Monday 26 November 2012

Cartoon Your Image

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Cartoon Your Image Biography

Ralph Steadman
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Ralph Steadman was born in Wallasey, Cheshire, on 15 May 1936, the son of Lionel Raphael Steadman, a commercial traveller selling women's clothes. He was educated at Abergele Grammar School, but left in 1952 aged sixteen, unable to bear the strict authority of the headmaster, who gave him "fear and hatred of authority." "I couldn't take it any longer," he recalled, "I just had to get out": "I went to De Havilland, the aircraft company. I stayed there nine months, but I found factory life unbearable, so then I got a job at Woolworth's as a trainee manager." In 1954 the local employment office got him a job in McConnell's Advertising Agency, Colwyn Bay, where he recalled that "I learned to make trademarks and tea."
From 1954 to 1956 Steadman spent his National Service in the RAF in Britain, meanwhile continuing to take Percy V. Bradshaw's correspondence course in cartooning, which his parents had paid for. He had started cartooning while at the advertising agency, and from 1955 sent a drawing to Punch every week, but his first cartoon to appear in print - dealing with Nasser and the Suez crisis - was in the Manchester Evening Chronicle in 1956. "Giles held me in his thrall", he remembered, "and his annuals were in my stocking every Christmas because my Dad liked him too": "My first published work in the Manchester Evening Chronicle was a Giles in all but name."
Steadman then joined the Kemsley Newspaper Group, where he worked as a cartoonist from 1959 to 1961, producing editorial cartoons and a weekly panel about a teenage girl named "Teeny." As he recalled, "I would go in at 10 o'clock in the morning and finish by three": "I'd do six roughs and show the features editor; he'd say, 'They're not very good, but if you must - that one'." From 1959 Steadman also studied art part-time with Leslie Richardson at East Ham Technical College, noting later that "because I was knocking off at three o'clock in the afternoon, I'd go up to the art school": "I'd be out five nights a week at art school. And Saturday mornings, Wednesday afternoons, and sometimes Tuesday afternoons, all day Thursday, I'd be at the Victoria and Albert Museum drawing from the antique. For seven years. That's a lot of time drawing."
While working for the Kemsley Newspaper Group, Steadman became involved with Gerald Scarfe. The two men first met at an early meeting of the Cartoonists' Club of Great Britain, which was founded in 1960. “He said, ‘I like your line; I’d like to come see you’”, Steadman recalled: “So he came up one day in his car and he brought his drawings with him and they were awful...commercial art drawings...he showed me these things and said, ‘Can you help?’ I said, ‘I’ll introduce you to my teacher Leslie Richardson.’”
Steadman and Scarfe worked very closely together. As one interviewer noted soon afterwards, Richardson "used to send them to the Victoria and Albert Museum where they would sit sketching statues and suits of armour": "They spent hours together, pacing the streets long into the night, talking about art and the future, and discussing ways of putting the world right." Soon, as Steadman later acknowledged, they had developed “an interchangeability about our styles”: “I know where lots of things came from and he knows where lots of things came from...Neither of us liked to accuse the other that we were copying each other, but you can’t help it when your styles are somehow similar.”
Cartoon Your Image
Cartoon Your Image
Cartoon Your Image
Cartoon Your Image
Cartoon Your Image
Cartoon Your Image
Cartoon Your Image
Cartoon Your Image
Cartoon Your Image
Cartoon Your Image
Cartoon Your Image

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