posted on 24 Sep 2017

Extinct Boids by Ralph Steadman

In the world of illustration what does the name Ralph Steadman bring to mind? I would imagine it’s the visceral and sometimes vicious political cartoons or the almost hallucinogenic road trip drawings that make up a substantial percentage of his portfolio. Nothing is too grotesque for Steadman to imagine and his pen boldly spatters the page with bold strokes that with a twist and turn capture a brutal likeness that seems to cut into the essential character and personality of his victim.

Steadman is undoubtedly a political figure but his politics are not mundane or focussed on a specific party position – in the great spirit of radical and progressive satire Steadman pounces on anyone who is deserving of opprobrium and there are no sacred cows. So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Steadman’s politics embrace the environment and humanity’s role in despoiling the planet and the other species we share it with.

This fabulous large folio book gives us one hundred paintings of birds that have become extinct – many of them as a result of human activity or even human stupidity. To be fair, Steadman’s imagination got the better of him and not all these birds are necessarily real :

Eventually I started making up imaginary extinct birds: one afternoon, when we were talking about vulgarity, he said, "I don't want any unnecessary rudeness," and I said, "You mean no needless smut?" And I had the name of a fictional bird – the Needless Smut. For the exhibition we filled a room with my drawings, hung up high: Ceri came up with the idea of handing visitors binoculars so they could bird-spot.

So, how did all this start? When film-maker Ceri Levy was thinking about making a film called Ghosts of Gone Birds he approached a number of artists asking them to provide an artwork representative of an extinct bird and Steadman responded with enough enthusiasm to make the two men sit down and talk about the project. What started as a request for a single drawing turned into this collection. Levy provides the written commentary and it’s a book that evolved as a result of a swapping of email and telephone calls that are presented here edited into the form of a conversation.

The drawings are beautiful – as you might expect – but the ones that I especially like are those that give the birds a real character. Like many artists Steadman seems to find the rogues and villains easier to animate than those with a milder or maybe blander reputation. When he can he likes to make the birds explode from the page or they look you in the eye and you catch a just the hint of a sly, twisted smile.

At the front of the book, which was published in 2012 by Bloomsbury, you’ll find the slogan ‘Raising A Creative Army for Conservation’ and a commitment that a proportion of each sale going to support the Ghosts of Gone Birds project.

You can still buy copies of this fabulous book for £20 or perhaps a little more. It’s a silly cheap price for such a magnificent production.

 

Terry Potter

September 2017