Michael Jeremy English was born at Bicester, Oxfordshire, on 5 September 1941 and was educated at boarding school, before going on to the Ealing School of Art in London, where he studied under some of the leading British avant garde artists of the day and attended the Ground Course, a revolutionary art-teaching programme devised by Roy Ascott. After graduating in 1966, he embraced the hippy movement which was then starting to hit London. He painted the shop fronts of two of the most famous boutiques of the era, ‘Hung On You’ and ‘Granny Takes a Trip’, both in Chelsea. In partnership with Nigel Waymouth, he also produced psychedelic posters under the name ‘Hapshash & the Coloured Coat’. Some of the posters were used to promote gigs by bands such as Pink Floyd, Cream, Soft Machine, the Incredible String Band, the Jimi Hendrix Experience and many others were influenced by the swirling lines and curved shapes of Art Nouveau and Aubrey Beardsley but with blazing, jarring colours. English described the style as ‘the bright, brilliant colours of pop flowing organically into the sexual shapes of Art Nouveau’. The posters were published in runs of thousands by Osiris Visions, a division of International Times and Ad Infinitum. On Friday nights at midnight in 1967, an Irish dance hall in the Tottenham Court Road was transformed into a drug-fuelled rock club called UFO (which stood for Underground Freak Out). Produced by English, the promotional artwork and surreal advertising posters for the club caused a sensation. That year, English and Waymouth released an album, Hapshash and the Coloured Coat: Featuring the Human Host and the Heavy Metal Kids. After a disastrous concert in Amsterdam the partnership ended. According to English: ‘The music was so experimental, people didn’t understand what we were doing. All the kids were thinking, ‘who are these guys?’ By the early 1970s, the hippy movement had all but petered out and English sought other avenues for his talents. He produced limited edition prints for mass production and in 1973, began to paint, abandoning the hyper-realism of the prints and concentrating on the dichotomy between man-made products and the natural world. During that period, he produced minutely-detailed close-ups of machinery, as in Fanjet (1978). His seminal painting of the period was No Deposit, No Return (1979), a smashed Coke bottle nestled in a beautiful bed of leaves, ferns, moss and pebbles. In 1978 English created sets for the Ballet-Théâtre Contemporain at Sadler’s Wells. In 1988, he made the first of several visits to the island of Praslin in the Seychelles, where the rainforests became the new theme for his painting. With his wife Jaki, he took photographs which were later worked up into acrylic paintings on canvas. By the end of his life, he had completed about 20 of these pictures, which he viewed as the most important project of his later career. Fortunately, he was a favourite of the advertising agencies and produced dramatic and colourful advertising posters for some of the world’s leading companies, among them Swiss-Air, McDonalds, British Airways, Porsche, and Bertolli. By this means, he financed his other interests. He also produced two sets of postage stamps for the Royal Mail, one based on early buses and the other on old motorcycles; both sets proving highly popular with stamp collectors. In 1995 English was invited by the BBC to take on the role of artistic director for a projected serialisation of Mervyn Peake’s novel Gormenghast. For the first time, he worked with digital imaging and scanned in concept paintings to build virtual sets and landscapes, within which, it was intended that the actors would perform. However, the mounting costs of the complex process forced the BBC to call a halt to the project. Examples of English’s work are held by the Arts Council, the Victoria & Albert Museum and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. English published a book about his work, 3-D Eye (1979), and The Anatomy of Illusion (1989), a short volume about airbrushing. English was still working until the last week of his life, with inkjet silk screen prints, which featured a poem by the beat poet Allen Ginsberg. Michael English died on 25 September 2009 aged 68 and was survived by his wife Jaki Abbott. English and Waymouth’s original silkscreen of the Jimi Hendrix Experience at the Fillmore Auditorium, New York, was auctioned in May 2008 for a record $70,800 at Bonhams, New York.