MEETING ANDREW BIRCH

The Ascent of Man (Backbiter) ©Andrew Birch

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by Paul Halas

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Anyone who has read Private Eye over the past few decades will be familiar with Andrew Birch’s cartoons, similarly his work has regularly appeared in The Oldie, The Guardian, The Observer, The Big Issue, The Sunday Times, The Independent… and that list could continue almost ad infinitum. Birch is a major presence in the world of cartooning.

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His style is immediately recognisable, in the way you can instantly identify the artwork of Ronald Searle, Michael Heath, Gerald Scarfe and a select band of other very distinctive, original illustrators. Can a cartoon drawing be both very simple and highly sophisticated at the same time? The answer is most emphatically yes, especially in Birch’s case. He has a very sharp eye, and coupled with his acerbic wit, he makes a very formidable commentator on the absurdities and vanities of our society. Especially those in it who exhibit excessive hubris and pomposity.

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Birch has produced an untold number of very funny stand-alone cartoons, but his regular short strips in a number of publications are perhaps his best-known work, each attracting a regular and faithful following. Perv’s Palace in Forum was a hoot (there are now several Forum Magazines, but we remember the one in question), The Rebel in The Oldie, which spawned a TV sitcom starring Simon Callow, Media Tarts in the Guardian, which was forensically accurate satire, and Young British Artists in Private Eye, which achieved what Birch would probably parody the hell out of – legendary status… in the cartoon world, anyway.

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It’s a standard question to ask whether Cartoonists are born or made. It’s probably most accurate to say Birch is self-made. Although he had always loved cartoons from an early age, and drew a lot as a kid, he states he was pretty much forced to make a choice between following an artistic or scientific path in further education – before he was ready to make such a decision. Maybe because he loved biology he chose sciences, and read microbiology at London University, although he describes the process as having been pretty random. At the same time, his love affair with cartoons continued unabated, and particularly with those in Punch Magazine – which at that time was enjoying a golden age of cartoons. The next few years of his life were spent living in a gamekeeper’s cottage, trying his hand at writing (yes, very D H Lawrence), but having to support himself by bar work and being a care assistant. It was around that time, when he was in his mid-twenties, that he started drawing cartoons in earnest.

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Birch recounts that his connection with the then new and fashionable Young British Artists came about because he drew a cartoon comparing them with another elitist arty set, the Bloomsbury Group, which was published in Private Eye. When the Tate Modern opened some months later he was asked to make it a regular strip, which was supposed to run for a couple of months. It lasted eighteen years.

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“I liked most of what the YBAs did,” Birch recounts, “and one of them was a dear friend, Rachel Whitehead – although she strenuously denies ever being a part of an artistic group – but they were all lumped together by the press, anyway. And the perception of them as being wild and shameless and selling their work for small fortunes, thanks in part to collectors with an eye to making a killing, like Charles Saatchi, provided me with a huge amount of raw material. I subsequently met and got to know several of them, and they were all great fun. Nobody was angry with me, quite the contrary – all good publicity!” When he was thirty Birch took the plunge and went freelance, and that same year he met Miguel, an Argentinian artist working in London, who was to become his great love and husband. Miguel had Spanish forebears, which probably explains the frequent Spanish holidays that followed, and Birch’s growing love affair with Spain. They bought a holiday house in a small Andalucian town, then relocated to Barcelona, and finally to Malaga, where they quickly felt at home and made numerous friends – mainly artists.

As well as continuing to publish in all sorts of UK outlets, Birch began to find work in Spain too. He was asked to do a strip for a newly formed Malaga Daily, and on the strength of that has had various shows, cartoon workshops, and has judged competitions for young Spanish artists. He states that Malaga has been very good to him, and he now feels half malagueño.

Perhaps the seed for Birch’s desire to live abroad was sown by reading Gerald Durrell’s My Family and Other Animals for O Level English, but he has also found that our near-neighbours in Europe provide a far more welcoming and appreciative environment for artists than the UK (in other words rather less stuffiness and intellectual snobbery), and that’s particularly true where cartoonists are concerned. Of course a more relaxed lifestyle and better climate may have something to do with it too.

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When speaking about politics Birch was initially a little bit coy – intimating that being a commentator on our foibles and vanities it’s essential to maintain a certain degree of detachment… but that’s to be taken with a slight pinch of salt. He has also said that more than anything he’s a socialist, and was a Labour Party member until he resigned over the Iraq War. He also caused a stir with the ruling conservatives who ran Malaga, which led to his being sacked from his newspaper strip for not backing off after continually baiting them. He states that he’s proudly gay and woke, which in itself can be taken as a political statement, but adds that’s had very little to do with his cartoons – except of course for when he worked for the gay press. In Spain – at least in the big cities – that’s no big deal anyway.

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Andrew Birch has shown himself to be very kind with other artists, with those of us who take an interest in his work, and even those ask questions he has probably heard dozens of times before, but his impressive output of work doesn’t let up: his wit and pen are as sharp as ever. Let the pompous and vain beware.

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There’s a show of Andrew Birch’s cartoons in his favorite bar, El Estraperlo, if anyone’s visiting Malaga. You can contact Andrew Birch via his website and see more of his work here.

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Paul Halas, the Arts and Lifestyle Editor of Ars Notoria and co-founder of AN Editions, is a writer of Jewish heritage whose escape from 1970s hippidom was the discovery that he could invent stories. He spent forty years contributing to various Disney magazines and books, as well as a variety of non-Disney comics, books and animated films. He has recently finished the second edition of his book The Rights of Man and Fish which will be launched at the Chapel Market Tavern On March 6th. Halas is a self described Humane Socialist.