Maiden, The Darkness and Europe, to name just a few, his work sits in the home of millions of music lovers around the world. Hotel Hobbies was lucky enough to spend time talking to Mark about his career, the bands he has worked with, his work away from music and his plans for the future.
Hotel Hobbies: I wonder if I can take you back to the beginning. In the past, I have heard you mention The Beatles Illustrated Lyrics Book and the Abraxas album cover by Santana as initial loves of yours. What else first stimulated your interest in art?
Mark Wilkinson: I gave a talk about psychedelic art in November, and created a small exhibition alongside an old band that had reformed specially for the event called The Psychedelic Circus. Gone is the hair (laughing) but that was my era. I grew up in the late sixties and in 1967, my epiphany if you like, was Sergeant Pepper. The effect the artwork had on me was huge. Forget about the music for now, which was pretty impactful of course! I’d never seen anything like that album art.
When I said that I was doing this talk, a writer got in touch with me to say that he was writing a book about the British psychedelic scene in the 60s and he was interviewing a lot of the artists that were still around. I happened to mention that one of my favourite artists at the time was a design collective called ‘The Fool’. He told me they were the people that McCartney commissioned to paint that huge mural in Baker Street for the Apple Boutique. He was also going to use them to create the Sergeant Pepper album cover but the gallery owner Robert Fraser suggested Peter Blake to McCartney instead and the rest is history. Blake said at the time that he didn’t consider he was hired to design a record sleeve; he was hired to create a work of art.
That really resonated with me at the time because I’d started to go to record shops and thought of them as art galleries full of contemporary art. In my hometown, Windsor, there was a shop called Audio-Craft and I got to know Andrea, who managed it. It was a keyboard shop to begin which had a tiny corner to begin with for records. But such was the huge boost in record sales, and the interest in music - the record shop gradually took over, swapping the small corner in the shop for keyboards. It was the record sleeves that attracted me as much as the music. There might be a new band with a beautifully illustrated album cover and I had to buy it. Never judge a book by its cover they used to say - but I did; I ended up buying records because of the record sleeves.
So I gradually got to know all of the artists. Hapshash and the Coloured Coat (Michael English and Nigel Waymouth) designed the cover for Supernatural Fairy Tales by a band called ‘Art’, which was one of my favourites at the time. ‘Art’ went on to become ‘Spooky Tooth’. There were psychedelic artists in America too. I was a huge fan of Rick Griffin who created some of the Grateful Dead album covers. I was never a big ‘Dead’ fan, but I bought the records because I just loved the artwork. So that’s how it started, my fascination for album art.
Hotel Hobbies: How and when did you discover you were actually quite good and how much practise was there in the early days or was it sort of a natural progression of your skills?
Mark Wilkinson: I certainly wasn’t a child prodigy. I didn’t even do art at school. Well, I did once in my final year. It was a competition open to the whole school, and I painted a ‘water’ scene inspired after a night at The Roundhouse seeing Pink Floyd who performed ‘Turn On The Tap Zap’! I think I earned twenty percent or something for my ‘house’, hardly a stunning start! When I left school, I joined an engineering company as a junior draughtsman. I would take the roughs from the designer and create technical drawings, for the engineers on site. That was my job but often, I was waiting for them to give me the rough so there was usually a bit of downtime a few hours a week. So I started doodling. Working with mapping pens, I started doing caricatures of the department heads, just for my own amusement. I had never tried it before. I was seventeen, eighteen. One day somebody looked at them and said oh they’re pretty good, can you do anymore? So I then started designing posters for the company social clubs, everything from the Table Tennis Club to the Badminton Club to Discos every so often. A friend at work saw them and asked if I could create something for his motorbike rally club.
Because I was interested in The Beatles Illustrated Lyrics, I became fascinated with the airbrush after seeing the work of Alan Aldridge so I bought one, and then I was off; the work was getting some attention round town. A good friend of mine, who sadly passed away last year, used to do silk screen printing in his parents’ old caravan at the bottom of the garden. He said I could help out sometimes and in return, he would show me how to use the cutting knives for the iron-on screen stencils. Because everything was created by hand, it was an invaluable experience. Airbrush art also depends on stencils, cutting masks to spray the ink through on to the board. After doing that for a little while, somebody at work suggested art school. “You should be doing something with this,” he said. Something about the wisdom of strangers? I don’t know, but I’d never thought about taking it any further. So I applied and the very first art college I applied to, I got in. It was a diploma course in graphics and illustration at a small provincial art college in Watford.
