He is widely recognized for his illustrations of various texts such as Aesop's Fables,[1]The Nonsense Verse of Edward Lear;[2] and the Folio Society's Myths and Legends of the British Isles.
[7] He attended Salford School of Art, now the University of Salford in Lancashire (1956–60); and completed his formal education at the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London, where he was taught by the modernist writer and artist Mervyn Peake and the surrealist Cecil Collins, amongst others.
In his 2007 retrospective, Drawing Upon Drawing he states that, "During (his) student days, in the late 1950s the work of Gerard Hoffnung, André François, Ronald Searle and Saul Steinberg...and, to a certain extent..the work of Paul Klee"[8]: 20 as was "an abiding interest" in Victorian steel engraving.
[8]: 20 In 1961, Lord began work as a freelance illustrator, joining the agents Saxon Artists, in New Oxford Street, London.
I carried out portraits of company directors for their retirement dinner menu covers, buildings for brochures, strip cartoons, maps and humorous drawings for advertisements....gardens and their plants, vegetables, mazes, refrigerators, dishwashers, totem poles, kitchen utensils, resuscitation diagrams, all kinds of furniture, typewriters, agricultural crop spraying machines, door locks, folded towels, decorative letters, Zodiac signs, animals....When you are a student there is a tendency at first to limit yourself to draw only what you like drawing.
This ultimately shackles you and limits your repertoire ...(it) narrows the margin of what you can depict in an image and consequently stifles imagination and ideas.
"[8]: 35 As a commercial artist, in 1968 Lord designed the album cover for The Book of Taliesyn by the band Deep Purple.
[8]: 48 Robert Mason reviewing Lord's lecture A Journey of Drawing An Illustration of a Fable writes: Lord's fastidious verbal dissection of the process of making a single pen and ink illustration, The Crow And The Sheep, over a period of 11 hours and 11 minutes on the 10th and 11th of February 1985, was intimate and unique.
Its very length, and its combination of intense focus interspersed with frequent digressions – about how to avoid actually working, the tendency of Rotring pens to clog, contemporary news topics (mortgage rate increases / African famines / American defence spending…) and the maximum and minimum temperatures of the days in question (minus 3 and minus 7 degrees Fahrenheit) made the audience feel at one with the process..."[13] In 1985 his The Nonsense Verse of Edward Lear won the ‘Redwood Burn Award’ sponsored by the NBL and Publishers’ Association; and it also won the ‘General Selectors’ Award’ by the British Federation of Master Printers.