There’s a hypothesis about caricature that I think holds a lot of water. It’s that we all carry around in our brains a model of the ‘perfect’ human head, and the caricaturist exaggerates the elements of a face that deviate from, or fall short of, that ideal. This is why the legions of young, pretty celebrities springing up out of nowhere all the time are so difficult to caricature: they don’t do much deviating.
My job should be easier now than it has ever been. In the 18th century – the golden age of caricature – those who could afford to buy caricatures would likely have been familiar with public figures in the flesh, as they moved in the same elevated circles. But the general public, who gawked at the engravings in the print-shop windows, would not necessarily have known what the caricaturists’ victims looked like. In fact, their familiarity with the faces of the rich and famous must have been shaped, at least in part, by caricatures.
Today, however, the media supplies all the source material I could ever need, and Joe Public can recognise a public figure’s headshot on a webpage from fifty paces. So, if I’ve done my job properly, a caricature will hit the Recognition Button without my having to telegraph who owns the face that I’ve kneaded into an interesting new shape.
There are, of course, certain tricks caricaturists use to help the recognition process along. For example, we all inflate the hell out of King Charles’s ears. (They aren’t actually that big, incidentally, but everyone thinks they are, so we’d be idiots not to exploit that prejudice. Which is exactly what we did at Spitting Image.) Over time, caricaturists reduce public figures to their component parts, which is why Margaret Thatcher ended up as little more than a hawk’s beak and a bouffant
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But before we reach that stage of boiled-down likeness, we have to map the unique facial architecture of whoever we’re dealing with. I think every caricaturist has their own approach to this. And in my new Paid Substack posts I’ll be outlining my process, for artists who wish to learn about how to create fully resolved caricatures…or just for those who are curious about how I hit that Recognition Button. Together, we’ll discover the joys of fooling around with the infinite variety of the human face.
So, join me, and together we’ll grab some famous fizzogs by the cheeks and bend them to our demented wills!