Hotel Hobbies: So obviously you are known mainly as an airbrush artist. Did you ever have any other medium you experimented in as deeply as that?
Mark Wilkinson: Yeah, watercolour and gouache but I used photographic dyes in the airbrush as you get very fine detail using those. Trouble is they were not light-fast. A lot of those early paintings for Marillion once exposed to sunlight for a time, faded quite badly. It took me a couple of years to realise this, so I started to use acrylic inks which were light-fast. Vigil In A Wilderness of Mirrors was the first one I used acrylic inks, which has retained the same vibrance as the day I painted it. From then on, I also started using acrylic paint more and experimenting with washes. One thing led to another; I was learning on the job really.
Hotel Hobbies: You obviously have mentioned before that your real entry into the album art world started mainly with Marillion and lots of discussions with Fish. Is it possible to sum up that forty-year plus relationship and friendship?
Mark Wilkinson: We got on really well right from the start and I think he recognised something in me, somebody he could work with especially after the first few paintings. You have to remember that with those first few singles, Market Square Heroes and He Knows You Know, I was being tested through a design group – Jo Mirowski’s Torchlight. They had been commissioned from EMI Records for this new band they’d signed: Marillion. Jo said to me they wanted to see what I could do before the band would commit. They paid for the first two singles and if they liked what I came up with, then I’d get that all important first album - Script For A Jester’s Tear - to do and maybe more albums after that. Because Script was a gatefold, and needed a lot of detail to fill in (I hadn’t done anything that complicated before), there were some sleepless nights I can tell you to hit the deadline, but I got there in the end. It seemed to go down well with the fans, which was the most important thing as far as the band were concerned. So that’s how it all began to move forward.
Hotel Hobbies: You mention the amount of work you had to do on something like Script, how much did you enjoy the chance to work on something like the huge booklet for Feast of Consequences? Was it a balance of excitement and trepidation?
Mark Wilkinson: That was interesting. Because I am a collector of records (I still buy records on the strength of the artwork, that’s how I really got into Tool, because of the artwork by Alex Grey), I am absolutely passionate about special packaging and I never forget those words from Peter Blake: it’s not simply a record sleeve, it can be a piece of art and therefore become collectible. When I was art school, I was very influenced by a book designer who was our course tutor for a while called Hansjörg Mayer. He gave me some of his special edition books, a favour for a favour as I worked on a book for him one time. Hansjörg’s books were really beautiful works of art. They made quite an impression on me.
From art college days, I’ve always been interested in packaging design and what can be done with materials using translucent papers and overlays etc. So I’d started to collect a few special editions like Steven Wilson’s. I said to Fish about Feast of Consequences, it’s a shame just to put this in a gatefold sleeve, why don’t you consider doing a book? So I had to look into the logistics of that, find a printer and a packager. I think it turned out okay in the end.
Hotel Hobbies: Most definitely. It is a lovely book.
Mark Wilkinson: We won the Prog Design Award that year which I was really thrilled about because the award was in the name of Storm Thorgerson who is one of my all time favourite album sleeve designers.
Hotel Hobbies: If I can ask you about one particular piece for Fish, that final piece of artwork in the Weltschmerz book, The Masque. Was the intention to bring it all full circle, back to the beginning again?
Mark Wilkinson: I struggled to come up with a defining image for Weltschmerz to be honest. Fish and I were kind of at loggerheads for a while. Everything I presented to him wasn’t right. So I think in the in the gap between rejection and resolving it, I did that painting. I told him as this was going to be his last album, what about an updated version of Market Square Heroes (the very first painting for Marillion in 1982). I had an idea in my mind to change the mask to something more like what the plague doctors wore in the 13th century with those long beaks. They stuffed herbs into them, hoping to keep the Plague away. The beaks kept their faces far enough from people who were ill. I thought that would be quite an interesting way to reflect what we’d all been through in lockdown and also bring the jester up to date. The original jester was based on me. So this new one was also based on me as well, looking gnarled and older with grey stubble. Fish said it was a great idea, but he didn’t want to use that for the front cover because it reflected the days with Marillion rather than his solo career. So I suggested it could be the very last page in the book, the final graphic comment to mark the end of his recording career. I went back to using the airbrush for that one, using acrylic paint of course.
