Artisode; 2.9; Pat Oliphant

You gotta be mad, you gotta be pissed off, you gotta bring yourself to a boil and that's how you should feel, that's why you do this thing because you get outraged. What you're trying to do as a cartoonist is start a conversation, plan an idea, hey, this is wrong. It's sort of, it's a confrontation allowed, I suppose. You have to look for the thoughts in politicians because the premise is that all politicians are crooks until proven innocent and that makes your job much easier because you're usually right.

The nuts and bolts of politics just bore me to tears, it's the people involved and the characters that fascinate me, cartoonists need villains, Nixon's still good once a year for the cartoon, actually just keeps coming back. Until Cheney there was nobody really like him, him and Bush, you can adjust their appearance to suit what you think of them, as in like cartoons, Bush, Shrink, about 2C, tall, I'm still talented, I have a menacing Cheney, that's why they were just so perfect. I used to really dislike Jesse Helms, I was still dislike Jesse Helms even though he did.

I did all sorts of as mean as I could things to him. My wife Susan had a gallery at the time in Washington because my work was being shown and two very attracted young ladies came in, said to me, we're from the center of the Helms office, I thought, oh Christ, I just wanted to tell you that center of the Helms just loves you work, I thought, what am I doing wrong, so long as you spell their name right I guess that's an example of it. What I'm looking for is the absurd preposterous, there's nothing going around. I have a lot of trouble with people's religions, one thing that will stir them up more than anything.

Race, religion, some more than politics, Catholic Church has been very good to me, but I did derive great satisfaction from what I drew, which is called springtime at St. Peter Filio's, Colin, the annual running of the old boys, priest pouring out of the church and pissing me off. I was just trying to join and of course you come to the end of a cartoon and you know when it's there, maybe it'll make you lost yourself, it's just a satisfaction in that. My dad was a big fan, even though my dad was like a public, he was like a cold water republican. Oh yeah, it's still, one thing about it, you're being fed plenty of material to work with, there's no shortage.

Oh yeah, it's a custom, they write their own stuff and they're illustrative, there's that dude. I love that, that journey and the horse, it doesn't matter which side you're on, you know. It did make a better difference, I mean, we were running out of oxygen in here, great. After all this, you get to leave, I could be in the studio. So I suppose in effect, I've always drawn, my dad was a draftman so we got the government and he had access to all sorts of things, I had an everlasting supply of that material. I've done it ever since, publicly you tend to get pigeonholed into being, oh he's a cartoonist, I can't let that bother me, I just go on from one thing to the other and you'll paint for

a month and then you'll paint, you'll sculpt and then you'll just keep moving around. It shouldn't be anchored to caricatures of people of today, it shouldn't matter in a hundred years, doesn't they have to be transcended by the art itself? I think I just want to leave something of beauty and perhaps an honesty. One lifetime isn't enough, you know what I mean. Thank you.