Steve Bell - Research

Steve Bell is a political cartoonist, with his most well known strip 'If...' appearing in the Guardian since 1981. I've been looking into his work because my work was compared to his during my Olio Pitch. The first piece of his that I looked at is 'The Promise of the Past', published in the Guardian on March 25th, 2009:

This is a reference to this old propaganda poster, which implied that men who didn't fight in the war would be fraught with shame years later when they have to explain themselves to their children:

By depicting the father in a military outfit, he turns the original poster's message on its head into an anti-war message, implying that the men who did fight in Ghaza would be ashamed of themselves in the future. There is also another subtle change between the two, changing the toys that the boy is playing with. In the original they seem to be regular soldiers, but in Bell's version the soldiers are shooting a cannon at an ambulance.

Here is a cartoon that was published in the Guardian on the eleventh of January 2007, 'George Bush's television address on Iraq'

The background of this is a painting by Pieter Bruegel the elder, called ' The Triumph of Death':

'The Triumph of Death' depicts a horde of skeletons destroying everything and killing everyone in sight, from the lowly commoners to the king himself. By using it as the background of a piece about George Bush's address on Iraq, it speaks more about the bloodshed than any caricature of Bush could.

Bell uses watercolours to a great effect, often having only a day or two to produce his paintings. And while I can see some similarities between mine and his work, what I'd like to emulate the most is how quickly he can produce his work, and how he still keeps the same amount of quality to it all.