Around the year 2000, I was hired as a caricaturist to draw the attendees of a local bank’s Christmas party. At the start of the evening, a somewhat reticent woman was persuaded into the chair in front of me by a couple of her colleagues. I dashed off what I felt was a pretty good and appealing likeness, and handed it to her. She looked at it with no clear reaction registering on her face, nodded, and left. Not the most auspicious of beginnings.
As I was packing up the tools of my trade about three hours later, the same woman staggered up to me, drunk as a skunk, with tears and an oil-slick of eyeliner streaming down her face, and she bawled me out in front of around half a dozen party-goers…
‘I was feeling really good about myself when I left the house earlier,’ she yelled. ‘You ruined my night! You must have nothing in your pants to go around doing this to people!’
Her resentful rant continued in this vein for a short while longer, and I made a few remarks in reply that singularly failed to placate her, before she was shepherded away by some of her co-workers. A few minutes later, the branch manager who had hired my services, and who was clearly oblivious to what had just happened, asked me if he could pay me to stay on and draw for a little longer. I declined.
This unfortunate incident, dispiriting though it was, was simply the pencil that broke the caricaturist’s back. The vow I made on the spot that I would never engage in live caricature again was a long time coming, but it has held firm ever since.
On the evidence I’ve seen, most live caricaturists love what they do. That’s fantastic, and I’m very happy for them. It’s an extraordinary skill to capture a total stranger’s face in next to no time, with a few strokes of a pen. There’s a good living to be made doing it, and if you have a ‘people person’ mentality, it probably wouldn’t be the soul-stripping purgatory to you that it was to me. I simply don’t have the gene that allows me to sustain a genial nature through protracted public performances. Answering the same inane question - ‘I suppose you exaggerate the most prominent features, do you?’ - posed repeatedly by an endless stream of strangers, always threatened to unseat my reason towards the end of an intense shift of drawing.
I also have an agenda these days, incompatible with quick-fire sketching at events. Live caricature is undoubtedly the art-form’s public face. Whenever I tell people I’m a caricaturist, they assume that the in-person side of things is my trade. As I mentioned, I have zero issues with anyone who makes a living this way. But my goal is to do whatever I can (which includes trying to grow this Substack publication) to help elevate the art of caricature to the tier of regard that I feel it deserves. For me, that entails restricting myself to the more time-consuming approach to capturing likenesses.
People connect with caricature in a unique way, and with an immediacy distinct from other art-forms. Since I also now focus exclusively on painting celebrities who are familiar to the world at large, I also like to think it’s a singular approach to showing people the unfamiliar in the familiar; to looking at a well-known face, and the persona behind it, in new ways. These days, I try to engage people with the process behind what I create, and show that the best results come from a good deal of thought, care, trial and error, just as they do in sculpture, architecture, filmmaking, or any branch of the visual arts.
It often feels like I’m swimming against the tide, and that few people recognize that caricature can offer so much more than the quick fix of a disposable laugh. But when a commission to which I’ve devoted a lot of time and care elicits the response, ‘It looks more like so-and-so than so-and-so does him-/herself!’ then I feel it has all been worth the effort.
Also, I hardly ever meet the celebrities I’m caricaturing, so I don’t have to deal with any tearful, drunken resentment.