Gerald Scarfe

“Well, this is my studio, this is where I come every morning very early, sometimes about 5.30 or 6 o'clock in the morning to start work and I have everything I want around me. These drawings behind me are sort of half finished drawings that I put up on the wall to get a kind of feeling of them. As you can see, I work very, very large – delusions of grandeur – and I need to get back from them to get them in perspective. I use pen and ink and then I add watercolour afterwards. What I will now do is… make a drawing of George Bush, our favourite, we all love George Bush, don’t we? Start with the… eyes, these simian eyes, monkey-like eyes, sharp nose like that… and then he goes back to this monkey-like mouth. One of the great things about having my studio in my home is that, you know, of course the family over the years have been able to come in and see what I’m doing. Being an artist is a very, very lonely job and to have people come in and be interested in the work, even if they are family members, is a good thing, it encourages you.

I work as quickly as I can. I try and get as much as I can onto the paper straight away. An idea is almost like a dream, you know, I’ve got to get it onto the paper very, very quickly otherwise, like a dream, it evaporates, so I can always go back afterwards and put as much detail in as I want, but at this point I’m just trying to get the main action, the main movement, and above all some sort of energy into the drawing.

So that’s really about how long it takes me to get down the bare bones of George Bush. I mean, sometimes the drawings don’t go right first time; I have to kind of try again and again and the studio floor sometimes is littered with these huge piece of papers. It’s rather tidy at the moment, I’ve had a tidy up, but it can be sort of almost knee deep in pieces of paper where I’ve started to work on things which I know are not going to work out. Some years ago, Disney asked me to design their film, ‘Hercules’, I was thrilled because I was a great Disney fan as a child and they wanted me to design all the characters and the whole film and one of the characters in it, Hercules, is a mythological subject and one of the mythological characters is Pegasus the flying horse and I immediately thought of this horse that I’ve always admired in the British Museum. It actually comes from the Parthenon. This of course is not the real one, this is… made of polystyrene on something, but I love the elegance of this beautiful piece and it’s part of the studio for me now, it just lives there all the time to remind me of what artists all those years ago were doing. Another… great job that I worked on was Pink Floyd, ‘The Wall’. I’ve got a memento here from Pink Floyd ‘The Wall’ – Roger and the gang gave me this typical rock and roll disc after the selling I don't know how many million versions of ‘The Wall’ and a lot of it was designed in this room, so it’s not only political caricatures that come out of this room, it’s theatre designs, it’s rock and roll, it’s animation, it’s costumes and sculpture too. I think to be drawing politicians over and over again on their own would be so, so dull.“