Transcript:

I am going to discuss two artists from distant sides of the world, with wildly different lives but whose stories relate, or contrast, through the horrors and events of world war 2. Ronald Searle was born 1920 in England and perhaps best known for creating the Belles of St Trinians, a famous series of cartoons first published in 1946.

Searle was born with a natural talent as an artist and began drawing at age 5. He went to art school and was illustrating for newspapers by age 15. 

Searles style is to capture the essence of one’s personality. The characters of St Trinians, for example, were synonymous with trouble and full of mischief and mayhem. 

Searle described a St Trinian girl as: "sadistic, cunning, dissolute, crooked, sordid, lacking morals of any sort and capable of any excess. She would also be well spoken, even well-mannered and polite. Sardonic, witty and very amusing…” 

This complex personality is quite visible, not only through the storytelling of the cartoon, but the expressive way which Searle uses his medium. 

He draws with sketchy black ink and is very suggestive of the characters and their emotions.  

As his peer and fellow artist Gerald Scarfe said “Ronald showed me that you have to really look at a person and assimilate what they are, then let that flow out onto the paper.”

During his career he created so many sketchbooks that filled his shelves he had a library of reference material at his fingertips. An invaluable resource when working from his imagination.

I spent several days carrying with me my own sketchbook, taking quick scribbles of passers by and tried to focus on getting the personality of the subjects on paper. I cared not about the “completeness” of the sketches, but more about the quantity and speed of what I could document, and worked on expressive techniques I could see in Searles work.

As someone who enjoys but finds challenging the ability to draw from imagination, building a resource of references as Searle did seems like a useful thing!

Tsuguhara Foujita was already established in France by the time of Searles birth. Although born in Tokyo in 1886, he studied art and moved to Paris in 1913. He quickly became part of the art scene alongside Picasso, Matisse, and Modigliani and lived a bohemian lifestyle. 

Foujita became very successful, even receiving the Legion d’Honneur from the French government, however, he abandoned France when he got caught evading tax and ended up back in Japan in 1933. 

Foujita also primarily focused on people and animals, and although he paints with a very different style and technique to Searle, there are many similarities in their work. 

Both accentuate features of their subjects for characterisation. Searle used this for comedy while Foujita for beautification. Both were skilled at capturing movement and they both drew from life and the focus of their artworks was figures and personality. 

When World War 2 started, Searle enlisted as a Royal Engineer. He was sent to Singapore in 1942 and after a month of fighting he was taken prisoner by the Japanese and ended up working in the Kwai jungle on the infamous Siam - Burma Death Railway. 

During his time as prisoner he contracted various diseases, took numerous beatings and his weight dropped to less than 40 kilos. Despite all this he managed to create a large volume of work, all of which had to be done in secret. He hid his sketches under the beds of people dying of cholera. 

In 1945, he was liberated and returned to England with approximately 300 drawings. He published a book,To The Kwai and Back, containing his drawings and experiences, including the day he woke up to find a dead friend either side of him and a live snake underneath his head.

Foujita began this period of war in 1938 working as a war artist for the Japanese Imperial Navy. He became president of the Army Art Association and the nation's leading war artist, overseeing special exhibits for the military.

It is easy to see how the war affected both artists’ work. Searle’s scribbles are far more serious, still able to capture the characters of those whose portraits he sketched, but clearly weighed down with the gravity of the situation he found himself in. 

His penmanship is more controlled, far less loose and flowing than it would become later in his life, reflecting what could have only been an extremely sombre time.

Foujita’s work also darkened significantly. He keeps the same intensity of movement, especially of fabric and cloth, but the light, playful use of paint to depict delicate subjects is moved aside for the messy and chaotic. 

Although they are from different sides of the war, and painted for opposite purposes, Searles rough inky sketches depicting the harsh conditions subjected by the Japanese and Foujita’s detailed oil paintings of Japanese success and glory both conveyed its brutality and terror.

After the war Searle would see much of his own personal success, particularly with his St. Trinians books and the Molesworth series, while Foujita, despite having a rich lifestyle, would have his reputation tarnished for being a propaganda artist. He was labelled a fascist and had many demonstrations against him. In 1950 Foujita returned to France. 

Foujita also continued to make art after the war and into his old age, when he converted to Catholicism. He died in 1968 and was buried in his own chapel which he built and decorated with frescoes. 

Searle moved to France as well, in 1961, and in 2007 the country gave him its highest award, the Legion d’Honneur, the very same award given to Foujita many years earlier.

Searle sketched locals and buildings, kept amusing newspaper clippings, anything he found interesting that he could use to refer back to later. 

He was skilled at composition, portraying movement and dynamism using strong vertical, horizontal and diagonal lines.

He used negative and positive space, and areas of dense detail balanced by blank areas.

For my final response piece I will expand upon my studies of street scenes. I took inspiration from Searle’s street sketches in France and went to North st and drew the restaurants and people. I would like to build upon this by creating a larger finished study, hopefully filled with life and characters like Searle’s drawings.

Response Piece:

Archive:

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