I’ve done some new work recently which I’m pleased with which is very different to anything I’ve done before. I am coming up to seventy-three this year and I want to move forwards, create art that inspires me again. So I’ve called a halt to my commercial work for the time being.
Hotel Hobbies: If you look back at that forty years with Fish, is there one piece of art – and they are all amazing – that you look at with particular pride?
Mark Wilkinson: (Without hesitation) The Fool. I really like it because it had nothing to do with the band or with Fish commissioning it. It was a fan in America who had bought many prints from me. Half-jokingly I said to him one day, my God, how big is your apartment? You could afford to commission me. He came back to me and said he had thought about it but hardly dare ask. So we came to an agreement on a fee and agreed he could have the original painting but I would own the reproduction rights. It’s become far and away my most popular print. His brief was to re-imagine Script For A Jester’s Tear in a different way.
Hotel Hobbies: That is a very interesting answer, thank you. Fish is a musician who gives you a lot of input about what he would like.
Mark Wilkinson: We both loved film makers like Francis Ford Coppola. He loved Fellini and me Tarkovsky. Any chance I can to get a black dog in a picture! With Feast of Consequences for example, the original idea was a dead fish on a dinner plate but to make the dinner plate like the eclipse. However, I didn’t know think it was strong enough for (what has become) my favourite work by Fish. I became very attached to this album and wanted to do something more impactful.
So I made some other suggestions, I was just inspired. I kept sending him visuals and he kept saying yes, (unlike Weltschermz which was no, no, no!) With Feast of Consequences, we both were perfectly aligned. I visited the High Wood with Simon Moston (who was also tour guide for Fish and inspired The Highwood Suite). There was a partially dead tree I remember seeing at the perimeter of The High Wood. It was really gnarled, with a grenade embedded into the tree bark which had grown around it. God knows how many thousands of soldiers met their death in the High Wood which had regrown into a beautiful forest once again. It was very inspiring. Lots of the trees had exposed roots plunging into the forest floor. I thought to myself what a good image that could be. I did some early drawings and sent those to Fish and he said develop them, maybe that could be the defining image we were searching for. I spent ages on that painting, absolutely ages. It’s one of my favourite pieces now.
Hotel Hobbies: One of my favourite pieces of yours is Painkiller by Judas Priest. How long does a piece of work like that take to complete?
Mark Wilkinson: Quite a long time, Painkiller. Again, a long gestation period because I submitted a lot of sketches. Rob’s initial idea was to have a Hells Angel on a bike – some sort of futuristic bike – and also, to continue the theme of the angel from Sad Wings of Destiny, maybe some sort of mechanoid angel riding pillion. It just didn’t look right. I didn’t like the Hells Angel either so I really tried to put him off that and put the angel on instead. He really liked it and I developed it with the metal wings. I reworked the bike to be a sort of monster hybrid with the saw blade wheels. I got that idea because I had a studio above a hardware store that I used to walk through to go upstairs to my studio at the time.
One day, I saw packets of saw blades and I asked Stuart, the guy that worked in there if I could borrow one to draw from. I thought that could be interesting because the whole thing about the bike, it was supposed to be this hell creature screaming like a banshee through the winds of hell! Let’s take it more away from a normal Harley-Davidson. I had loads of sparks coming out, which I was pretty pleased with. I scratched into the board to get the fine detail then added a little puff of white airbrush paint to make them glow. The band asked me to paint over the sparks which I thought was a shame. If you look carefully at the final album art, you can still see the sparks because the over-paint didn’t cover them completely. I must have spent in total six/seven weeks on the finished painting with all the changes. It’s one of Rob’s favourites.
Hotel Hobbies: It is my favourite Priest album and album cover, for sure. It was always my first ‘’new’ Priest album as a fan.
Mark Wilkinson: Yeah, that’s an amazing album musically as well.
Hotel Hobbies: Regarding the work you have done with Iron Maiden - who had a run of covers with a very popular artist – how do you feel stepping into the shoes of someone like Derek Riggs, maintaining the balance of what a Maiden cover is but bringing your own style and thoughts to it as well?
Mark Wilkinson: Poison chalice. That’s what it was. On the one hand, you’re thrilled to be working for such an iconic band and then you think oh, God, the fans! They love Derek Riggs with good reason. He created such an enduring character which is known world wide. I remember doing some work for Star Wars once - Lucasfilm sent me a style guide with dos and don’ts. They sent profiles, front and back line drawings that you could not deviate from or reinterpret. With Maiden, it felt almost the same as that. The band didn’t give me any hassle, but I knew the fans might! You mess with Eddie at your peril!
