Luke Edward Hall: 'I like drawing beautiful things, beautiful people'

“When I first moved to London, I would have been wearing a domino print sweater, lots of necklaces made of ribbons and painted pasta shells, with bright blond hair.” Not the look you’d now expect from Luke Edward Hall – the 27-year-old illustrator and interior designer described by Vogue as a “wunderkind”, who has made his name with portraits and patterns drawing heavily from the beautiful boys and glamorous lives of the 1920s and 30s.

His collaborations with fashion brand Burberry include naive, Picasso-like paintings of Mario Testino photographs, while his Young Hearts exhibition at Christie’s later this month brings together a collection of works by contemporary artists and designers under 40. Whether it’s a more rarefied life than rollicking around Bethnal Green, east London, in a painted pasta necklace is hard to call, but art and fashion have long been in thrall to each other.

These days, Hall’s illustration work is dominated by Greco-Roman heads, sketches of palm fronds and lolling boys, repeating animal prints, sailors, round spectacles and idealised scenes of European life. The style may be naive but the attention he’s garnered is well-established. What drew him to this interwar world of beautiful villas and floppy-haired men?

“I love the 20s and 30s because, during that period, artists would do a bit of everything from set design to ceramics, to photography,” Hall tells me, via a jagged Skype connection from his beautifully styled bedroom. Hall himself moved from being a menswear fashion design student at Central Saint Martins in London to working with the interior designer Ben Pentreath, to ceramics, illustration and textiles. “I’ve obviously romanticised it a bit, but I love reading about the interwar years, when there was lots of light and fun,” says Hall. “People like Cecil Beaton, Rex Whistler, Oliver Messel. A lot of them were gay, so I suppose you could consider it a queer aesthetic.”

As an art student, Hall sold antiques online with his boyfriend Duncan Campbell and friend Haeni Kim under the name Fox & Flyte. After this, he moved into styling and interiors. Where did he learn about antiques? “Well, we didn’t really,” laughs Hall. “We would go to markets or buy things from eBay that we could post quite easily – ashtrays and cocktail shakers. We weren’t experts.”

This relaxed sense of accomplishment seems to be the secret of Hall’s success – not for him the anguished life of a penniless artist, more holidays in Italy and the south of France, picking up antiques and sketching. “I draw a lot of people; a lot of boys. Some are just from my head but I also draw from old photos,” says Hall. “I like drawing beautiful things, beautiful people, beautiful interiors.” On a recent holiday to Italy, Hall sketched people lolling on the heat-baked rocks below him – a scene that sounds more like something from a turn of the century grand tour than the digital-heavy art world of 2016.

His teenage years were more prosaic. Hall grew up in “totally fine but pretty boring” Basingstoke. His father’s job is “something financey” and his mother looks after his younger siblings. Yet, as a young man already sure his future lay in London and the creative industries, he created a fanzine, Cake, full of photographs, articles and sketches by friends. It worked: Hall recently travelled to Korea for Burberry with some of his artworks and ceramics, to create a project similar to the sprucing he’d done of their Regent Street store. “I definitely felt very English over there,” he says, sitting against his green Farrow & Ball wall, in a pale blue shirt and pair of round glasses. No doubt he did.

Most of his faces, Hall says, start with the mouth – rather than the eyes, eyebrows, nose that others might sketch.. Later, he’ll decide if it belongs on a vase, as a repeated pattern on a fabric or within a portrait. “What I love is taking my drawings and seeing how I can apply them to products,” he says, sounding every bit the post-Warhol artist. Does he consider art democratic? Available and accessible to all? “I hope so,” he replies. “Read more at:sexy formal dresses | formal dresses