Gary Smith was born in Portsmouth and is self-taught as a cartoonist. As he later recalled, "I liked to draw faces at school and was always getting into trouble because I'd drawn my teachers' likeness in the margins of my exercise book": "Even the art teacher...said I was wasting my time drawing faces, so I was amazed when at the age of eighteen the local Portsmouth paper started me off by not only publishing my work, but paying me money." Smith concentrated on caricatures of people in the arts - especially theatre and film, plus illustrations for book reviews, and his work has appeared in the Daily Mirror, London Daily News, International Herald-Tribune, Sunday Times, Daily Mail and Radio Times. He has also contributed to Vogue, Tatler, Elle, Today and Punch and designed covers for books by Keith Waterhouse and others. Influenced by Hirschfeld, Covarrubias, Don Bevan, Nerman and Sherriffs, Smith works with brush and ink or - for colour - brush and gouache on paper. However, he admitted in 1989 that "I don't think colour helps my work too much - I much prefer black and white, it has so much more impact."
View Account
