We are your original and definitive source for authentic, exclusively licensed and embossed travel posters and fine art prints thereof. Our core objective is to help fill your walls with beautiful poster art. With exclusive usage rights on the 132 proven best seller artworks in our current 'live' collection, more images and destinations being revealed from behind the scenes each year and a first class framing service fully integrated into our offering, we are on a mission to spearhead a renaissance in travel poster art and, in so doing, transport you, time-machine-style, back to the art deco, mid century modern and 1980s’ golden eras of travel.

This website over-arches our Asia-region flagship gallery which is located on the tropical southern coast of Sri Lanka in the UNESCO world heritage city of Galle Fort; our Iberia-region flagship gallery located in the historic centre of Palma De Mallorca, capital of Las Islas Baleares and a further thirty five re-seller outlets we supply at our luxury hotel and retail sector clients’ establishments.

 

 

We are often asked what brought us to Galle and latterly to Palma and how did we set about designing travel posters in the first place.

When the war ended in Sri Lanka in 2009 my husband; an advertising photographer and tsunami survivor and I, a former insurgency / security risk analyst, wanted to 'be the change we wanted to see in the world' by doing something good for the country and good for us; something original and uplifting that would raise positive awareness about this remarkable island's rich heritage and stunning natural beauty all around the world.

 

For too long Sri Lanka, a palm-fringed isle of twenty-one million people, second only to Hawaii in its biodiversity, had been associated in most overseas peoples' minds with terrorism, the tsunami and human rights issues. We wanted to cast light on the other side of the story on this island of extremes. What better way to tap into the aspirations, the heritage and the journey of a nation, then through a celebration of its poster art movement? So there began the making of Stick No Bills™. 

Since 2011, our original Asia flagship gallery has been spread out through every main room of an old Dutch colonial merchant's townhouse situated at the heart of Church Street which has now become the 'golden mile' for cultural tourism in Sri Lanka; a historic and peaceful road lined with boutiques, jewellery stores, cafés and high-end hotels that intersects Galle Fort, the incredible UNESCO World Heritage City located on Sri Lanka's tropical southwestern coast.

 

From inception we specialised in designing retro-style posters on the one hand, and, on the other, authenticating, raising the profile of and, where true copyright permits, digitally remastering antique tea and travel posters dating from the late 1800s through until the 1980s. The resultant Ceylon / Sri Lanka and Iberia (thus far Mallorca & Ibiza / Las Islas Baleares) vintage and retro collections we exhibit are the most extensive in the world.

 

With huge gratitude for the dedication of our second-to-none staff, the talent of our illustrators, the collaboration of our suppliers, partners, clients and re-sellers and the enthusiasm of our myriad customers, our high quality prints of our images can now be found on the walls of literally hundreds of thousands of homes, hotels, restaurants, cafes and offices on all continents.

I had landed in Colombo for the first time in 1999 to work as a rookie journalist for The Sunday Times. I remember being struck by how dark the capital city was as I came in over the Indian Ocean to land an hour or so after sunset; at how many houses were still lit by only one or two kerosene lamps and at how massive the surrounding ink black mangroves and jungle looked.

After three months of living in pretty squalid and mosquito-infested digs in Mount Lavinia, from where I commuted into Cinnammon Gardens by bus, I went back to Edinburgh University to complete my Masters Degree in English Literature. Gainfully exploiting what was, back then in the United Kingdom, a free university eduction, I became enthralled by studying the canon of literature through the ideological prisms of 'Colonialism, Post-Colonialism & The Discourse of Discovery' and 'Utopia and Dystopia’; by the ways in which Geoffrey Chaucer, John Barbour, William Shakespeare, John Milton and Williams Blake had inculcated such a mythic sense of place on ‘the Sceptred Isle’ from which I hailed (my mother being Scottish-English and my father a Cornishman).

