High-camp storytelling, deadpan portraiture, maximalist art direction.

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In September 2024, comedian and artist Joe Lycett staged the theft of his own painting – The Mona Lisa Scott-Lee – to launch his debut art book, Art Hole. Over the course of a week, a completely fabricated mystery unfolded online: a beloved artwork had gone missing, a cash reward was offered, and the British public were invited to help track it down. The stunt played out across Instagram, billboards, media appearances, and a final twist at Canada House, ending with the painting’s triumphant return to the National Portrait Gallery – just in time for Joe’s book signing.

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I worked closely with Joe to lead the art direction across the campaign – shaping a visual world from concept to execution. This included the design of all campaign materials, the creation of original artwork, and the development of a graphic identity that extended the visual language of Art Hole itself. The book’s saturated colour palette and type choices carried across into the campaign, creating a sense of visual cohesion between the object and the madcap story that surrounded it. We built the look and feel around a deliberate tension: high-stakes drama meets tabloid daftness, all rendered in a palette of clashing neons and surreal, over-the-top layouts. We designed a suite of billboards, fly posters and social assets using bold colour, chunky type, and a straight-faced sense of urgency. The tone veered between “lost masterpiece,” “missing cat poster,” and a gloriously unhinged pop-cultural dream logic.

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I also painted a series of intentionally terrible landscapes and portraits, credited to the fictional culprit – ITV political editor Robert Peston. These were used as narrative red herrings: one even physically concealed The Mona Lisa Scott-Lee inside Canada House. They were both plot devices and visual jokes – bad paintings hiding a good one, inside a fake story, promoting a real book – via a national campaign. The final chapter took place just down the road from Canada House, as Joe operated live from the National Portrait Gallery. The painting was recovered, the reward handed out, and fiction dissolved neatly back into reality. All in time for the signing queue. This was a campaign that borrowed from treasure hunts, tabloids, true crime, and curatorial PR – and treated all of them as material. As art director, my job was to hold the visual world together: a big, camp, silly, meta farce that looked as bold and bonkers as the story it told. One of the most joyful, layered projects I’ve had the pleasure to help bring to life.

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Campaign Producers: Chris Sawyer & Lucy Kane
​Graphic Art Direction & Design: Billie Temple & Joe Lycett

Campaign Publicist: Will Wood of Multitude Media

Social Content Creator: Dan England