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Showing posts with label Cats. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Cats. Show all posts

Monday, February 20, 2023

Cat cards

  



'Welcome Home' card for Searle's US agent John Locke





Tuesday, August 29, 2017

CATS!

Early on in his career Searle became best known in the UK for the St. Trinian's girls but when he later moved to Paris he found a commercial subject in cats. He confessed to me that he actually possessed no love of cats and that they were simply 'what sold'. The success of his cat books became an even heavier chain around his neck and it replaced the schoolgirls in what the public came to expect from him. Americans seem to adore his cats the most and as a longtime contributor to the New Yorker many of Searle's covers featured a feline gag.

Many of the cat drawings are admittedly funny. The early ones made while in Paris in the late 60s are quite experimental and no doubt informed Searle's more abstract experiments wit the 'Anatomies & Decapitations' series and his expressive work on Baron Munchausen.



Although it is 15 years since Ronald Searle last sketched the spindly ankle and leering eyeball of one of his pigtailed horrors from St Trinian's, a drastic effort to dissociate himself from them has never succeeded. "People are convinced that I am still producing them," Searle, who has settled in Paris, said. "It's baffling. Not too many people could really have seen them. I produced about one a month between 1946 and 1951, and then packed it in. The films helped to keep the image alive." The interment of St Trinian's was the beginning of a break with his past. A few years later he broke completely with his life in England, he separated from his first wife, signed over all his royalties to provide for their two children and came to Paris to start, financially, from scratch.
Now married again, aged 47, he has built up a new career, contributing to the "New Yorker" and "Holiday" doing travel books and organising exhibitions of his work in Europe. An exhibition of his cat drawings has just opened at St Germain des Prés. They are not pretty, cute cats with glossy furs, but vilified, spiky-haired individuals with doubts about the universe. Cats with a wrinkle of anxiety in their smeared eyes; harassed cats, cats shrinking from some menace (such as having discovered the truth about their own libido).
To imbue cats with human feelings is a logical outcome of drawing on one's own experience. When the girls of St Trinian's gleefully hung a schoolmistress by the thumbs, Searle was drawing on stark images from a Japanese prison camp. (As a Japanese magazine put it, "He took part in various battles until he was captivated by the Japanese Army.")
When he came back to Britain in 1945 editors snapped up his drawings of nasty little girls first sketched to amuse his fellow prisoners. "I had brought an element of horror into the public cartoon," Searle said, "and the climate was right for it." Within a short time his girls were helping to bring in an income of £25,000 a year. He now lives right in the student centre of Paris. "I find Paris keeps me in a continual state of excitement," he said.
[The French cartoonist] Sine, he feels, has cancelled himself out. "His magazine Sine-Massacre was inviting trouble. "He simply butchered the police, Government, army, and clergy. He just put himself out of business. His latest book, for example, is 60 pages exclusively devoted to lavatories. "I suppose you can pull the chain on the public, but I don't think it gets you anywhere."
Peter Lennon


Ronald's daughter, Kate, with his cat drawings.




Monday, May 25, 2015

King of the Beasts

Searle was, of course, known for his cat drawings but their larger feline cousins were also a recurring motif- here are Searle's LIONS!

'The King of Beasts' aka 'The Situation Is Hopeless'
The Searle lion is a bewildered, often lackadaisical creature, bemused or bored by his status as King of the Beasts.
'The King of Beasts and Other Creatures' detail (1979)





'Feeble-minded Circus Lion'




'Zoodiac' (1977)




'Young Elizabethan' magazine, 1957

Punch magazine (1960)
 (Original Wilhelm Busch - Deutsches Museum für Karikatur und Zeichenkunst)

One of Searle's best lions; 'The Peaceable Kingdom' (1974)

Of course, the 'Venice Lion' Travel & Leisure magazine cover detail (1972)

'Burma Today, or: Whatever Happened to the Empire? (1987)
 (Original Wilhelm Busch - Deutsches Museum für Karikatur und Zeichenkunst)

Let's Have a Bite!' (2010)

Tuesday, February 14, 2012

Happy Valentine's Day

Stephen Nadler blogs about a romantic Searle New Yorker cover here 


'Darling, this is bigger than the both of us.'

Monday, December 19, 2011

Christmas Update

Stephen Nadler blogs about a piece of personal Searle art here
Searle fans in L.A. should see the Searle retrospective exhibition at Gallery Nucleus through January 29th.  I've updated the following sections:
New Yorker Covers
Book covers
Lemon Hart Rum
Toujours Provence
New Yorker Editorial
Theatre Design


Ronald Searle is profiled in Making Great Illustration, a collection of interviews with todays' top illustrators featuring amongst others Ralph Steadman, Quentin Blake, Dave McKean and Pete Fowler.
A perfect Christmas gift for illustration fans-buy it on Amazon.





Last year Searle contributed to the 'Inspired by Soanes' exhibition at the Sir John Soanes Museum, London. See all the artwork here

Sunday, August 14, 2011

Magazine Illustration Part 4: NEW YORKER magazine COVERS












'They're all against me . . .'



'The Long March'


'Dolce Vita' 



January 1979 Rough 








SIGNED AND DATED 1988
PEN INK WATERCOLOUR AND BODYCOLOUR   17 3/4 X 12 1/4 INCHES
 NEW YORKER , 23 JANUARY 1989 PRELIMINARY FOR COVER









'Catlas'


'Ugh!' 2002, cover rough. 
'The Great Escape', 2002, cover rough. 

Cover rough 2002
pencil, pen and black ink, coloured crayons and watercolour