I was fascinated by Seamus Heaney and Tom Paulins' potent depictions of the impact of centuries of conflict in the troubled borderlands of Ireland where I had spent some of my childhood as the daughter of a British Army officer; and at Saint Lucian poet Derek Walcott and Sri Lankan author Michale Ondaajtes’ extraordinary abilities to so poignantly describe how our subjective association with our homeland is often contaminated by our awareness of the idle, often reductive perceptions of plunderers present and plunderers past. And by that I mean the reductive stereotypes formulated by all manner of perceived invaders; from colonisers, to spice traders, to evangelists, to pirates, to pilgrims, to foreign investors to even the politest, most eco-conscious of modern-day tourists until we are all, in danger of either just voyeuristically passing through or in Walcott’s words, worse still: "inhabiting a succession of postcards”, void of authenticity.

In the aspirational travel poster designs that we create we explore these pernicious notions; the flawed belief systems; the superiority and inferiority complexes, the racism, the superstition, the Orientalism, the chauvinism and the Xenephobia that riddle their way into the seemingly innocent picture postcards which countries' use to project either themselves or other nations they connect with out into the global geopolitical arena.

 

So, if you were wondering if there is an underlying satirical element to the Stick No Bills image libraries, the answer is yes. It is impossible to disengage art from politics.

Since 2018 we have been glad to have been able to welcome clients and key visiting suppliers to our new Europe region headquarters; a sister poster art gallery to our original flagship in Galle Fort, located in Costa D’en Brossa 10, Temple, in the heart of the 2,140 year-old Roman citadel of Palma, on the southern coast of Mallorca. We also welcome visitors and guest artists to our neighbouring design studio located right next to the 9th Century Order Gomara Fort, and its original gate into the Berber Medina of Mayurkar.

Mayurkar was the fortaleza of the Cordoba-sprung conquering Moors - who were themselves preceded by invading Phoenicians, Greeks, Carthaginians, Romans and Vandals and succeeded by the Knights Templar, the Thirteenth Century’s military style religious order loyal to King Jamie I.

 

The medieval-stone-arched, 145sqm cavernous space within which we undertake all our image, product and supply chain innovation activity, also serves as a permanent (forever in flux) exhibition space within which we showcase museum standard prints of the most sought after images in our Ceylon and Iberia collections.

We feel lucky to be the current custodians of a building that is utterly steeped in history, connected by an underground hiding chamber leading into tunnels to the Cathedral and the beach no less.  We hope that the positive vibes our creative mission generates at Temple to some extent serves to assuage the residual negative energy born during fraught eras past of the property’s evolution, when it served as a prison for the Spanish Inquisition between 1483 and 1531 in particular.

We would challenge any leading author of historical fiction equipped with the wildest of imaginations to conjure up two more heritage-rich island paradises than the two from which we are taking the world by storm with our posters.

To this day we remain drawn to these Ceylon and the Islas Baleares above and beyond anywhere else. We are entranced by their bizarrely parallel statuses as cultural cornucopias; by the extent to which they have come to represent geopolitical sweet spots, punching far above their weight in their respective regions, attracting millions of traders, invaders, settlers, conquistadors, artists and all manner of other sea-faring souls before us.

Unfortunately, the very popularity of these islands makes them especially vulnerable to over-development and pollution. It is heartbreaking to see how much the reefs surrounding them have perished in the past few decades alone. We therefore hope that our designs can help cherish and promote the right type of respectful, sustainable, environmentally sensitive travel to these exceptionally fragile destinations in the years ahead.

 

Above all, it is our love of the romantic sense of place specific to the locations that we have honed in on, immortalised in these series of posters depicting hyper-stylised moments of their past, that resonates through all the Stick No Bills™ images.

Jack Rennert of Rennert's Rare Poster Gallery in New York City, so perfectly crystallised our raison d'être in a recent publication that I asked Jack if we could quote him and he kindly approved:

"There’s something perfect about the travel poster. What I mean is the idea, the gestalt of the travel poster. It solicits. You smile. There is no resistance. The wall is a window – and now a door. You’re not here any more. You are there: even, almost, better than being there, is being in the idea of there: the essence of place, and the specificity of time as created by the artist. These places being advertised – you cannot go there today. None of us can. They are idealizations of the past, which is another country. But the sensation of place, in the artistic past: that you can own. That can be yours. That endures.”