When it came to doing the last two album covers, obviously, it had to look like Eddie, of course it had. But I thought the only thing I can think of is to make him even more monstrous and so realistic that you see every heightened detail - like a modern monster horror film. They said great, let’s see what you come up with. I was dealing with management, and they would forward it to Steve. In the end, they said, Why don’t you just work directly with Steve? He encouraged me to go a bit further, go a bit further, go a bit further, make it even more monstrous. On one occasion, he went, Oh, perhaps dial that back a bit, might be a bit too much! Cut down on the gore (laughing)! But he really liked the general direction.
He especially liked the treatment of the skin. I played around with a 3D programme to get the textures right. I sent him a version of it on just plain black but I planned to add a lot more detail in the background: torn vines, shrunken heads - the whole Mayan vibe. When he saw it though, he said he wanted to keep that plain black background as it would be different to what they’d had before. He suggested having the big triptych reveal on the inside of the gatefold. I knew that would be contentious and as expected got some flak for it initially when the Maiden fans thought the cover was all they were going to get...like “where’s the detail??” Which of course was on the inside.
My phone lit up when the cover went public and the management sent me a message asking if I’d been checking it all out online, and I said no. I had other things to think about at that time as I was really ill, slumped in my chair in the chemo ward! So I didn’t get to see any of this stuff for a month or two, really. And then, when I scrolled through, it was quite funny because the first few comments were about why the cover had a plain black background. Where’s the detail? And then when the album was released, the tone changed, “Oh, I’ve just seen the inside cover; makes sense now.”
Hotel Hobbies: The band must have been pleased with the black because that is what happened with Senjutsu too, with the reveal on the inside.
Mark Wilkinson: Yeah. Again, I wanted to do something different. I did the face-on version to begin with and Steve really liked that. He said let’s just keep it on black and I said, “Really Steve? I’m going to get into trouble again” and he laughed. The inside illustration took me the longest time I’ve ever spent on a piece of art. It took months. Four months, maybe five months. A long, long time for me to get it right.
Hotel Hobbies: Having followed your work for so long and knowing you had done the Maiden artwork, I thought that the black must have been a deliberate choice. They are both great. As you mentioned, the skin on The Book of Souls Eddie is so alive! In the album credits for Senjutsu, you are credited as Mark ‘The Tinkerer’ Wilkinson. How did that nickname come about?
Mark Wilkinson: Steve and I got on really well. I sent him visual developments and when I changed something Steve could tell because he would overlay them. He would say, “You have changed something and I know exactly what it is! Why do you keep changing things I haven’t asked you to (laughing)?" He said he’d got me on speed-dial as ‘The Tinkerer’! When it came to the album credits, he rang me up and asked how I’d feel about my credit being Mark ‘The Tinkerer’ Wilkinson, after football manager Claudio Ranieri ‘The Tinkerman’.
Hotel Hobbies: He’s always come across an easy person to chat to when he is being interviewed. Another piece of yours I particularly like is the one for Weather The Storm by Glyder. That is the ship on the ocean. Which type of artwork do you prefer, the scenic ones like that, the person based artwork or the bigger pieces with more detail? I know in your early days you did not like landscapes.
Mark Wilkinson: The landscaping thing came from when Fish left Marillion. Manager John Arnison rang me up and at that time; I had already started working on Vigil. He asked if we could talk about the new Marillion album. It was a messy fallout as you know! As far as doing the artwork for them, I said to John that I felt a bit uncomfortable doing it because I had had a more collaborative relationship with Fish right from the beginning, apart from He Knows You Know, which was me and Mark. They always left the artwork to me and Fish. I had such a strong relationship with him and if I carried on working with Marillion, perhaps something would suffer. Also, for their first post-Fish album ‘Season’s End’ they wanted a landscape with all four seasons in one day, which I’d seen something like it before. I said I wasn’t really keen on landscapes; in the end, we agreed it was probably best I went one way or the other and it made much more sense artistically if I stayed with Fish. It was a spur of the moment decision; on balance I don’t think I would have lasted long with Hogarth’s Marillion; let’s leave it at that!
With Glyder, I absolutely loved them. I sent those albums and singles to anyone that I could think of: Sony, Warners and even Maiden’s management for consideration as a support band. Did everything I could to give them a leg up. I really loved that single - Weather The Storm – too. I just liked the idea of doing a pirate ship, a ghost ship on stormy waters.
