They say never meet your heroes, but then I met a Gonzo legend

When I was just starting out as a cartoonist I was voraciously eating up any knowledge I could find about the art of ink penmanship.

There was no internet back then so books were the only real source of research and I used to pour over Ralph Steadman’s work in particular.

I just couldn’t figure out how he got his cross hatching so small and his lines so tight. I searched out thinner and thinner ink nibs and tighter and tighter paper, but I just couldn’t get close to mastering his techniques.

It was only years later, at an exhibition of his work, that I realised it wasn’t the tightness of his work that gave him such intricate inking at all. It was the fact that he worked on an enormous scale.

This goes some way into explaining the importance of standing right in front of real physical works of art and actually going to exhibitions.

At this point I feel it’s only fair to explain that 88-year-old Ralph Steadman, to us other cartoonists, is someone who has ascended the mere day to day drudgery of cartooning (he was once a day to day spot cartoonist, creating small, standalone illustrations under the shortened name of ‘Stead’) and has risen up to become an advanced species, a renaissance hybrid of cartooning, high art, literature and absurdity.

Looking at his work, seeing straight razor clean lines and perfect crisp concentric circles next to chaotic splashes of ink and disorderly hatching has a unique quality of going in through the eye, bypassing the brain completely and going straight to your soul.

His work can be simultaneously terrifying and shockingly amusing. This is an exhibition of many parts, The world famous Gonzo work is there, illustrating his lifelong collaboration with Hunter S Thompson racing out of the paper like a savage narcotic roar.

Conversely, a wall is dedicated to his early children’s illustrations for such books as Fly Away Peter (Ralph kindly signed my wife’s copy that she’s had for 45 years) where ink outlines are rarely seen and painted block colours depict animals and trees. These have an innocence rarely seen in his work and yet it’s still unmistakably his hand.

His workstation is set up so you can see the years of paint splatters and ink pots, printers blocks and brushes, amongst which there is placed a particularly inventive book of his work for those with reduced vision that have raised lines to feel your way around his pictures.

A huge section is set aside for his conservational work, or Gonzovation as it’s now known, on which he works with Ceri Levi.

Brightly coloured ‘Extinct Boids’ and ‘Critical Critters’ adorn the wall with the foreboding but hopeful messages of extinction possibilities and endangered animals.

For me the most breath-taking section was the book illustrations that Steadman has accomplished over his career.

On display were his terrifying version of Animal Farm, his sumptuously earthy Treasure Island and, with 60s stark psychedelia in place of the previous gentle Victorian penwork, Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass.

We talked of his trepidation of stepping into the shoes of the 19th century illustrator Tenniel while doing ‘Alice’, we spoke of his changing signature and his house and studio and the different types of splashes, slashes, drips and drops.

Sometimes ink, sometimes simply using water from the dirty water brush jar that can take days to dry.

As we chatted I felt that I wasn’t speaking to a man at the end of his career but one constantly asking questions of art, life and philosophy, always experimenting, fiercely curious, always working. Not limited by scale or broadness of ambition.

Precisely as you’d hope from someone who many call the country’s finest illustrator and I call the country’s finest artist.

The Ralph Steadman Inkling Exhibition is at the Heath Robinson Museum in Pinner until the 10th of May