Anthony Earnshaw: Surrealist Artist and writer, painter, box-maker, cartoonist and witty Satirist

Anthony Earnshaw was born Ilkley in Yorkshire in 1924 but moved to Leeds at the age of ten. At one time a crane driver, he taught himself to paint while moving from one factory job to another and was greatly encouraged by another Yorkshire painter, Patrick Hughes, who persuaded him to hold his one-man show. He now teaches art at the Leeds Polytechnic and the Bradford Collage of Art.

In 1968 he published in association with the Methodist minister, Eric Thacker, a brilliant surrealist fantasy in words and pictures called Musrum. At that time Anthony Earnshaw told George Melly in an interview: 'The book may well be a fantasy . If it is, it's not one that offers an escape from the world. For Eric, as for me, reality has always contained every possible and every impossible thing.' Melly himself commented: 'This is an encouraging declaration of faith. At a time where "pop" appears to be chasing its own tail in gestures of increasing desperate triviality, two men are prepared to reassert their faith in the marvelous.'

Three years later, Thacker and Earnshaw published a follow-up, Wintersol, and embarked on a weekly cartoon strip in The Times Educational Supplement which chronicled the adventure of Wokker, a fabulous wheeled bird.





	Anthony Earnshaw's Seven Secret Alphabets spells out an alternative to the the triumph of Universal Standardisation. Never have the letters of the alphabet been more ingeniously portrayed. A half-dressed girl tied to a railway line becomes A; the entwined tentacles of a diver and an octopus make B; an arc of false teeth from C; a voodoo doll stuck with pins becomes K; two pairs of empty but self-supporting trousers shape M; the upraised arms of a cornered burglar make Y. Each picture is a matchless miniature on its own - witty, dramatic or macabre - and each alphabet is more breathtakingly original than the next. Readers of Musrum and Wintersol will recognise in Seven Secret Alphabets an important source of reference, for here displayed are the surrealist humour and visionary draftsmanship that distinguished those two earlier works. As a book of pictures or a visual joke book, Seven Secret Alphabets is outstanding; as a feat of the imagination, it is incomparable.

	front insert

	Anthony Earnshaw was born Ilkley in Yorkshire in 1924 but moved to Leeds at the age of ten. At one time a crane driver, he taught himself to paint while moving from one factory job to another and was greatly encouraged by another Yorkshire painter, Patrick Hughes, who persuaded him to hold his one-man show. He now teaches art at the Leeds Polytechnic and the Bradford Collage of Art. In 1968 he published in association with the Methodist minister, Eric Thacker, a brilliant surrealist fantasy in words and pictures called Musrum. At that time Anthony Earnshaw told George Melly in an interview: 'The book may well be a fantasy . If it is, it's not one that offers an escape from the world. For Eric, as for me, reality has always contained every possible and every impossible thing.' Melly himself commented: 'This is an encouraging declaration of faith. At a time where "pop" appears to be chasing its own tail in gestures of increasing desperate triviality, two men are prepared to reassert their faith in the marvelous.' Three years later, Thacker and Earnshaw published a follow-up, Wintersol, and embarked on a weekly cartoon strip in The Times Educational Supplement which chronicled the adventure of Wokker, a fabulous wheeled bird.

	back insert	▲ << III >>