The intuitive, seasonal and curious nature of illustrating covers for the London Review of Books, with Jon McNaught

A park dotted with picnic blankets; a warm-windowed train travelling across a bridge at night; a grey motorway submerged in drizzle; a newsagents glowing at dusk. These are all scenes you’ll find throughout Jon McNaught’s cover illustrations for the London Review of Books.

Since 2011, Jon has been collaborating with the renowned literary journal, creating works that have a quietly mesmerising quality. His scenes breed comfort with their universality, but also their ability to evoke specific memories and feelings in the individual viewer. Through his covers, Jon artfully captures the essence of everyday life by representing the vastly contrasting nature of British weather, plus the uniqueness of London’s architecture, green spaces and public transport.

To create such evocative work, Jon explains that he consistently maintains a level of curiosity about his surroundings. “I always have half an eye out, looking for inspiration for covers during my day to day routines,” he says. “I take lots of photos on my walks to work or out of train or bus windows, and every trip out of the city is an opportunity for new things to catch my eye.”

At the end of each month Jon sits down with his photographs, making thumbnails with simple watercolours – “testing out possibilities” – until sending a few sketches to the LRB team. Jon explains that there isn’t really a set “formula” to the covers , but he tends to have a feeling when he’s got something good. “It could be something as simple as a view from a train of a chair propped on a fence, that once sketched out develops an intrigue and character of its own,” he says. “The covers that are most successful usually have a subtle sense of a story to them, a picture that makes you ask questions, even if the question is just ‘why is that chair on that fence’.”

Once a sketch is approved, the process of “intuition and experimentation” begins. Sometimes, Jon will complete the image in watercolour, which results in a “looser” and “softer” finish. In others he will paint in layers of black into or chinagraph crayons, which he then digitally colours to create something “bold and graphic”. When working, Jon also finds it productive to set himself “practical limitations” like a limited colour palette, or reducing an image down to its essential components. “It’s a skill that I practised as a printmaking technician – where an extra colour means another day in the studio and another expensive printing plate,” Jon says. “I think there is a sort of poetry in capturing a scene in just a few colours and with simple marks and shapes.”

Working so closely with the team at the LRB has been a process Jon finds enriching, for their renowned artistic legacy (he sits among other great artists and designers like Peter Campbell, Anne Rothenstein and Cressida Bell) and the team's close and considered involvement in the journal's visual look. After seeing his screen prints in St Jude’s gallery, Jon was first contacted by the team in 2011 to see if he had any ideas for covers. That year, Jon’s first cover was printed, after which he would submit two to three covers a year, quickly developing a strong relationship with the team and an understanding of what constitutes a successful cover. Now, Jon says, he’s gradually “become part of the furniture”.

In 2019, Jon moved from Bristol to London and began working more closely with the LRB on more projects like products, adverts and specific edition books. In that year, Jon recalls a meeting with editor Alice Spawls at the journal’s offices in London. “It was a crisp spring morning, and Alice suggested that I go up onto the roof to take photos and sketch the rooftops, looking across towards the British museum,” Jon says. But, despite many sketches, Jon couldn’t decipher a good cover design. It was a year later, when looking at the images and sketches suddenly “the shapes locked into place”. The piece now exists as one of Jon’s favourites, and has been turned into a 1,000 pieces jigsaw puzzle, “which I have attempted but not got very far with!”, Jon adds.

Perhaps the most charming element of Jon’s work is how well he captures the specifics of seasons. It makes sense to hear that it’s around the times when one season is transitioning into another that Jon finds himself most inspired by his surroundings. “In October when the nights draw in, I might spot that the newsagents are glowing like lanterns as I walk home from work, but by December I’ll have gotten used to it and they are just newsagents again,” Jon says. “Catching these little moments of surprising beauty is something that I’m always trying to do in my pictures: the crispness of spring mornings, a patio in a sudden downpour, the city softened by mist.”