 

 

We are your original and definitive source for authentic, exclusively licensed and embossed travel posters and fine art prints thereof. Our core objective is to help fill your walls with beautiful poster art. With exclusive usage rights on the 132 proven best seller artworks in our current 'live' collection, more images and destinations being revealed from behind the scenes each year and a first class framing service fully integrated into our offering, we are on a mission to spearhead a renaissance in travel poster art and, in so doing, transport you, time-machine-style, back to the art deco, mid century modern and 1980s’ golden eras of travel.

This website over-arches our Asia-region flagship gallery which is located on the tropical southern coast of Sri Lanka in the UNESCO world heritage city of Galle Fort; our Iberia-region flagship gallery located in the historic centre of Palma De Mallorca, capital of Las Islas Baleares and a further thirty five re-seller outlets we supply at our luxury hotel and retail sector clients’ establishments.

 

 

We are often asked what brought us to Galle and latterly to Palma and how did we set about designing travel posters in the first place.

When the war ended in Sri Lanka in 2009 my husband; an advertising photographer and tsunami survivor and I, a former insurgency / security risk analyst, wanted to 'be the change we wanted to see in the world' by doing something good for the country and good for us; something original and uplifting that would raise positive awareness about this remarkable island's rich heritage and stunning natural beauty all around the world.

 

For too long Sri Lanka, a palm-fringed isle of twenty-one million people, second only to Hawaii in its biodiversity, had been associated in most overseas peoples' minds with terrorism, the tsunami and human rights issues. We wanted to cast light on the other side of the story on this island of extremes. What better way to tap into the aspirations, the heritage and the journey of a nation, then through a celebration of its poster art movement? So there began the making of Stick No Bills™. 

Since 2011, our original Asia flagship gallery has been spread out through every main room of an old Dutch colonial merchant's townhouse situated at the heart of Church Street which has now become the 'golden mile' for cultural tourism in Sri Lanka; a historic and peaceful road lined with boutiques, jewellery stores, cafés and high-end hotels that intersects Galle Fort, the incredible UNESCO World Heritage City located on Sri Lanka's tropical southwestern coast.

 

From inception we specialised in designing retro-style posters on the one hand, and, on the other, authenticating, raising the profile of and, where true copyright permits, digitally remastering antique tea and travel posters dating from the late 1800s through until the 1980s. The resultant Ceylon / Sri Lanka and Iberia (thus far Mallorca & Ibiza / Las Islas Baleares) vintage and retro collections we exhibit are the most extensive in the world.

 

With huge gratitude for the dedication of our second-to-none staff, the talent of our illustrators, the collaboration of our suppliers, partners, clients and re-sellers and the enthusiasm of our myriad customers, our high quality prints of our images can now be found on the walls of literally hundreds of thousands of homes, hotels, restaurants, cafes and offices on all continents.

I had landed in Colombo for the first time in 1999 to work as a rookie journalist for The Sunday Times. I remember being struck by how dark the capital city was as I came in over the Indian Ocean to land an hour or so after sunset; at how many houses were still lit by only one or two kerosene lamps and at how massive the surrounding ink black mangroves and jungle looked.

After three months of living in pretty squalid and mosquito-infested digs in Mount Lavinia, from where I commuted into Cinnammon Gardens by bus, I went back to Edinburgh University to complete my Masters Degree in English Literature. Gainfully exploiting what was, back then in the United Kingdom, a free university eduction, I became enthralled by studying the canon of literature through the ideological prisms of 'Colonialism, Post-Colonialism & The Discourse of Discovery' and 'Utopia and Dystopia’; by the ways in which Geoffrey Chaucer, John Barbour, William Shakespeare, John Milton and Williams Blake had inculcated such a mythic sense of place on ‘the Sceptred Isle’ from which I hailed (my mother being Scottish-English and my father a Cornishman).

