Yanni Stumbles - Posters and Graphics
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| Greedy Smith (Mental as Anything), Yanni Stumbles and Shoena White, Sydney, circa 1980. Source: Yanni Stumbles. |
I was once asked by a band’s agent not to do such good posters, because as soon as they were put up, they were pulled down and hung on people’s walls (Yanni Alexander 2013)
Biography
Yanni Stumbles (born Janni Alexander, 1952) is a graphic designer and accountant. In the early 1980s she produced numerous Sydney street posters, designed the cover for the Hoodoo Gurus breakthrough album Stoneage Romeos, was band manager of Paul Kelly and the Coloured Girls, and as an accountant worked in the Australian music and film industries for an extensive period. She studied art at East Sydney Technical College during the late 1970s and between 1980-86 produced numerous artworks and screen prints in association with, amongst others, the Lucifoil Poster Collective and the Tin Sheds Art Workshop at the University of Sydney (pers. comm., Kenyon, 1995). During this period she also taught screen printing at the Darlo CYSS (Darlinghurst Community Youth Support Scheme). Some of her prints from those years bear the inscription ‘Seagull Posters’, the name of her own production company within Lucifoil. This includes the 1982 poster A Change in the Weather produced for a production by Theatre South, Wollongong, and in association with the Woman and Arts Festival of that year. Around 1983-4 Yanni moved from screen printing to working with the Australian music industry in areas of management and production design for bands such as the Hoodoo Gurus. For a short period thereafter, through to 1991, she managed Paul Kelly and the Coloured Girls / Messengers, producing LP cover art and promotional posters. Yanni moved from Sydney to Melbourne where, in 1995 she worked as a consultant accountant for the Victorian Rock Foundation. According to the book Rock Dogs: Politics and the Australian Music Industry, by the time of her arrival '...the Victorian Rock Foundation board has been instructed by the VRF's consultant accountant Yanni Stumbles, that it could no longer honour cheques (Extraordinary Board Minutes, 15 May 1995, page 171). At the end of the decade Janni attained a Post Graduate Diploma in Arts and Entertainment Management from Deakin University. As of 2013 she was operating as an independent production accountant and small business manager. Film industry credits include production accounting on L.A.D., Blinder, Crawlspace, My Year Without Sex, Zokky the Kangaroo and Rock Wiz, plus general business management for several Melbourne production houses. In 2013, this author conducted a brief interview with the artist.
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| Artworkers Union organising committee members, December 1979. Top Row L-R: Gregor Cullen, Charles Merewether, Tim Burns, Yanni Stumbles, Sally Wade, Ian Burn, Merilyn Fairskye Middle Row L-R: Viv Binns, Jackie Laws (?), Elizabeth Campbell(?), Rosemary Johnson, Barry Collins, Michiel Dolk, Ross Wolfe Front Row L-R: Mary Kinney, Michelle Fitzgibbon, Ian Milliss, Pam Debenham, Nigel Lendon, Bob Gill. Photo by Lori Sherman. |
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* Interview with Janni Alexander by Michael Organ, Tuesday, 25 June 2013
Michael (MO) spoke to Janni (JA) by phone and asked her about the A Change in the Weather poster, its production and her time at the Tin Sheds as part of the Lucifoil Poster Collective.
MO: What was the process for obtaining and/or carrying out commissions with Lucifoil?
JA: People usually came to us either via the Tin Sheds or Darlo CYSS - or friends - word of mouth ...
MO: How did your involvement with the Lucifoil Poster Collective operate - regular meetings, residencies at the Tin Sheds, etc.?
JA: No, I don't recall meetings. We tended to just see each other at the [Tin] Sheds I guess.
MO: In regards to the Theatre South A Change in the Weather poster of 1982, how many copies were made?
JA: It was probably produced in a print run of about 100 copies. I didn’t do many at the time.
MO: Who did the printing?
