Introduction

1The genius of Ralph Steadman can be found in the more than 50 books he’s written or illustrated (or both written and illustrated), in his famous partnership with Hunter Thompson and their co-creation of Gonzo journalism—the two not just covering a story but becoming it

2Steadman’s creative brilliance shines in the lyrics he wrote for Richard Harvey's oratorio Plague and the Moonflower [Enjoy the choral movement here https://www.youtube.com/​watch?v=gIQJiPlklyk], in the songs he’s written and recorded, in the lead and backup vocals he’s performed for other musicians, in the prose and poetry that he contributed to Kotori magazine, and in a wide range of artistic expressions. Over the years Steadman has created beer bottle labels, illustrated endangered birds for preventing extinctions programs, designed postage stamps for Great Britain to commemorate the return of Halley’s Comet, and diverse theater sets, including one for the Royal Opera House production of a ballet of The Crucible. But most of all, Steadman’s genius is manifested in his scathing, scurrilous, occasionally scatological, always over the top, visual assaults on corrupt, authoritarian, and stupid politicians, and in his protest of social unfairness.

3As social satirist, Steadman has carved a place for himself in the pantheon that includes Jacques Callot, with his 17^th-century depictions of war and caricatures of the grotesque, Thomas Rowlandson, who did comic renditions of the social types in 18^th-century England, Honoré Daumier, whose savage portraits of the 19^th -century bar stripped away all pretense of lawyers working at justice and which became ubiquitous in contemporary law offices, (and were in mine when I practiced), and Thomas Nast, father of the American cartoon, whose drawings promoted the abolition of slavery, supported Native Americans and Chinese immigrants, and which, most notably, helped bring down New York’s corrupt Tammany Hall government.

4For Steadman there were no end of targets when he arrived in the U.S. from Britain, and he became a one-man version of the legendary satirical magazine, Simplicissimus. “When I first came to America I saw America as a screaming lifestyle, and that screaming lifestyle seemed to me to be a threat to a decent, simple human being like myself who believed in fair play.” The original cover of his collection America depicts a terrified family about to be devoured by the gigantic teeth of what appears to be a whale-sized shark.

5The cover of a subsequent edition is hardly more endearing, presenting an electrocution with an offstage voice wishing the victim a nice day. [Britain, along with most of the civilized world, had by then abolished capital punishment]

6While gathering material for The Writer’s Brush: Paintings, Drawings, and Sculpture by Writers, I interviewed Steadman on camera during his 2001 visit to America. [Link] In that interview, Steadman referenced the 1972 national conventions of both U.S. political parties, explaining: “I was fearful of what I saw in Miami [where protestors were being teargassed and arrested outside the Republican convention], I was fearful about what I saw in New York.” Those experiences were followed by the years of the Watergate scandal, and Steadman recalled how he “went through all that with Hunter Thompson. And Hunter picked up on that because he could see there was a genuine kind of not-a-Puritan here, but someone who was looking through a glass darkly… that he couldn’t just see it as ‘oh, well, that’s the way of things.’”

7The horror Steadman experienced when confronted by the poverty and indifference to the down-and-out in New York City, inspired his first drawing there: “It’s the one [when I realized] everyone in New York walked the streets, and nobody eyelocked. Everyone was at business. And so I did people in rather twisted poses, you know, like newts of a kind, all walking through a linear upright landscape…. They were all mutants. So that drawing still matters in that way…’Give us a dime buddy, this is a tough city to get started in.’ Well that’s still as relevant today... I mean if you’re out in the street, and nobody gives a monkey’s what who you are.”

8Steadman also recalls how, when still a boy, he chanced upon a three-volume set of the notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci. Costing something less than half a dollar he bought them because he liked to build model airplanes and was drawn to the pictures of aircraft wings. Grown up Steadman became so identified with Leonardo that he assumed his persona to pen a compressed, humorous, putative autobiography, I, Leonardo. One sentence of Leonardo’s so impressed Steadman that it seems to have informed his life: “’Genius is the capacity for taking pains.’” Steadman says he took that to mean “that perhaps there isn’t such a thing as genius… just some poor guy who works harder than anyone else to get there, to achieve.” He adds that, “It made me try to do something, because I wasn’t doing very well.”