Hotel Hobbies: Earlier, you mentioned your wife. I know she has supported you with some of your work. How integral has she been to that over the years?
Mark Wilkinson: So, so much. It is a bit of a joke in our family. She has the BA; I just got the diploma. So I kind of defer to her expertise. She’s technically a better draughtsman than me. If I’m doing something either on the tablet here or I’m drawing out a rough visual, she’d come and say no, that’s not quite right. And I’m seething, you know, I’m seething (laughing loudly). What do you mean it’s not quite right? Well, you know, you’ve got to look at the perspective. Yeah, you’re right goddammit! When we first got married, she was the breadwinner. She was getting a lot of advertising work and my career had yet to really take off. We had no idea that Marillion were going stratospheric in the way that they did. It was lucky because it exactly coincided with the birth of our son. He was born the week that Misplaced Childhood was released. Then suddenly, my career also went skyward. It’s amazing what a little smidgen of success will do and all of the people behind all the doors that I’d furiously been knocking on for years were suddenly calling me up! I thought, “Where were you when I needed you?” But anyway, it all worked out fine.
Hotel Hobbies: That success led to other work for Monsters of Rock. What different challenges did work like that create?
Mark Wilkinson: Yeah, that was another rabbit hole. I went through it because I was told by Bravado that Marillion were only second to Maiden in terms of t-shirt sales at that time. I got a call from one of the Drinkwater brothers, Barry or Keith, the two brothers behind Bravado. They wanted a trademark designed for Monsters of Rock. The first festival poster I did was for Bon Jovi. So then they kept coming back year after year. It was never my intention to be ‘the heavy metal’ guy. The bands know that but sometimes I think they quite like it that way. I had a conversation quite recently about one of Maiden’s albums with a friend who’s a massive fan and I said, “Which one was that again? Which one did it come after?” It’s fine though. I absolutely loved their last two albums. Reminds me in a way of Tool, with the songs being very extended. Some think they’re too long, but I actually really like that. It gives them room to breathe. That’s the kind of music I really like.
Hotel Hobbies: Away from music, you also did some art for 2000AD.
Mark Wilkinson: That was completely left field. A guy moved to our village by the name of Alan Grant! He sadly died a few years ago. I used to see him and his wife walking around. The house where I live overlooks the playing field and every year, we have a big church fate. I saw them and thought I’ve got to find out what they do because they look interesting. So Alan and Sue became really good friends. Then, I find out what he did and we used to go to their house parties and I met John Wagner, who invented Judge Dredd. I helped Alan move soon after to a converted church a few miles from here.
He used to write a character called ‘The Demon’ and he had a huge life-sized cardboard standee. His car wasn’t big enough to transport it so I took it in my car when he moved. I asked him where he wanted it and he said in the bedroom. So I put it in there and stood it up. That night we had the biggest thunderstorm I think we’ve ever had in this area; it was really end-of-the-world scary stuff. That was their first night in the church and he said that standee of The Demon kept lighting up (laughing). He said the storm shook the church so much that night that it eventually fell on the bed on top of them. He wasn’t scared too often but it freaked the hell out of them so they moved it into the spare room!
One year, he suggested I go with him to ComicCon and he’d introduce me to a few people including Fleetway, the publishers of 2000 AD. So I went and they said they’d love me to do some stuff but I’m just not quick enough for doing the interior illustrations. The art director at the time, I can’t remember who it was, predated David Bishop anyway, said what about the covers? They used artists like John Bolton to do the covers and as that paid more, I could afford to spend a bit more time. But Alan was really keen for me to do a story before they moved away again to Scotland. He said, what if he was to write a special story with me in mind, which doesn’t have a lot of panels? I think they’re called splash panels. So I could paint one or two illustrations per page, and it’ll be a very, very compressed story. It turned out to be Judge Anderson and as she’s my favourite character in the Dredd universe, I was really honoured. I love that ‘PSI’ universe she inhabits and so that’s the only time I did anything for the inside.
Hotel Hobbies: So without giving anything away that you’re not supposed to, are you currently working on anything exciting?
Mark Wilkinson: Nothing for any bands. I’m about to get a call from the States with a business proposal. I don’t know what it is, maybe nothing. I’ve turned down a lot of work this year and they’ve all taken me at my word (laughing)! I’m building a studio in the garden. They’re coming in April to do that. I’m planning a couple of exhibitions. I started doing some sculptural things. I’ll quickly show you. It’s pretty big. (Proceeds to show me a huge sculpture of a woman’s head with branches for hair ).