I was fascinated by Seamus Heaney and Tom Paulins' potent depictions of the impact of centuries of conflict in the troubled borderlands of Ireland where I had spent some of my childhood as the daughter of a British Army officer; and at Saint Lucian poet Derek Walcott and Sri Lankan author Michale Ondaajtes’ extraordinary abilities to so poignantly describe how our subjective association with our homeland is often contaminated by our awareness of the idle, often reductive perceptions of plunderers present and plunderers past. And by that I mean the reductive stereotypes formulated by all manner of perceived invaders; from colonisers, to spice traders, to evangelists, to pirates, to pilgrims, to foreign investors to even the politest, most eco-conscious of modern-day tourists until we are all, in danger of either just voyeuristically passing through or in Walcott’s words, worse still: "inhabiting a succession of postcards”, void of authenticity.

In the aspirational travel poster designs that we create we explore these pernicious notions; the flawed belief systems; the superiority and inferiority complexes, the racism, the superstition, the Orientalism, the chauvinism and the Xenephobia that riddle their way into the seemingly innocent picture postcards which countries' use to project either themselves or other nations they connect with out into the global geopolitical arena.

 

So, if you were wondering if there is an underlying satirical element to the Stick No Bills image libraries, the answer is yes. It is impossible to disengage art from politics.

Since 2018 we have been glad to have been able to welcome clients and key visiting suppliers to our new Europe region headquarters; a sister poster art gallery to our original flagship in Galle Fort, located in Costa D’en Brossa 10, Temple, in the heart of the 2,140 year-old Roman citadel of Palma, on the southern coast of Mallorca. We also welcome visitors and guest artists to our neighbouring design studio located right next to the 9th Century Order Gomara Fort, and its original gate into the Berber Medina of Mayurkar.

Mayurkar was the fortaleza of the Cordoba-sprung conquering Moors - who were themselves preceded by invading Phoenicians, Greeks, Carthaginians, Romans and Vandals and succeeded by the Knights Templar, the Thirteenth Century’s military style religious order loyal to King Jamie I.

 

The medieval-stone-arched, 145sqm cavernous space within which we undertake all our image, product and supply chain innovation activity, also serves as a permanent (forever in flux) exhibition space within which we showcase museum standard prints of the most sought after images in our Ceylon and Iberia collections.

We feel lucky to be the current custodians of a building that is utterly steeped in history, connected by an underground hiding chamber leading into tunnels to the Cathedral and the beach no less.  We hope that the positive vibes our creative mission generates at Temple to some extent serves to assuage the residual negative energy born during fraught eras past of the property’s evolution, when it served as a prison for the Spanish Inquisition between 1483 and 1531 in particular.

We would challenge any leading author of historical fiction equipped with the wildest of imaginations to conjure up two more heritage-rich island paradises than the two from which we are taking the world by storm with our posters.

To this day we remain drawn to these Ceylon and the Islas Baleares above and beyond anywhere else. We are entranced by their bizarrely parallel statuses as cultural cornucopias; by the extent to which they have come to represent geopolitical sweet spots, punching far above their weight in their respective regions, attracting millions of traders, invaders, settlers, conquistadors, artists and all manner of other sea-faring souls before us.

Unfortunately, the very popularity of these islands makes them especially vulnerable to over-development and pollution. It is heartbreaking to see how much the reefs surrounding them have perished in the past few decades alone. We therefore hope that our designs can help cherish and promote the right type of respectful, sustainable, environmentally sensitive travel to these exceptionally fragile destinations in the years ahead.

 

Above all, it is our love of the romantic sense of place specific to the locations that we have honed in on, immortalised in these series of posters depicting hyper-stylised moments of their past, that resonates through all the Stick No Bills™ images.

Jack Rennert of Rennert's Rare Poster Gallery in New York City, so perfectly crystallised our raison d'être in a recent publication that I asked Jack if we could quote him and he kindly approved:

"There’s something perfect about the travel poster. What I mean is the idea, the gestalt of the travel poster. It solicits. You smile. There is no resistance. The wall is a window – and now a door. You’re not here any more. You are there: even, almost, better than being there, is being in the idea of there: the essence of place, and the specificity of time as created by the artist. These places being advertised – you cannot go there today. None of us can. They are idealizations of the past, which is another country. But the sensation of place, in the artistic past: that you can own. That can be yours. That endures.”