Long Drawn Out Trip: A Memoir

Description

In 1964 a young artist sat in the public gallery of the House of Commons, sketching former Prime Minister Winston Churchill. The Sunday Times refused to print the resulting drawing of this frail, aged figure - so far from the public image of the man - it was too truthful. In the sixty years since, Gerald Scarfe's work has continued to expose the truth, and has appeared many times in the pages of the Sunday Times, in the Evening Standard, New Yorker, Private Eye and Time, as well as on the walls of the V&A and the Tate, the stages of the English National Opera and the English National Ballet, and cinema screens around the world in the form of Pink Floyd The Wall and Disney's Hercules. In Long Drawn Out Trip, Gerald tells his life story for the first time. With captivating, often thrilling stories, he takes us back to his wartime childhood and the terrible curse of asthma, through his days as an advertising draughtsman, to his field reporting in Vietnam and the giddy highs of rock 'n' roll. He also reveals the process of cartooning - and the ways that certain subjects have reacted to his visions of them. Along the way he has been car-jacked in Derry, dined with royals, 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 *