'It is December and already dark forces are gathering'

Original pen, ink and crayon illustration by Glen Baxter, signed and dated in pencil. Image size 25 x 22.5cm.

Fine. Framed and glazed. Chris Beetles Ltd. gallery label to rear.

One hopes that, like a pianists' fingers or a footballer's toes, Glen 'Colonel' Baxter has had his sense of humour insured for a seven figure sum. One of Britain's leading comic artists, he has worked for over forty years for a wide range of publications, including The Guardian and The New Yorker, in addition to publishing a string of successful books, such as The Wonder Book of Sex and The Collected Blurtings of Baxter. From him, we learn the essential knowledge that among antiquarian booksellers in Brussels powdered gherkin is considered to be an aphrodisiac, and that cowboys have a profitable sideline in stealing paintings by Rothko, but turn their noses up at Mondrian.

Baxter's work follows a well-worn formula, a comic image rendered profoundly surreal by its following caption, but with no sense that the joke will ever wear off. Like overheard conversations on a train, these captions flower in the mind, opening the door into an alternate reality where suddenly the absurd seems almost plausible. Baxter, now 78 and living in London, where he continues to work beneath his trademark Stetson while listening to country music, argues that “it works because it’s like a fractured narrative. It’s like you’ve found a missing page from a book, but you don’t know what the book is, and it’s like; ‘why is that happening there?’ It’s that collision, that moment of that little explosion of thought.”

This image published in The Observer, 7th December 1997.

Stock Code: 247068