Hello, I’m Lucy Creed (the ginger mug in the picture) a painter, obsessive drawer and I’m told, an annoyingly curious person since birth.
In 2015, 25 years after graduating in Fine Art I discovered the untapped, glorious potential of the humble greetings card. I quickly fell in love with the potential to create artwork and share ideas and humour in an affordable format.
Poet and Painter was chugging along at a respectable pace when in 2017 enter, stage left, my gorgeous partner in grime from art school, Bryn Dineen (still positioned stage left in pic.) Known to her family as Pedantington Bear, Bryn is an artist, wordplay aficionado and closet grammar fascist. Arguably becoming more Slapdash and Louche than Poet and Painter, we were immediately both happy as two unruly teenagers with unlimited access to eyeliner, jaeger bombs and a studio. Imagine our surprise and joy as nominations for industry awards began streaming in, and our list of stockists across the UK ballooned.
Eight years on and holy crap, over two million card sales worldwide, we’ve been kept on our grubby toes. I continue to fire on all cylinders like an over lubed engine 24/7, whilst Bryn joins me in the studio ad hoc bringing the wry and dry brakes, and together we nearly make one sensible person.
Our approach to design is, much like us, untethered. We aren’t interested in any styles that are trending, we leave that to the trendy people. We prefer to tread our own messy path. We write all our own words and we relish the freedom of approaching each card as a separate piece of artwork we can splash around with.
We offer all our designs and products plastic-free, we print in the UK on high quality matt board. We print to order for minimal waste, and we consider environmental credentials of all our suppliers. We’re pretty much saints.
Apart from being a pair of filthy potty mouths. However, we promised Trevor Parsons, my dear friend and the actual real-life contributing original Poet of Poet and Painter, we would never include swearing in print. He thinks we’re better than that. He’s wrong of course, but we aim for our messaging to be always life affirming and warm-hearted and we’ve stuck to our word on the rudies. It’s a family show. You’re welcome.