9By not “doing very well” Steadman means terribly. He hated school, beginning with the authoritarian headmaster of his grammar school—"a hideous monster of a man who carried a cane” [that he used on the boys]—and dropped out at sixteen to take a series of odd jobs. It was at one of them—stock boy at a Woolworths’ store—where he ran into his old headmaster who rendered the humiliating judgment, “’You really buggered your life up, haven’t you? If you’d tried harder, you may have done something, but look at you sweeping streets.’” Although Steadman declares that he “hated him from that day until this,” and that it made him afraid of “institutional places, you know, schools, universities…places that drove you away from curiosity and interest, and then creativity,” the event and his early failure seems to have been motivational.

10“It was out of failure that I grew and tried to do something, because the idea of failing was—was only failing in whose eyes…. Because it wasn’t the proper job, you know…. Never was a proper job. Nobody at school offered me… ‘well how about becoming a cartoonist who draws strange eyeballs?’” Artists, he says, “don’t want the proper job, because they know the proper job will dump on them, you know, as it always does.” At the peak of his success, Steadman dedicated a book “To failure.”

11Steadman’s work is shot through with anti-authoritarian images aimed at the usual oppressors: church, police and government.

12His 1975 drawing of five policeman beating a helpless man is horrifyingly relevant today, a half century later, when George Floyd was murdered by Minneapolis cops, and only a week ago, five Memphis policemen tortured and beat Tyre Nichols to death during a routine traffic stop. Steadman’s work, like that of other great social commentators, does not merely reflect his times, but exposes the superciliousness, the depravity, the vein of murderous evil that can be found in every generation.

13Born in Liverpool in 1936 to a housewife mother and a traveling salesman father, Steadman’s earliest memories were of his mother taking him to shelters during the German bombings. The attacks resulted in his family fleeing to North Wales. While doing his compulsory military service he received training in technical drawing and drafting and at night studied in a correspondence art school. At the same time Steadman began to submit cartoons to newspapers. After many rejections came an acceptance by the Manchester Evening Chronicle in 1956 which helped persuade him that he could have a career drawing. He left Wales for London and found work there as a cartoonist with a newspaper chain.

14It was also in London that he did seven years at the London College of Printing and Graphic Arts. Steadman, explains his choice of trade school over one of the schools of fine art: that it was not Slade “or anything like that,” he says, can be laid at his having been “brought up to go out and earn a living,” his family being “very simple folk.” The fundamental idea, he adds, is that “you’ve got to earn a living and pay your way…. I’ve met people who do art for art’s sake and frankly they’ve got nothing much going on.”

15By the 1960s, Steadman’s work was appearing in Punch, The Daily Telegraph, the New York Times, and Rolling Stone. But the event that sent his life on a new trajectory was when he was assigned by Scanlon’s Magazine to cover the Kentucky Derby with Hunter Thompson. Steadman’s drawing titled “The Winners’ Circle,” featuring a grotesque, miniaturized depiction of what Thompson called “a captain of commerce,” clutching the reins of the justly proud horse and indifferent jockey, encapsulates it all: it is money, not skill or courage, that allows the entitled, unattractive group access to the winner’s circle.

16Appreciating the inventiveness of science fiction writers, Steadman asks rhetorically, “Well, why not? I can do that. I can say that. Because I'm only writing this thing… it's not reality… It's the same feeling I like to put into a drawing. When you decide that you don't want the head up there, or you don't want to draw politicians’ heads--all you want to draw is their legs.”

17“And people think you can't do that. No, yes you can. And you draw so that it's more insulting, because legs are sort of peculiar things…” Steadman explored the possibilities with a series rendering US and British politicians as nothing but legs:

18Here’s Bill Clinton composed of nothing but legs, saxophone, and golf club:

19Here’s the “Home Sweet Home Secretary:”

20“For the next election, if I do something, I’ll just draw sphincters you know… The idea of making sphincters that resemble politicians like George Bush or Al Gore would be rather important. I think. They'd be saying they're talking through their backsides anyway, half the time. And so you wouldn't have to say a lot about what they're saying. Except that …they are... full of shit.”

