Len Thurston Sold at Auction Prices

b. 1932 - d. 2011

Len Thurston was a British artist and noted illustrator for book covers and national magazines during the second half of the 20th century. His work appeared regularly in Woman and Woman's Own, Woman's Realm, TV Times and Radio Times.His passion for painting was sparked as a young boy when he attended South East Technical College of Art, where he studied carpentry and woodwork, along with art. It was this formative time that turned a talented young boy into a skilled practitioner.He started his career as a lettering artist enjoying the precision and technical demands of the discipline. He worked at IPC Magazines in Holborn, publishers of Woman and Woman's Own, rising to Art Editor for the Group before he left in 1968 to pursue a freelance career and, from that point on, he never stopped working.He had started illustrating under the pseudonym Harold Walter during the 1960s and had built up a strong client base of authors and publishers. In the 1970s, in his heyday, he was producing two large paintings a week, using oils and acrylic on board. He worked solidly on book jackets and magazine illustrations for the Readers Digest and Woman's' Weekly Library Series, as well as, on advertising posters turning his hand to stylised sixties imagery using bright, flat colours. But it is the romance and period scenes he painted for which he is remembered, created for authors, such as, Catherine Cookson, Josephine Cox, Margaret Kaufman, Jane Carrick and Freda Lightfoot.The images he created evoked a time and a place; he captured the spirit of the stories' eponymous heroine and the charm of a recent past. As an artist, he was assured and knew exactly what he wanted to achieve using the same group of models to interpret the author's story; they became friends and regular visitors to the family home. Among these models and the most recognisable was Gary Myers, the original Milk Tray Man.