WORDS BY CHRIS O’NEILL
PHOTO BY MICHAEL OTERO, IMAGES COURTESY OF GERALD SCARFE
Gerald Scarfe is the English illustrator and artist who is pretty much solely responsible for the existence of those scratchy caricatures flanking serious political commentary in your newspaper. You know, the ones that mean you don’t have to read a single word of text in order to perfectly grasp whatever pressing issue your broadsheet has decided you should feel strongly about on any given day. They also have the added bonus of making deadly boring situations appear funny and interesting.
If you don’t read newspapers, then you may know Scarfe as the guy whose 1971 animated film, A Long Drawn-Out Trip, with its trippy, amorphous visuals and cut-and-paste soundtrack, brought stream-of-consciousness art into the worlds of film and music, and earned him a breakthrough job directing the animation in Pink Floyd’s 1982 film The Wall. What’s more, in 1998, his caricatures of comics such as Tommy Cooper and Peter Cook appeared on a set of postage stamps commemorating British comedians.
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Gerald Scarfe: Do you ever feel bad about the people you draw?
Are you ever tempted to do something so disgusting that they won’t want to hang it on the wall?
You get a lot of licence when drawing a cartoon, more than, say, a stand-up comedian might have.
Have you ever had legal trouble?
What’s she doing in the cartoon?
What else were you doing at that time?
Sunday Times Private Eye Time Daily Mail The Daily Mail?
Daily Mail Private Eye Daily Mail Daily Express Private Eye Daily Mail. It seems odd sending a cartoonist to Vietnam. What were you meant to do there?
Was that before you went to LA and made A Long Drawn-Out Trip?
How did A Long Drawn-Out Trip come about?
It comes across as very trippy and drug-fuelled.
Hercules One of your most famous creations is the hammer logo from The Wall.
Your drawings have also been shocking in their time.
Private Eye Does anything shock you now?
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