The Talk Place

Our Christian artist, Graham Wade, who drew the pictures for Look, Listen and Live, Good News and The Living Christ, died in August, 2009, aged 78.  He was a friend of Helen Gemeren who was in charge of producing the visuals that are used along with our recordings. They were published in the 80s and 90s. I remember him when I was involved in the redrawing the forty pictures of the Good News.

He was a tall, athletic kind of man who loved swimming, loved the Australian bush and who was an avid recorder of the songs of the Australian birds. He worked in his home studio overlooking the bush, packed to its roof timbers with an incredible array of artists brushes, pens, paints, papers, drawings and collected objects he used for inspiration.

He loved making pictures of the bible stories and was a master at drawing people with great facial expressions and having delightful body language. He could draw saints and demons with equally avid realism, all done with a flick of a fat black felt pen on thin white paper. He didn't know the meaning of white out. He loved drawing fluffy clouds, bonfires with high smoke and cinders, flat top houses, trees with big leaves, grassy plains and dramatic hills.  My favourite pictures in the Good News are the empty cross, creation, Nicodemus and the Geresene madman.

How popular are his pictures! They are treated as priceless stained glass windows amongst oral communities. His flipcharts and booklets circle the globe, coming to rest in village churches and houses, in jungles, on islands and in the sparsely settled icy wastelands.

Vale Graham, you were a major player in GRN and your Bible pictures are reaching new generations of delighted believers.