Drawing for Amnesty International

This was drawn for Know your Rights, an Amnesty International booklet that reprints the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR).

 

Each of the 14 cartoonists involved was asked to illustrate a clause in the UDHR. My cartoon accompanies Article 27, which is in two parts. The second is particularly relevant to working as a cartoonist. I must admit, I was ignorant of the fact that such things are included in the UDHR:

(1) Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.

(2) Everyone has the right to the protection of the moral and material interests resulting from any scientific, literary or artistic production of which he is the author.

 

Unusually, they also asked the cartoonists for some thoughts on the subject to go with it. I offered up the following:

"The right to participate in and enjoy culture and the arts may seem minor compared to some human rights. But enjoyment of the arts gets to the very heart of what it is to be human."

 

The booklet is available by the tills in branches of Waterstones for £2. Proceeds from it, and the sale of the original drawing, will go to Amnesty.

Come and see me talk about cartoons

I'm doing a free talk about my cartoons, with slideshow, as part of the Summer Squall arts festival in Ramsgate. It's at the Kings Theatre at 11am on Bank Holiday Monday, August 26.

It'll be a bit like the cartoon talk I did in 2010, above, but with more recent cartoons and a different shirt. Apparently the venue this time is very large (gulp) so there's no need to book, you can just turn up on the day (please do!)

There's more on the arts festival here.

Spectator cartoon: Masked humour

I drew this months ago but coincidentally it appears in print (in the current Spectator magazine) in the same week that I saw a film screened live in a cinema for the first time.

The joke is a dig at your typical noisy mulitplex customer, but they're unlikely to be seen at a play so in fact it was very enjoyable (it's just the old cartoonist cynicism at work again). We saw the National Theatre Live screening of The Audience, with Helen Mirren. Of course, it'll never match the experience of the real thing, but if you can't make it/afford it, it's the next best thing. Sadly, during the performance we saw she did not berate any gay drummers.

Here's another "theatre masks" cartoon from a couple of years ago.

Click here to buy Royston's cartoon book

Arts and culture cartoon: The waiting game

Sometimes you have to wait quite some time before a cartoon which is taken by a magazine actually appears in its pages. The above cartoon is a case in point. It appears in the current issue of The Spectator. My records show that it was part of a batch of cartoons sent to the magazine on May 8th, 2007. So it has taken 13 months to see the light of day.

I've found, from talking to other cartoonists, that this is not unusual. Some have horror stories of even longer delays. My own personal record is the cartoon below which appeared in the New Statesman in early 2001, two years after they took it.

By the way, Newsnight Review, for those not familiar with it, is a BBC2 arts show that is screened on a Friday night after the regular Newsnight show. It's always good for a laugh as some of the comments of the participants can be a bit on the pretentious side. It's particularly amusing when discussing stuff that isn't generally what you'd call high-brow. For example the poet and critic Tom Paulin seems to say about more or less any Hollywood film, "Essentially, I think, the subtext here is Vietnam."

Kids, on the other hand, have two default settings when it comes to "reviewing" films and TV. As a parent I'm acutely aware that everything is "cool" or "boring". They should hand Newsnight Review over to the kids for one show. They'd get through a lot of stuff.

***UPDATE July 4, 2008***
Unbelievably, the "Newsnight Review for Kids" cartoon has come true! This week they brought in a panel of kids, rather than the usual pundits, to discuss the stage version of High School Musical. The words "like" and "cheesy" were heard a lot more than usual. Here it is: The REAL Newsnight Review for Kids.

Royston's portfolio website