Gerald Scarfe

Last month I took a little trip to London to visit the House of Illustration as they’re holding an exhibition of Gerald Scarfe’s work. I’m currently writing my dissertation on Gerald Scarfe, as I’m very interested in how illustration and music are used together and obviously never have the two mediums come together so seamlessly as with Pink Floyd’s The Wall. Scarfe’s style has become synonymous with the band despite only being used for just one album out of fifteen, and I find it so interesting how his artwork has given such a concrete visual narrative to the very non-visual medium of music. He’s illustrated Roger Waters’ ideas and autobiography to an extent, and yet added his own narrative and perspective into the mix. I could geek out about it for hours! So you can see why the exhibition was a must for me.



I hadn’t been to the House of Illustration before, and photos aren’t allowed so unfortunately I have nothing to show you, but it’s well worth a visit. It’s very small, and the Scarfe exhibition filled most of the gallery. It covered a fairly wide selection of his art, with sections on The Magic Flute, his costumes and design for The Nutcracker, The Wall, his short animation The Long Drawn-Out Trip, and his concept work for Disney’s Hercules which I found the most interesting. Being a huge fan of Disney, I loved seeing the notes back and forth between Scarfe and the animators of how the characters should be designed and move without losing Scarfe’s distinctive style, and how the animators translated that style to be Disney appropriate. I’m currently trying to change my own art style up from a less Disney inspired style as it’s what I grew up trying to draw like, so I made sure to take some of their notes to heart and took joy in seeing how they had to unlearn some of the same habits I’ve gotten myself into. I also loved seeing so many of Scarfe’s original artworks, nothing can compare to seeing an artists work you admire in the flesh. To see that things aren’t as perfectly cropped and bordered like they appear in a book or a screen, to see the lines he rubbed out and how his designs changed. I’m sure all of this sounds terribly geeky, but for an illustrator like me I was in my element!




These photos of his works are from Their Mortal Remains, but you can see some those details here too. Not many of his pieces from The Wall were featured in this exhibition, but they were different from the ones I’d already seen which I appreciated. I know Scarfe had a lot of his original artworks stolen by Floyd fans in the ‘80s, so I believe what’s left is quite limited.