When all the rules go

Although best known as political cartoonist of the Daily Telegraph, and for his eye-catching covers for The Spectator, Nicholas Garland trained as a fine artist, and never stopped drawing even during his active though short-lived career in the theatre. Recently, he has focused his energies on print-making and is about to open his first exhibition of woodcuts at the Fine Art Society. Exploiting different densities of black ink and the varying texture of the woodblock into which he carves his design, he makes bold simplified images of considerable impact and sophistication. These couldn’t be farther from the concerns of the political satirist, for they record Garland’s enthusiasms – music, performance, travel – and disclose a pantheon of heroes which includes Cézanne, Orson Welles and General Ulysses S. Grant.

‘I’d always wanted to be an artist – apart from a short time when I wanted to be an actor. I was stage-struck for a while, but I didn’t have any talent at all in that direction, or even any particular vocation. It was the glamour of it that appealed. My mother was a sculptor, her father was a painter and one of my aunts was a painter, so I grew up in a very arty household. It was natural for me to draw.’ Garland’s boyhood was spent in New Zealand, his family having emigrated there just after the war, and he left school in Wellington with an overriding obsession to get back to England. He applied to the Slade and was accepted as a foreign student. He studied painting, under William Coldstream, with a particularly gifted bunch of students which included Paula Rego, Craigie Aitchison and Euan Uglow.

‘That’s what I found wrong with the Slade – it was so organised as to be perfect for a talented student who knew what they wanted to do.