21Henry Kissinger as a soccer player running off the pitch, taking the world with him, as though it’s the ball he’d brought:

22Consider Steadman’s less than charmed view of Disneyland’s saccharine cheerfulness:

23Like the horror film Chucky in which a serial killer inhabits a good doll, Steadman, with subtle alteration, exposes a hidden malevolence--the corporate greed and manipulation behind the oversized, ostensibly benign and child-beloved cartoon figures. From their unhappy faces, the kids, unlike their dollar-drained parents, are not taken in. One suspects that when he was confronted by the scaled-up costumes he rendered them instinctively, as he was seeing them, and the message, such as it is, was not articulated, but left to the viewer to discern. “Wittgenstein said ‘the only thing of value is that [which] you cannot say,’” Steadman insists in his interpretive paraphrase. He adds, “But it doesn't stop great writers from doing it somehow, you know. So, how did they get round to it? Or is that the secret… of good writing is not confronting it head on, but stalking it, you know, and getting to the point by various other means in a much more sort of meandering way. And then striking…”

24Like the parable of the blindmen and the elephant, creative geniuses, Steadman suggests, tend to approach the truth through one medium or another while wishing they could encompass it all. “The writer can tell you something, describe it in words, but only there. So that's one part of the whole equation. Then perhaps an artist wants to be a musician, writer, painter, you know, scene painter, design, you know, for all of that and control the world. You know, what we love is to do the whole thing: I had this idea to write musicals. While I did write sort of the whole book for a musical for Leonardo da Vinci, you know, the life of Leonardo, with all the different songs. I wrote eighteen songs, and a song about banking, because that's where it started--in 1452. The Medicis started the idea of banking. And the first opening line is how much are you worth? Tell us in money. We have your interest at heart….”

Transcript

25

Geniuses are losers who try harder

26I wanted to be an aircraft engineer. I wanted to build them, fly them, you know--make them, take them out, you know, design them, everything. And I did that as a boy. I made little airplanes, which is where I first got involved in Leonardo da Vinci. Because I wasn't really getting much of an education, but I found three volumes of the notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci They fascinated me. And one particular phrase in there was, “genius is the capacity for taking pains,” said Leonardo da Vinci. And that I thought was an interesting thing: that perhaps there isn't such a thing as genius. It's just such a thing as some poor guy who works harder than anyone else to get there and to achieve. So maybe all geniuses really are losers who try harder. And I thought maybe that was what it was and it made me try to do something, because I wasn't doing very well. Because I didn’t want to be an aircraft engineer in the end.

27And then I went to Woolworths to try being a manager of a store. And I was sweeping out the whole store--you go right to the front after going down all the aisles, you get all the stuff to the front, you get it all to the front and then you have to pick it up. And the man who passed by just as I was doing that was my old headmaster, who looked at me. He said, “You really buggered your life up, haven't you?” He said, “you know, if you'd tried harder, you may have done something, but look at you sweeping streets.” You know, like that, you see. And he was an awful man, that was. He scared the hell out of me, you know.

Growth through failure

28It was out of failure that I grew and tried to do something. Because the idea of failing was--was only failing in whose eyes? You know, was I failing in my eyes, or was it somebody else who thought I'd failed? Because it wasn't the proper job, you know, what you do is not a proper job. Never was a proper job. Nobody at school offered me--like a youth employment officer, who you have to go and talk to--would have offered me “well, how about becoming a cartoonist who draws strange eyeballs?”

29You know, say, you know, you could do that, and then finding that that's not at all what you would consider to be a success. I was quite happy at one time to be a law-abiding, decent, wholesome citizen. And then I realized that if you want to be that, you're going to have a miserable life, because everyone else seems so miserable within it. And I would prefer to say something, or speak my truth clearly, as I know it.

Art should provide an income

30I did seven years at the London College of printing and graphic arts. You see the emphasis being on the graphic arts rather than on the fine arts. So I didn't go to the Slade School of Fine Art or anything like that. But perhaps if I thought about doing it, it's just, I was brought up to go out and earn a living. And that seems to me to be something quite fundamental to the whole idea of it. I've met people who do art for art's sake and frankly they've got nothing much going on, you know. There's nothing happening somehow. Because there isn't, there isn't a valid connection between themselves and, and a motivating force so strong that they can pull other people along with them.

First drawing in America

31When I looked at my first book, America, I did over here, some of the pictures still resonate, still have a feeling of nowness about them. The first drawing I ever did in New York, and it's the one of-- everyone I realized in New York, walked the streets, nobody, eyelocked. So I did people in rather, twisted poses, you know, like mutants of a kind, all walking through a linear upright landscape. That drawing still matters in that way, you know, for me, and few of the others. The one about “Give us dime, buddy,” you know, a gnarled hand really cut and bruised blue and sores all over it, you know. And he's just saying, “Give us a dime, buddy, this is a tough city to get started in.” Well, that's still as relevant today, as you know. I mean, if you're out in the street nobody gives a monkey's what who you are, you know.