JA: I did all the work myself. We all worked that way at the Tin Sheds at the time, every bit of it. We worked hard. The poster was printed at the Tin Sheds, University of Sydney.
MO: Can you tell me about the poster itself – it seems to reflect the influence of Roy Lichtenstein?
YA: The bright colours were to attach people’s attention. You need to know your audience and attract their attention in order to get a message across. So we used bright fluro colours at the time. I suppose I was influenced by Roy Lichtenstein and Pop Art at the time.
MO: Who were Seagull Posters?
JA: That was just me, I was Seagull Posters. That was my little thing. I was also part of the Lucifoil Poster Collective and worked with people such as Leonie Lane and Shoena White.
MO: What was it like working at the Tin Sheds?
JA: It was a lot of fun. I feel very privileged to have worked with such a group. I was just one of the team. Others were so much better. Michael Callaghan – I looked up to him as a master printer.
MO: What else were you involved with at the time?
YA: I did some teaching at Darlinghurst Art College and also curated the “Street Art” exhibition around 1981-2. I later worked with bands, designing posters and album covers, with bands such as the Hoodoo Gurus and Paul Kelly. I was once asked by a band’s agent not to do such good posters, because as soon as they were put up, they were pulled down and hung on people’s walls.
Posters, record / CD covers & t-shirts 1980 - 1986
Yanni Alexander’s poster art from the early 1980s exhibits both feminist and modernist influences, and remains an important part of the output of the Lucifoil Poster Collective. It is coloured and innovative, in line with the boom in screen printing which took place in Sydney during that period and is best seen in the work of the Earthworks Poster Collective and offshoots such as Redback Graphix. A list of her known work is presented below, having been compiled with the assistance of the artist. Images are primarily drawn from the National Gallery of Australia (NGA) and the Australian Prints + Printmaking websites. Copies of the works are held in public collections such as the NGA, the State Library of New South Wales and the Powerhouse Museum, Sydney, along with numerous personal collections. Catalogue entries list her variously as Yanni Stumbles or Janni Alexander. Some 32 items are listed below.
1 - 2. King Cross Youth Refuge Needs Volunteers 1980. Screenprint, printed in colour from two stencils, Lucifoil Poster Collective, Sydney. A t-shirt featuring elements of this poster was also produced - refer photograph above with Yanni Stumbles wearing the t-shirt whilst speaking with Greedy Smith, singer and pianist with the band Mental as Anything.
3. 1st South Sydney Youth Film Festival 1981. Screenprint, printed in colour from four stencils, Lucifoil Poster Collective, Sydney.
4. Buckeye and Pinto ... Valhalla Cinema Glebe 1981. Screenprint, printed in black ink from one stencil, Lucifoil Poster Collective, Sydney. The 1979 independent Australian film Buckeye and Pinto also shared a double-bill with Terror Australis.
5. Riptides 1981. Screenprint, printed in two colours - black and gold - from multiple stencils, Lucifoil Poster Collective, Sydney. Poster for the Australian rock group Riptides.
7. Terror Lostralis 1981. Screenprint , printed in black ink from one stencil, Lucifoil Poster Collective, Sydney. Poster for the independent Australian cult film Terror Lostralis directed by David Shepard and released during 1980. A number of variants of this design were used in the promotional campaign.
10. A Change in the Weather 1982. Screenprint printed in colour from multiple stencils, 48 x 76 cm, Seagull Posters and Lucifoil Poster Collective for Theatre South and the Women & Arts Festival, Wollongong. Exhibited in Wollongong in Posters: Art on a Telegraph Pole, University of Wollongong, 2013. This poster promotes a work by well known playwright and founding member of Theatre South, Katherine Thomson. In A Change in the Weather, a play about two women at work in Wollongong, she explores one of her recurrent themes of how ordinary people respond to social, economic and political change. Katherine and Faye Montgomery performed in this well received play. The A Change in the Weather poster is strongly reminiscent of the style of American artist Roy Lichtenstein, with its comic-style imagery, fluorescent colours and dynamic text bubbles.
