Issue 97: Cover Art

Issue contents can be found here. Click on the links to be taken to the individual stories, or scroll down to read the issue online here.

The cover for Litro no.97 features author portraits of three of the writer featured in the August 2010 issue: Louise Stern, Clare Wigfall and Jackson Martin. Louise is a prizewinning winner who opens the issue with her contribution, ‘Rio’; Clare wrote ‘The Party’s Just Getting Started’ (page 29 – print issue) and was the recipient of the 2008 National Short Story Award; and we are pleased to feature an extract from a novel by Jackson, a promising new writer, this month as well.

The photographer for the cover was Jon Cartwright (www.joncartwright.com) and it shot on location at The Dalston Boys Club, London – highly appropriate for our East London-themed issue.

This month’s Litro cover artist is Gillian Ayres, one of many talented artists exhibiting at the annual Royal Academy Summer Exhibition now in its 242nd year. Click here on to find out how to become a Friend of Litro and be entered into our competition to win one of 5 pairs of tickets to this year’s Summer Exhibition.

Gillian Ayres studied at the Camberwell School of Art. After leaving in 1950, she began to paint abstracts, with her first solo exhibition being held in the mid-1950s. Ayres was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 1989. In 1986 she was made an OBE and in 1991 become a Royal Academician.

Ayres’ early works were typically made with thin vinyl paint making up relatively simply forms from a limited colour palate, but later oil painted works are much more colourful and exuberant, as seen above in this month’s cover  art.

Cover Art for Litro 94

Spanish and Catalan issue

Cover art by Edward Hopper, the American Realist artist. This issue contains poems from Ernest Farrés’ Edward Hopper, which relate to his paintings, capturing the stories being told within them.

Hopper was best known for his oil paintings, but was an equally talented as a watercolorist, printmaker and illustrator.  His work reflected his personal vision of modern American life but with a strong European artistic influence, realistically depicting urban and rural scenes which referenced both natural and modern man-made structures and lifestyle, combining  a sense of geometry and the careful placement of the human figure with an almost cinematic use of light and shadow.