America as a screaming lifestyle

32I saw America as a screaming lifestyle. And that screaming lifestyle seemed to me to be a threat. I was fearful of what I saw in Miami. I was fearful about what I saw in New York, you know, in 1970 and then onwards. Watergate, went through all that with Hunter Thompson. And Hunter picked up on that, because he could see, there was a genuine kind of not-a-Puritan here, but someone who was looking through a glass darkly, you know, of his own making. Perhaps you do go out of your way to stay outside, because by doing that, you remain objective.

Gonzo Journalism

33A lot of journalism is fatally flawed from the beginning. Because it’s there to fill a vacuum in people’s lives that need news every day of any kind, you know. And misquotes are, in fact, the stuff of all good journalism. And Gonzo is not fanciful at all. It's a kind of reality, but you go to cover a story but what you end up doing is covering what happened to you during that story. That's really what Gonzo is, I think. There is no story. I have to make one.

Text and image

34I just think being creative or being an artist is being someone who attempts to fill a vacuum. There's an absence of something you're about to do, you know, but the world may not need it. That's not important, really. But you need it, or you need to do that something, you feel there is a vacuum to be filled. And the act of, of creativity is trying to fill the vacuum.

35I think that's what you do too, you make a reason for doing or there's no reason for doing any of it. And yet there is a reason. And sometimes you want to write, and you don't know why you want to write you feel you've got something you want to say. Now if I want to do this book on philosophy called the philosophy of French plumbing, why do I want to do it? I think it's because you got an earthy-- touch sense to it. It's got something anal retentive about it, which is of course what is necessarily due for an artist. And that's perhaps what I would like to do mostly it to create a book that actually, nobody could quite figure out where it was coming from, you know. But it would intrigue because that's how I think, you could- so it’s kind of theater isn’t it? I mean a book of pictures and writing to me would suggest theater.

36If you get a line, say from Hunter, the bats over Barstow or something. It was somewhere around Barstow, that the drugs began to take a hold. You get this image, bats car, zooming forward, you know, you add the other dimension to it, but it's crying out for a picture. So there's an entire interrelationship between all of this stuff. And I think that's probably what artists who do want to write, or make music or make a sculpture actually are about, they want to do it all themselves, because they realize that the picture they might have painted isn't complete, either without a title, which is writing, or a descriptive thing about painting and about their whole point of view about painting and why they bother to do it in the first place. They need to almost, you know, inform people that I did this, because.

What cannot be said

37Wittgenstein said ‘the only thing of value is that you cannot say.’ You can't quite, you know, you know, the thought to can't put words around it because you’rre limited it immediately. But it doesn't stop great writers from doing it somehow, you know, so, how did they get round to it? Or is that the secret-- not confronting it head on, but stalking it, you know, and getting to the point by various other means, you know, in a much more sort of meandering way. And then striking.

38If you just suspend your sense of disbelief for a minute and go off and let the mind do it. And have you have to keep remind yourself. Well, why not? I can do that. I can say that. Because I'm only writing this thing it doesn't it's not. It's not reality, I'm only making this happen.

39It's the same feeling I like to put into to a drawing. When you decide that you don't want to head up there, or you don't want to draw a politician's heads. All you want to draw are their legs. And people say ‘you can't do that.’ No, yes, you can.

40And so you you start concentrating only on the legs. And you draw that it's more insulting, because legs are sort of peculiar things and all the sort of [unintell] that goes around here. The next thing I thought, for the next election, if I do something, I’d just draw sphincters

41The idea of making sphincters resemble politicians like George Bush, Al Gore, would be rather important, I think. They’re saying what they are saying. They’re talking through their backsides anyway.

Proving a point everyday

42I don't really believe that artists are necessarily any different to other people except having this some slight, this drive, this germ in them, you know, that infects them and see seizes them in a way that gives them some sort of bacteriological function, you know, to throw stuff out, you know, it's like that it's a fever.

43You start your life, every morning and think, ‘what is it I believe in today? Or do I just want to play around with it? Yes, I do.’ Actually, I want to play around. I've got a hunch that making marks on paper is an interesting way to find out what is down-- what is in the subconscious, you know, what is making, what is driving me, you know, what makes me want to do something. Because I have a point to prove every day, you know, that my existence is worthwhile. Without that existence, the world is a lesser place, you know, say, so you fool yourself every day, that that's how necessary you are.