Ralph Steadman
British cartoonist and caricaturist who is best known for his work with American author Hunter S Thompson.
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Hunter Thompson wasn't Joseph Conrad, Jimmy Carter wasn't Harry Trueman. But strangely, Richard Nixon was Richard Nixon.
I'm no Pablo Picasso but there's no harm in straining. After all, the charm of any activity is in the trying and so rarely in the finished article.
Beware of privilege. It stinks of rotten rotten fish heads, many of which were lapping the shore beneath the jetties.
One can derive the same fun from print-making as from making mud pies and great subtlety can be achieved through the use of transparent inks, half-tone screens and even accidental colour combinations, which is often where the art hides.
At least my mural of Leonardo da Vinci still exists on the wall of their offices, which were subsequently taken over by Expedia. They had the wall insured.
America is ripe for lies and lethargy. The pure mountain air is going and gone. It is a huge burden and a sadness for us all.
'Happiness is a Small Politician' - my mantra then and forever more.
I don't think that at the time, or now, come to think of it, I gave a damn. Foolishly, I wanted truth and idealism, but there was none to be had.
What actually happened was that Rolling Stone paid me fifteen hundred dollars for the use of all the drawings - about twenty four of them - and then offered to buy the originals from me, which my agent urged 'was a good move!'. He sold the whole damn treasure trove to Jann Wenner for the princely sum of sixty dollars per drawing. I rue the day I let him convince me.
Maybe he is the Mark Twain of the late twentieth century. Time will sort the bastard out and I leave it to others more qualified than me to assess and appraise his monumental literary legacy.
By this time trapped inside the drug's reverie I could have sprayed out Michelangelo's Last Judgement on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. A yacht would be a beggar's handcart by comparison.
Today we are sacks of shit bundled into flying tubes with a security warning secreted inside every orifice.
Those Fear and Loathing drawings were only possible for me because of the America's Cup six months earlier, which injected the the drawings with the eerie sense of being there to record the sensations. It was a regurgitation, a psycho-artistic vomit - a creative, cathartic cleansing of my inner being.
Funny thing about Americans. They are the first to adopt weird lifestyles and radical views but they are the most conservative race on earth.
Each boat is worth the price of a new university and they are watched by gin-soaked yachting types, male and female, in captain's hats lounging in deckchairs inside Perspex covered enclosures at the front of yet more expensive, floating country houses representing nothing more than elegantly vulgar expressions of dodgy wealth. The America's Cup.
Where is Winnie the Pooh without it's illustrations?
Americans live with the certain knowledge that the source of their greatness has not yet been released.
It was a carefree period and we took to it like genuine lowlife.
I was in a slightly befuddled state by this time and the potent combination of watery beer and whiskey was bringing on a severe attack of drawing, as always happens when I start seeing unusual faces through a haze of controlled drinking. My body becomes a protective casing and lets me observe through the two keyholes on the front of my head.
I am an artist, I trade in uncertainty and superstition and cant. I invent dark visions of impossible situations that can never be resolved.
Let me say it here and now. For all Hunter's mindless self-indulgence, which is legendary and crude, he always impressed me with his blind, selfless urge to cut out the crony bestiality of modern society and the political economy that scarred the era.
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