11. Mick Jagger [1982]. Screen print in multiple colours, 50.6 x 76 cm. Seagull Posters. Image based on Jane Brown's 1977 photograph of the lead singer of the Rolling Stones.
15. Hoodoo Gurus 'My Girl' Tour 1983. Screenprint, printed in colour from multiple stencils, 80 x 110 cm. Tin Shed Posters. Also issued in a variety of monotone variants with space at the bottom for relevant gig information during the My Girl tour. As noted by James Anfuso in a 2021 Facebook discussion on the Rock Posters Australia group, the image is based on the Will Eisner art for the 4 January 1948 issue of The Spirit comic, featuring femme fatale Powder Pouf on the cover. Pink and green monotone colour variants of the poster are also known. This is Yanni Stumbles most famous poster.
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| 18. Stoneage Romeos, LP, 1984, front cover. |
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| 19. Stoneage Romeos, LP, 1984, rear cover. |
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| 20. Stoneage Romeos, T-shirt, c.1984. |
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| 21. Gig poster. |
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| 22. Hoodoo Gurus Festival, 2013. |
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| 23. Leilani |
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| 24. Tojo (Yanni Stumbles and Dave Faulkner) |
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| 25. My Girl. |
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| 26. I Want You Back. |
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| 27. Bittersweet. |
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| 28. Like Wow! Wipeout. |
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29. Post - Paul Kelly 1985. Album cover for Paul Kelly's first LP. Yanni Stumbles managed Paul Kelly for seven years, either with her then partner Stuart Coupe, or on her own after they split up. In an interview she said that she found working with Kelly helped form the bedrock of her work philosophy – ‘an honest days work means an honest days pay’. A man of few words but with a strong work ethic "he gets up and does one of his songs, and it moves you because he is such a great songwriter and artist. He is one of the few people who has ever sung a song and made me weep."
30. Paul Kelly 1986. Screenprint, printed in colour from one stencil. Generic poster for concerts by Paul Kelly.
32. Paul Kelly and the Coloured Girls - To Farf - Before too long... 1986. Screenprint, printed in colour with three stencils, 60 x 40 cm. Annotated 'Seagull '86' lower right. Reproduced in Plastered: The Poster Art of Australian Popular Music, p.128. Therein described as: "A nod to the pop art of Lichtenstein, with its lounging woman and iconic air, dressed down by a quick fix of Letraset fonts."
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Acknowledgements
This blog was compiled by Michael Organ with the gracious assistance of Janni Alexander.
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References
Anfuso, James, Rockin Australia: 50 years of concert posters 1957-2007, Starman Books, Tuart Hill, 2013.
Australian Prints + Printmaking [website], Australian Centre for the Arts, National Library of Australia. Available URL: http://www.printsandprintmaking.gov.au/. Accessed 18 July 2013. Yanni Stumbles entry lists and illustrates 16 works.
Therese Kenyon, Under a Hot Tin Roof - art, passion and politics at the Tin Sheds Art Workshop, State Library of New South Wales Press, 1995, 152p.
David Lesser, 'Paul Kelly - 1991', in The Whites of Their Eyes: Profiles, Allen & Unwin, St. Leonards, 2011, 203-
Frost, Andrew, Girls at the Sheds exhibition, The Art of Life [blog]. 20 February 2015.
Murray Walding and Nick Vukovic, Plastered: The Poster Art of Australian Popular Music, Miegunyah Press, University of Melbourne, 2005.
Mayhew, Louis, Girls at the Tin Sheds: Sydney Feminist Posters 1975-90, University Art Gallery, University of Sydney, March 2015, 72p.
Yanni Stumbles, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. Lists 15 works and illustrates 3.
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Last updated: 17 July 2023
Michael Organ, Australia
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