Drawing Bush

It feels much easier being me. I sit here and simply write what comes to mind. Little imagination required. No attempt to be more interesting than I am.

I’m off the back of a marathon sleep. I was out for something like eleven hours last night. I’ve always been a good sleeper but usually restrict myself to seven or eight. But whenever I hit my Manchester days, it breaks whatever work and sleep pattern I’ll have established in the previous five days. I drag myself by my ears from my bed at six o’clock, on the train for seven, and I’m in the office and working for eight or eight thirty. The day is fixed. I have to work eight hours and, like most people in the office, I choose to work them in a solid block, eating lunch at my desk and with only a couple of ‘bathroom’ breaks. By four thirty, I’m usually a mental and physical mess but happy to heading home. The nights aren’t much of anything. I’m paid for eight hours but they’re really taking eighteen. I travel, work, travel, doze in front of the TV, and then I sleep. A rush of energy on Thursday was the exception to the rule. I managed to write a few posts. My ‘Coming Clean’ piece was the product of peanut butter, which I’ve been told is good for energy. I think it was the relief of confession that drove me on but last night, I was unable to function.

Today I’ve been unable to write. I spent this afternoon trying my hand at drawing a political cartoon. I’d had the above joke in my head for over a week but hadn’t had time to draw it. Unlike my more surreal jokes, scribbling political figures requires far more time and effort. I finished today’s picture (don’t ask how long it took) and sent it to my sister who immediately pointed out that my George W. Bush looks remarkably like Donald Rumsfeld. She had a point. I went back and added a slightly more prominent lip, smaller ears. I think it is enough for the joke to work. I posted it over at The Spine, just to keep that site going.

Caricatures don’t interest me all that much. I see them as a necessary evil when making a joke about a public figure. That was always the pleasure of writing The Spine regularly. I could use photographs to make my point. The down side to the site was that I could never sell my gags to newspapers because I would have to account for every element of a picture. The copyright laws just don’t make any allowances for new forms of cartooning involving Photoshop. The other problem was that any joke was always constrained by the availability of a picture. I would often resort to taking photographs of my own elbows, hands, and knees, just to fill in a gap. Sketching allows me to get closer to my ideas, though I face a different difficulty drawing recognisable caricatures.

I try not to be influenced by the way real illustrators draw their victims. I had to deliberately avoid Gerald Scarfe’s method of drawing the simian-like Bush, big ears and huge baboon maw. His caricatures are some of the best in terms of taking a hard swipe at a figure. He’s more in the tradition of the great seventeenth century artists and, naturally, I think of Hogarth. Scarfe’s figures regularly display their genitals or are to be found facing us arseways, sphincter compressed. As much as I admire his work, I don't think he's chasing outright laughs. They more scatology than wit, more outrage than punchline. He’s not, as far as I can see, a humourist who cares about the laugh. He's probably greater than that.

Thinking about all this reminds me of my local shopping centre where a lad runs a stall where he draws caricatures of customers. I always glance over and see what he’s doing. He clearly has a skill for it but, for me, it’s too close that that episode of The Simpsons (doesn’t everything remind us of episodes from The Simpsons?) where Lisa is allowing herself to be drawn by the local caricaturist. If I remember it correctly, the artist simply sticks her in a car and exaggerates one feature (her hair). It’s implied that this is exactly what he does with every subject.

Could mutter on some more but my laptop battery has dropped below 10%...