Q: Hi Meg, tell us about Stick No Bills and where it all began?
A: We started Stick No Bills on a wing and a prayer when my late husband Philip and I used our last $5,000 to buy early tea, travel and film posters promoting “Ceylon” (as Sri Lanka was called before 1972) which we stumbled on in the backstreets of Colombo. At the time we were living close to Galle Fort on Sri Lanka’s southwest coast running a Norwegian built surf hotel called Easybeach. An ironic misnomer as managing it was not easy, more like a Tropical Faulty Towers - and there was no beach left because the 2004 tsunami had ripped all the property ́s golden sands away. So, in 2010 as soon as we had the hotel fully booked and found a buyer for it we opened our first gallery in an old Dutch town house in the heart of Galle and dove into Year One of this creative archives revival project.
Sifting through those first caches of rapidly-disintegrating posters: tattered, faded, caked in dust, some of them dating back to the 1870s and 1880s, all of them literal paper survivors of a devastating natural disaster and 26 years of civil war, we realised we had a race against time to save the artistic best of these precious artefacts from extinction. We achieved this by forming The Archives Design Group to digitise them and restore them to their full former glory at a magnified scale, and then gaining rights’ clearance, case by case, from the attested owners of the moral and economic copyright.
Stick No Bills Asia flagship Gallery at 63 Pedlar Street, Galle Fort, Est. 2011 and open 7 days a week
Q: Since then, you’ve expanded to numerous gallery locations around the world. Do you curate your collections to tailor to each destination?
A: That’s right. 85% of our sales occur on the ground in our flagship galleries and
surrounding satellite points of sale rather than online, so it did not take long to learn that
clients rarely want to buy Mallorca posters when in Sri Lanka, or Barcelona posters when
they’re in Galle. People are inspired to purchase images that encapsulate the very specific
heritage of the place they are visiting; not just its architectural and natural landmarks and
flora and fauna, but also graphics that are a hat-tip to the quirks of its unique traditions,
rituals, sporting events, idioms, music, cuisine, typography, fashions and style.
Stick No Bills® Global Printworks in Palma inside Nueva Balear, the oldest active printworks in Mallorca, Est 1913).
So we hone in on curating hybrid collections of place-centric posters, marrying our own,
modern art deco style designs with our authorised remasters of the best of analogue era oil paintings, watercolours and first edition lithographs. When these images are put together in standardised formats within one space they speak to the viewer of the specific location they are immersed in, either as a local resident or a traveller passing through. Our abiding aim is for all people to leave our galleries enlightened, amused and uplifted, whether they're carrying a Stick No Bills poster tube under their arm or not.
Stick No Bills Middle East Flagship Gallery in Al Quoz Dubai (Est. 2023)
Stick No Bills Europe Flagship Gallery in Barcelona (Est. 2024) 200m from the Picasso and MOCO Museums in El Born.
Q: Stick No Bills fundraises for humanitarian and conservation projects at each of its locations – has this always been at the heart of your ethics and ambitions for the company?
A: Yes, my first career working in conflict zones such as Iraq and Yemen compelled me to
want to create an upbeat, family-run creative and commercial enterprise with a deep-rooted sense of social and moral responsibility. This was especially important to us because we started and grew the brand in places we weren’t from, but where we were lucky enough to live and be received with so much good will and support over the years. It takes forensic levels of round-the-clock data-mining (thankfully now expedited by AI) to track all the royalties and donations raised by each sale of each image across 15 print variants and many channels. But it’s this exacting commitment to copyright, to giving back and to heritage preservation within the graphic arts sector which is our driving force. It really has been the making of us in a tough global market fraught with piracy and data deluge. Our clients love to know they are investing in a legitimate fine art print on which original authors’ rights are honoured, while also fundraising for a positive cause.
Q: As guardians of rare pieces of design history, what has it meant to restore and augment these posters so that they can be enjoyed by lovers of travel, aviation and design as fine art prints?
A: It’s a hard-earned privilege to be entrusted to simultaneously promote so many renowned organisations’ crown jewels, as all at King & McGaw can appreciate, perhaps better than almost any other British institution. From the outset we envisioned building a creative safe harbour where iconic collections stand shoulder-to-shoulder in standardised formats with the Stick No Bills collection. In this way, the global portfolio ́s ever-evolving entirety serves as a unique and varied resource for collectors today and in the future.
