When the British illustrator Ralph Steadman came to prominence in the early 1970s, the underground press was flourishing. The wild west of ad hoc leaflets and magazines — filled with outrageous cartoons, stoned musings by hippies, yippies and zippies, and the seeds of the burgeoning self-help movement — connected the counterculture in a way comparable only to the later internet forums of the 1990s and 2000s, before the omnipresence of social media leveled both. These periodical’s illicitness and mind-expanding promises created a sprawling network that kept the in-the-know informed and the soon-to-know on a path to vulgar psychedelic enlightenment.
It also made the names of the people who created and contributed to them, from Lester Bangs to the dubious Tom Forçade. While his stay in the underground pages was only a pitstop, Steadman was one of them; and even now, with awards, acclaim and a slew of iconic images, he’s kept the attitude of an outsider. This summer, a career retrospective of his work, “Ralph Steadman: And Another Thing,” will be running at the Bates College Museum of Art in Lewiston, Maine, through October 1, a captivating encapsulation of his decades-long journey.
Steadman is a workman. For nearly 70 years, he has set to work drawing the real and the imaginary, on a strict schedule. “I would usually go to the studio at about 10 a.m., if I had a drawing on the board, I might work on that for a while,” he said.
“After lunch, I would go back to the studio, carry on working on a drawing or look for research images, in books or pieces of anatomy for collage. I have references around if I am drawing someone and lots of pieces I can play with. You never quite know what is going to be exactly the right piece of Clinton’s brain, Hunter’s leg or the ‘Fahrenheit 451’ hellhound. You just have to be open to every possibility around you.”