I’ve also been painting mannequins. I did a few for an exhibition in honour of Peter Blake (the exhibition about psychedelic art mentioned earlier). I was thinking about the wax works on Sergeant Pepper. Obviously, I couldn’t get hold of any wax works but thought about mannequins. Some friends of ours own a wedding shop in Rugby and we were travelling around and stopped there. I said we’d seen some painted mannequins in a gallery at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park so I was inspired. And she said, oh, I’ve got 3 in the garden - all in bits though. So I loaded up the car with them the following day and off I went. Turned out the hands were missing on the female mannequin so I cut her arms off completely and just used the torso to paint and created a pedestal for her. I put them in this exhibition just for my own amusement. And (in surprised tone) people wanted to buy them which got me thinking, I’d like to create some more.
I went to the London Art fair last week just to see what was going on in the modern art world. Now I’ve sort of semi-retired, I’ve got the freedom to do whatever I want. I want to try different techniques, work with different materials - work really big, paintings as well as sculptures. But I need a bigger studio for that. So watch this space! I would like to do another book in a year or so when I’ve done this new work and make that the very last chapter of the book, to be about the direction I’ve gone in after all the craziness. I don’t just want to stop; it’s the curse of being a creative I suppose. You can never retire really.
Hotel Hobbies: Good luck with it! You have earned the right to do whatever you want now! If there are any budding artists reading this interview, what advice would you give them?
Mark Wilkinson: The whole landscape has changed. It has changed in music and every sphere of the arts. That was one of the reasons that I wanted to go to the London Art Fair. I wanted to see all the contemporary galleries represented there, all the contemporary artists. I wanted to soak up what people right now are doing. And it’s incredible, the materials they’re using. This one artist is using biodegradable polymer, which you would think was an oxymoron. However, they’ve managed to do it. I want to do something like that with the mannequins. Add bits to them, re-purpose them into art objects.
I want to experiment. That head (indicating the head he showed me earlier) is not bronze. It’s wood. It’s Styrofoam. It’s string. It’s a couple of bamboo hoops used for flower arranging and twigs, branches and flowers. I was saying to my wife, it needs something on the top. It’s meant to be sort of like a ‘Gaia’ creature and she said, what about dried rose petals? I sprayed everything afterwards with black stove paint and I thought that wouldn’t work on petals, but it did. It worked perfectly. So dried flowers, petals and plaster. I rubbed a little bit of gold acrylic paint in here and there and it looks like a bronze. I just want to experiment now. Day one at art school again. I want that kind of freedom. You have to find your own way.
The way that I did it in the late seventies is totally irrelevant now, dragging heavy portfolio cases around. You’ve got to have a website. The marketplace is digital. There’s a website called deviantart.com - go on there, it’s a massive worldwide shop window. That’s a good way to reach people.
Record companies now don’t commission artwork. You have to get friendly with the bands. It’s the bands that drive it. In the old days, EMI had their own art department. They don’t have art departments now. It’s a very different world as far as the recording industry is concerned. New bands make albums in their bedroom and upload them and usually create their own artwork! I used to have to take the artwork to the printers and they’d strip it off the board and put it onto a drum scanner. As the name suggests, it used to sort of revolve slowly and then there’d be some sort of scanner which would take the information from it for the print plates. There isn’t any advice that I could give that would be helpful to budding artists now.
Hotel Hobbies: And my last question is, if you could have designed one piece of album artwork in history that’s not yours, what would it be?
Mark Wilkinson: Behind you (pointing at the Floyd album cover up on the wall in my room) Pink Floyd. I would love to have done anything for the Floyd. Actually, the first band I went to see was The Nice with Keith Emerson. But Floyd was the first band I joined the fan club and followed right from the start with Syd Barrett. I just thought (and still do think) they’re amazing; their music still speaks to me.
Hotel Hobbies: Thank you so much for your time Mark. It has been an extremely enjoyable and fascinating interview. A real privilege to talk to you.
Mark Wilkinson: You’re welcome. I have enjoyed it too. Thank you.
Mark Wilkinson online
To see more of Mark’s art and the opportunity to buy limited edition prints, please visit www.mark-wilkinson.co.uk
Fascinating interview !