Chloe Hollinshead

Alan Fletcher was a very famous graphic designer.Fletcher's way of thinking and his amazing visuals ensured that his work survived many years. In 1962 he founded Fletcher/ Forbes/ Gills firm. In 1965 Gill left. To replace Gill was Theo crosby. The firm was renamed Crosby/ Fletcher/Forbes. As the firm continued to do well, In 1972 two more partners joined the three named Kenneth Grange and Mervyn Kurlansky and they evolved into Pentagram. Fletcher created logos such as Reuters, the Victoria Albert Museum he also created a logo for Institute of Directors. He has worked with some well known clients and companies such as Pirelli, Shell, Lloyd's of London, Daimler Benz and the British arm of Time and Life.
I and a few others went along to the Alan Fletcher exhibition at the Cube art gallery to look at his work in more detail. I found that when I was looking at his work his like for typography was evident. His work was visually interesting it was vibrant and loud. I liked the rebus work he created using newspaper clippings, images and type. Also what was eye catching to me was the calender designs he created in different languages such as german, french and spanish

Damien Hirst, the once hard-drinking, hard-partying, brash, loud-mouthed enfant terrible of art, admitted he was a changed man as he unveiled an exhibition that represents a sea change in his work. Over two years he stood alone in a studio and painted. He is, he said, a man confronting his mortality.

Hirst has chosen one of the grandest galleries in the UK to exhibit 25 works that took up a big chunk of his life between 2006 and 2008. From tomorrow visitors to the Wallace Collection in London – with its arms and armour, walls covered with Old Masters including Poussin, Titian and Velázquez, and its lunching ladies – will also be able to see the artist's Francis Bacon-influenced Blue Paintings hung over two rooms.

He becomes one of only a handful of painters who have had work exhibited at the Wallace Collection in their lifetime, including Lucian Freud in 2004. Hirst paid £250,000 to make the show possible, with gilding on the ceiling, a refurbished, lighter floor and £60,000 of blue silk wallpaper, commissioned from Prelle of Lyon (Marie Antoinette's silk manufacturer of choice).

Today Hirst said he was an impatient man learning to be patient.

He said: "The paintings are about my mortality, whereas all the other stuff was about my immortality. I mean I definitely believed I was going to live forever, for a while, back there."

Hirst, the most successful of the Young British Artists, was known for his partying. "We had a brilliant time but you've got to get off the table and stop shouting 'yeahhh'. When you're drunk as a young person, you look cool but when you're old you think 'fuck off.' It's just not attractive when you're older."

Hirst admitted that for a long time he had been afraid of painting, even though he admired painters more than other artists. "I was always very dissatisfied with my paintings, I always thought they weren't very good. It was a big uphill struggle. But I suddenly thought, after everything I've been through, there was nothing to be afraid of."

Hirst's new paintings feature the artist's familiar themes and motifs – skulls, spots, sharks and butterflies – but it took a long time to get to where he wanted. "I did two years of absolutely rotten paintings and I wouldn't want anybody to see them. They were just awful.

"For two years when I was painting them I thought, fucking hell, if I die now they're going to come in here and go, 'Oh, he fucked it up at the end. He was brilliant up to that point and then he did these and they're awful.' I was painting skulls and I couldn't paint them properly so I put a fag in their mouth and a red jacket and it was like 'Death having a fag'. And then I started painting the smoke and they were just awful. And then I told myself, just go back to the skull."

Hirst had a large team to help produce some of his best known works – the animals in formaldehyde, the spot paintings, the diamond-encrusted skull – but these paintings were produced alone in a studio at Claridge's hotel.

"Someone said to me recently, after seeing me in the studio covered in paint, 'Are you really making these yourself?' It's funny that that is shocking as well. For me to do paintings is more shocking than formaldehyde."

Hirst may have rediscovered painting but that does not mean he is going to spend the rest of his career with oils. "I'm doing other types of work. Something has definitely changed but I'm not saying I'm just going to paint like this."

Projects include painting from photographs, and sculptures which look as though they have been found in the sea.

Hirst, 44, lives in Devon but is also restoring a country house, Toddington Manor in Gloucestershire, with a view to it becoming a family home and gallery.

Tracey Emin recently said she was considering leaving Britain and living in France because "I'm simply not willing to pay tax at 50%". Hirst, one of the world's richest artists, is more sanguine. "I like living here. If you live somewhere nice you've got to pay the taxes, haven't you? Unfortunately. But I will moan at the telly, like Victor Meldrew."