We have to meet the high expectations of the licensors themselves – the experts that know these legacy brands intimately from the inside out, while measurably raising the global prestige of the revived images by positioning them in the most respected arenas. Which brings me on to why we approached King & McGaw in the first place pre-Covid: we already recognised back then that you are the best of the best; that we share the same ethos and your framing capabilities are second to none in the British Isles, so we were compelled to partner with you to amplify our reach and bring this exciting “new” vintage content to your clients.
Q: We’re thrilled to have launched a selection of fine art prints from your BOAC collection first and foremost. What can you tell us about these designs?
What we have here is an outstanding collection of striking graphic artworks dating back to the 1920s produced by the greatest illustrators of their day, on order of British Overseas Air Corporation to inspire a first generation of jet setters to take to the skies
Meg with Air India ́s Executive Leadership at the Middle East Flagship Gallery in Dubai Gallery & with Lucy Gorman, British Consul General / Head of Consular Services for Spain & Andorra Foreign & Commonwealth Office and Tracy Wootton (daughter of Frank Wootton O.B.E) at the Mallorca Flagship Gallery in Palma.
Our inaugural collection of remastered vintage British Airways and B.O.A.C. trademarked poster artworks mark the first time these seminal destination marketing posters have been made accessible again as licensed fine art prints. Fixed percentages of proceeds from our net income of this collection go to the World Land Trust, helping this global conservation charity to bring land under protection for wildlife, biodiversity, climate and local people around the world.
The 50 images listed are, in our opinion, the greatest in terms of stylistic import of over 950 original posters we have been lucky enough to access thus far at the Speedbird Heritage Centre; the museum formed “to preserve the records and artefacts of British Airways” as well as its predecessor companies BOAC, BEA, BSAA and the pre-war Imperial Airways Limited and British Airways Ltd”.
Synonymous with the pioneering glamour and thrill of the incipient jet-setting spirit, these images offer a quintessentially British retrospective of the earliest golden days of international air travel.
Q: Do you know much about the artists who created these designs?
A: Yes! But it took some digging as many are classic examples of mid 20th century's unsung heroes of commercial illustration. They were born into the same fascinating era of the evolution in graphic arts as Andy Warhol, but unlike Warhol they did not brand their own artistic talent, rather their skills were absorbed as “works made for hire” into Mad Men-style destination marketing campaigns. The three artists we choose to bring to the fore in this first listing with K&M are Frank AA Wootton, Aldo Cosmatti, and Hayes; three absolute legends of the advent of aviation art. Additionally Philip Sharland and Dick Negus ́ genius art-directing of talented French illustrator Jaques Nathan-Garamond to produce an outstanding series of abstract day-glo-coloured posters for B.O.A.C in the mid 1950s.
Q: Do you have any personal favourites from the BOAC collection?
A: Yes, Fly BOAC to Ceylon by Aldo Cosmatti, whose playful national stereotype motifs all
designed against a navy blue backdrop in the early 1950s have bedecked the walls of British Airways corporate headquarters for many years.
Philip and I bought our original 1953 silk screen print of this classically mid-century modern, Picasso-esque motif from a private dealer in San Francisco shortly after Phillip and our Creative Director Angela Hartwick survived the 2004 tsunami together. This was long before Stick No Bills was conceived, crystallising all our shared passion for poster art into an enterprise.
Investing $550 into this beautifully linen-backed artefact for our private collection of antique posters sealed our lifelong love affair with the so-called Pearl of the Indian Ocean where we would go on to live for eight years. Later, Fly BOAC to Ceylon would also become the first image British Airways curator Paul Jarvis gave us permission to remaster and re-launch in 2016.
I see this particularly playful, naive poster depicting one of the highlands of Sri Lanka’s many amazing tea-pickers as absolutely formative. Every time I see it hanging in pride of place at Stick No Bills original flagship gallery in Galle Fort, at a friend’s house, or a client sends me a photo of it, it reminds me why Philip and I began this adventure together all those years ago
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