Instamatic art
Ralph Steadman had a busy time of it at the Aspen Design Conference earlier this summer. He related the extraordinary history of the Boyo Tapestry and its destruction at the hands – well the jaws – of a goat. He sang Singin’ in the Rain dressed in a snorkel and flippers. And he took more than a hundred Polaroids of fellow luminaries singled out for the Steadman treatment. Steadman calls his doctored Polaroids “paranoids”, and next month Harrap publishes a book of them. Described as an account of famous paranoids through history, it covers everyone from Socrates (the philosopher not the footballer) to Joan Collins. Steadman is also writing a commentary on paranoia, a subject he feels he knows something about.
He says most of his Aspen subjects were sympathetic, though some posed better than others. He mentions US designer Saul Bass and UK corporate identity wizard Wally Olins as being among the best posers, and explains the thinking behind some of the other pictures. Design minister John Butcher seemed too nice to be one of Maggie’s men – hence the satanic reference. Because of the high altitude, Pentagram’s Alan Fletcher looked even more melancholic than usual. The picture of Milton Glaser sought to capture his “wonderful frog-like face”. David Puttnam was conceived “as he might have looked if he’d appeared in Apocalypse Now”. And the portrait of Roy Strong strove to bring out his gentleness, which, according to Steadman, rarely comes across. The paranoids technique is simple. Take a Polaroid; wait for it to develop; when it’s still gooey, work on it with a pencil. If it dries and you want to do more, re-heat it and carry on scrawling. The hard part comes in knowing what sort of photograph to take and what to do with the pencil. We can all kick a ball, but there’s only one Socrates (see above).
Steadman discovered paranoids by accident. On holiday in Turkey last year he left one of his Polaroids out in the sun. It melted and “moved into a painting almost on its own”. Instant impressionism. He photographed a local artist and played with the picture while it was tacky. Eureka! “When I realised I could pull the nose out beyond the face,” he says, “I knew I had something.” The technique is in every sense developing. “At first I moved the background a lot more than I moved the face,” says Steadman. “It was cruder then. Now I know what works and when it’s going to break down. Initially, I thought the best way to do them was as they were developing, but that’s the worst time because the stuff breaks up. It’s only later, when it gets a little fattier, that you can see what’s there.”
Steadman’s paranoids were unveiled last October when he covered the Conservative party conference for the Observer magazine. He was invited to draw top Tories, declined on the grounds that he “couldn’t think of anything more boring” and gave them the paranoid treatment instead. A manic Maggie, snapped on television, adorned the cover. Sir Keith Joseph, arch-paranoid and likened by Russell Davies in the accompanying article to a crashed helicopter, starred inside.
“The techniques suits me,” says Steadman, “because I’m a little paranoid and the work does have a slightly nervous edge. The pictures make people look ridiculous, and that exorcises my fear of them. If I dislike the person, maybe something of that comes out subconsciously. Steadman says the impact the pictures made surprised him, and he puts it down to the fact that people respond to distorted reality. They like the reality and fear the distortion.
Paranoids has left him little time for drawing, and he was pleased to be doing a cover for the New Statesman. “It’s good to do the odd one to know that I’m still touching the paper,” he says. After the book he’ll be doing a good deal of paper-touching as he ploughs on with a project called The Big I Am, which he refers to as “the God book”. His art is clearly now philosophical rather than satirical, and he admits to having no political causes on which to sharpen his nibs. “There’s not much going on at the moment,” he says wearily. “We live in the age of the third rate. There are great minds around, but very few of them are doing anything genuinely original. Too many have become corporate people. Most say ‘I’ll take it while it’s going and get out later’, but they never do it. It’s a terrible trap.”
It’s a trap Steadman has always fought to avoid. He could have gone on doing the same cartoons in the same way. But he feels he has to move on. “I didn’t want to draw the same people or tub-thump the same bullshit. Your work has got to be meaningful for you. The God book will be an attempt to find another way forward.”
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