Personality profile Ralph Steadman
Interviewing Ralph Steadman is a bit like observing one of his legendary cartoons …splashes of comic genius interspersed with wild and crazy tangents heading off all over the place!
As a young man, Ralph Steadman wanted to change the world. With his first marriage to the mother of his four children breaking up in 1969, Ralph accepted an invitation to visit American journalist and newspaper publisher Dan Rattiner in New York. Moved by the sights of
misery and deprivation he encountered, he decided to take 1000 pictures – then convert the images he captured into drawings.
“Art is just tricks, really,” he said. “If I knew what was going to happen before I started it, what would be the point of doing it?”
“My experience in New
Living in Loose for almost 25 years, Steadman has managed to combine a-
sometimes maniacal existence across the Atlantic with a somewhat more sedate life with his family in the Kentish countryside, where his imagination has plenty of scope to run riot in his spacious studio.
Jane Shotliff paid him a visit.
6 Mid Kent Living
York gave me the conviction I needed to make this the work of my life and to reassure myself that I was not wasting my time here on earth,” he says. His continual inspiration has always been that desire to change the world and he says wryly: “I finally think I have succeeded. Now, the world is much worse than when I started out.” Steadman steadfastly
maintains he cannot draw. Unlike many artists, he has
never done a pencil draft before embarking on a project – yet never made a mistake. “A mistake is just an opportunity to do something else,” he says matter-of-factly. He started out with his
trademark ‘splash’ art quite by accident. “It was sheer clumsiness,” he says, “and I thought ‘ooh, I quite like that!’ ” He has donated countless images to charity and provided the art for may campaigns including Save the Children, The Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture and the Campaign which eventually led to the freedom of the hostage John McCarthy. Influenced very much by
Picasso, Steadman likes to start with a blank sheet of paper and see what emerges.
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