Artist Ralph Steadman, whose scratchy, gory, and often hilarious illustrations accompanied gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson’s best-known work for Rolling Stone, insists that the notion of “content” matters more than “style.” “Style is looking for something and then not taking any notice of the things that you’re supposed to be drawing,” he tells Rolling Stone.
A new exhibition, Ralph Steadman: And Another Thing, at the American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center in Washington, D.C. will display seven decades’ of the artist’s signature content. The illustrator’s entire oeuvre — Thompson looking his gonzo druggiest, political cartoons, drawings from children’s books, animals, and mangled Polaroids of celebrities he calls “Paranoids” — will go display starting Sept. 7.
“I always went straight into my work,” Steadman, 88, says in a Zoom from his home in England. “I never used to do pencil drafts. I would send in the pen, which was quite something, I think, for me.”
