Spooner Caricatures, Drawings and Prints by John Spooner

Spooner Caricatures, Drawings and Prints

by John Spooner, Foreword by Michael Leunig

Thomas Nelson, 1981, [First Edition], full page illustrations throughout, hardcover, dustcjacket, ISBN 0170059545

Like New Condition, previous owners gift inscription on front flyleaf, 

'The caricatures in this book range far and wide: from Gough Whitlam and Sir John Kerr to Barry Humphries and Trent Nathan; from Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan to Spike Milligan and Woody Allen.  The subjects of the drawings are similarly diverse: drugs poverty, nuclear fusion and women's liberation; all attract the artist's pen and his unerring eye.  Both caricatures and drawings have the uncanny ability to leave a sharp, lasting image of either a whole personality or a complex subject.

Much of the work in this book is Spooner's 'public' art - caricatures and drawings done in a newspaper office under the pressure of a deadline, with the events and personalities of the outside world providing the material and the stimulus.  But the prints are John Spooner's 'private' art.  The subjects, and their treatment, come from within himself, rather than from outside sources.  They can be either satirical, as in the series on the Law, or gentle and loving as in The Blind Mother.