Friday, Aug 29, 2008
Artist Ralph Steadman is a people-loving, Nietzsche-reading, ink-splattering grump. And he doesn't think Hunter S. Thompson should have a gun.
Sep 1, 2000 | Fear and loathing -- artist Ralph Steadman feels both working with gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson, and occasionally on his own. A humorous, visual alchemist, Steadman turns the grotesque into gold. He even has the look of a wizard with his crown of white hair and his Hawaiian necklaces.
We know Steadman for his splattered inkings, which punctuate the off-the-wall antics in books of Thompson's such as "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" and "The Curse of Lono," as well as the writer's occasional Rolling Stone articles. Steadman has also written and illustrated books on wine ("The Grapes of Ralph"), whiskey, da Vinci, Freud and God ("The Big I Am"). Throw a few children's stories into the merry mix, too. His Charlie Chaplin stamp has traveled the U.K. via the British postal system, and many a tippler has admired the graphics he has done for wine and beer labels.
Steadman, 64, lives in Kent, England. Occasionally, he travels to Colorado to display his artwork at the William Havu Gallery in Denver and to visit his friend Thompson in Aspen. His latest exhibit is entitled "Making a Mark," a reference to his recent tactic of beginning each piece without an initial subject in mind -- only marks, such as his trademark ink drippings, from which he subsequently seeks to derive meaning. A reader of Nietzsche, Kant and Schopenhauer, he gets philosophical when speaking about his latest method: "The newest aspect of my life is that I really don't know what the drawing is for anymore," says Steadman. "I'm following that path."
You've written about how, at one point, it seems like art went one way and cartooning went the other. Do you think your work has bridged that gap?
I'd like to think that it did -- that I was trying to blur the division. I think good art can be purely decorative, but it can also inform the intellect in a certain way. It can inform the intellect decoratively, like the Maya sculptures, the Maya pyramids and the Egyptian hieroglyphics. It's an information vehicle, like cave painters and the way they exorcised their fear by drawing on a cave wall the very fear that they were about to go out and hunt. That seems to be a very real reason why art ever came into existence at all. They had the art to protect them from the truth. They realized the truth was hideous. And the idea that they would [draw animals] from the side, too, triggered that thought. They would always draw them in profile because they didn't want to see them face-on.
But it seems like you face some of your fears head-on in your paintings: You depict some of the things that disturb you.
Oh, the problem is I'm afraid of life. Believe me, I'm afraid of life. I think life is a monster. But it's also a wonderful thing. I mean, it's the bird song and all the rest -- let's not to get too poesy and romantic. But I love all those things. You look at it and say, "Look at it. It's so fucking right. It looks wonderful. I'm so in awe of it." And then man comes along and fucks it up. And that's a thing in Nietzsche that I love particularly: that it is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence in the world is permanently justified. It is a beautiful aesthetic phenomenon, and man goes out of his way to try to destroy it.
I think as you get older you start playing more. I think to myself, "I've been so fucking serious for so long, trying to make my work meaningful, trying to change the goddamn world. I can't change the bloody world! It's getting worse." So, I ain't done much of a job, myself. I've done nothing to help it. I'm not a leader of any kind. I'm just an artist trying to do something.
And, bless it, blissfully, a lot of people have thought likewise and liked what I did. But only, I think, as an affirmation of what it is they think themselves. What I might have done is picked up on someone else's vibes. And all I've done is manifest it, then, in a drawing, and people go, "I like that, because I think that way." That's how people look at my work, I bet. But that's only preaching to the converted, isn't it? People already think like that, so what am I doing? I'm doing something which is out of date, finished.
Get Salon in your mailbox!