Born in 1950, Vincent McEvoy grew up in Crosby, Liverpool.
He studied at Liverpool Art College in 1967 before taking a job as a studio junior at Littlewoods Mail Order where he worked on fashion layouts, surrounded by the coming and going of 60s models and photography by Cornell Lucas and John French (assisted by David Bailey), and engaged in delivering the completed pages to London studios. This experience was followed by a Fellowship in Graphic design at Oxford Polytechnic, and then a period at Geers Gross advertising agency before a chance job for Emerson Lake & Palmer changed everything, and led him to Polydor Records.
McEvoy was the Art Director of Polydor in the 70’s
As such, he had unique access to some of the biggest names in Rock, including The Who, Bob Marley and Eric Clapton. You can hear him talking about this period in an interview with Johnnie Walker on BBC Radio 2 which he has made available on SoundCloud.
When I worked at Polydor the average was thirty albums a month, which is one a day....it was about seeing off artwork every day for one album and coming up with an idea, or a concept, for another.
Since then McEvoy has been awarded numerous D&AD and NYADC awards. In 2002 his work was exhibited as part of ‘Rewind – 40 years of the best UK Advertising & Design’ at the Victoria & Albert Museum. McEvoy first got his hands inky when working with - and being influenced by - Andy Warhol in the 1980’s.
In recent years he has rekindled his passion for silkscreens (seriagraphs), producing artworks based on some of the memorabilia that he accumulated throughout his career.
There is a lot of fun in creating silkscreens with colours so vibrant. The hit and miss moments doing it all by hand can be magic (or totally frustrating), compared to working with graphics digitally.