Long Drawn Out Trip: A Memoir

Description

In Long Drawn Out Trip: My Life, Gerald Scarfe tells his life story for the first time. With captivating, often thrilling stories, he takes us from his childhood and early days at Punch and Private Eye, through his long and occasionally tumultuous career as the Sunday Times cartoonist, to his film-making at the BBC and much-loved designs for Pink Floyd's The Wall and Disney's Hercules. Along the way he has drawn Churchill from life, gone on tour with The Beatles and thoroughly upset Mrs Mary Whitehouse. It is a very personal, wickedly funny and caustically insightful account of an artist's life at the forefront of contemporary culture and society.

Gerald Scarfe began his career in the sixties working for Punch and Private Eye before taking a job as a political cartoonist for the Daily Mail. He then worked for Time magazine in New York before starting his fifty-year-long association with the Sunday Times. He drew weekly for the Evening Standard. His varied career has seen him work with Pink Floyd (The Wall, Wish You Were Here), Roger Waters and Eric Clapton (The Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking), as a production designer for Disney (Hercules), costume and set designer for English National Ballet (The Nutcracker) and Los Angeles Opera (Fantastic Mr Fox) as well as produce such iconic images as those for the titles of Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minister. His work has featured in the New Yorker and various BBC TV films such as Scarfe on Sex and Scarfe on Class. Exhibitions of his paintings and drawings have appeared in the Tate Gallery, the National Portrait Gallery and the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, as well as galleries in Australia, USA, Germany and Czech Republic. He is viewed by many as both a national treasure and a genius.

A fascinating and surprisingly gentle read, from a man famed for his venomous nib -- Nick Newman * Mail on Sunday * Compelling . . . the childhood chapters are extremely moving -- Ysenda Maxtone Graham * Daily Mail * Gerald Scarfe's ghoulish-looking Mother, Pink and Schoolmaster creations defined the visual aesthetic of Pink Floyd's The Wall, stage show and movie. But artist Scarfe's story is much bigger, encompassing sweeping social changes in the 60s and beyond * Planet Rock *