It was 40 years ago today ...
Local artist Jann Haworth helped shape the Beatles' iconic 'Sgt. Pepper' cover
In machine gun-like fashion, artist Jann Haworth delivers a volley of support, dissension, enthusiasm, disdain, endorsement and opposition ... depending on the subject you raise.
She is quick-witted, opinionated and disarmingly polite — a true feminist who calls and visits her children with strict regularity.
Now in her 60s, her face retains the adolescent comeliness that once captivated young British artists in the 1960s.
From the early "Pop" days of her visual-art career, where she helped then-husband Peter Blake design and construct the set for the Beatles' "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" album cover, to this year's exhibit of Pop abstract assemblages in the Salt Lake Art Center, Haworth has been a major voice for the democratization of art.
Born in 1942 in Hollywood, Calif., Haworth spent much of her childhood running around movie-studio backlots, where her father, Academy Award-winner Teddy Haworth, designed sets.
Later, her ability to sew and interpret dress patterns, combined with her experiences on Hollywood backlots, became the catalyst for her cloth "celebrity dolls," such as "Lindner Doll" (1965), "Cowboy" (1966) and "The Maid and BB" (1969).
While studying art at the University of California Los Angeles, Haworth took a summer vacation to visit her father on the set of "The Longest Day," which was being filmed in France. On her way home, she stopped in England.
"As soon as I got off the train," Haworth said, "and my foot touched English soil, I knew I wanted to stay."
And stay she did — from 1959-97.
Her return to America found her high in the mountains of Provo in a cabin at the Sundance resort. She's lived there ever since.
In 1961, Haworth enrolled at the Courtauld Institute in London; a year later she entered London's Slade School of Fine Art.
One evening, while returning to her flat, "I said to myself, 'I know anatomy because I know how to make a pattern.' And because I'd made so many clothes, I knew the whole body. I thought all I had to do was transfer that information into how do I make a nose or the brow, and I could make a face. It was taking one piece of information from one territory and putting it into another."
In a 2004 letter to author David Lister, Haworth described the genealogy of her vision and style: "I entered '60s London from the door marked 'Hollywood,' and what I saw was framed by my growing up playing on the backlot or the sound stage. I saw with eyes that knew that on the other side of the wall was a blank and two-by-fours holding up a flat fiction; that on the set, you don't even move a walnut; and that 'stars,' though big on the screen, were life-sized (or smaller) when you met them."
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