André proudly called himself the worst cartoonist ever and for years bombarded his friends with odd imaginings scrawled on pages torn from notepads. Mainly they were too bewildering even to the recipients for them to penetrate further into the world. Introduced to a computer drawing programme, André tried to reproduce his scrawls as vectors, using only the mouse. The results were nothing like the originals but new and boldly abstract compositions. Of these, the drawing entitled "If it's a cat, why has it eaten the children?" is my own favourite. I thought it had a suggestion of Thurber in the original but the computer version is quite different. The original animal had been intended to be a lion, though with André intention never seemed to be separate from the product. The pen-drawn thing bore at least some resemblance to a niggly lion with indigestion. The computer-drawn creature is both more cat-like and more disturbing, if ontology can count for much when the kids have just been eaten.

Once we start to unpack the meanings we are faced with the absurdity of taking an absurd thing seriously. Yet, for all its oddness, there is an underlying continuity with cartoon traditions. It deals with social embarrassment as surely as anything in a Victorian edition of Punch. The caption, we assume, could have been a speech bubble issuing from the mouth of the gesticulating character on the left and the other character sits forward in her? seat, as if made uncomfortable by the implications of negligence. Their debate goes on, strangely independent of the existential horror beneath them. Their chairs are real and the creature just as real in solid black but the people, if that is what they are, seem much less substantial, as if the mortality which has swallowed their offspring renders them vulnerable. They respond to their own fragility by an absurd aggression directed at each other: the cat-thing is too big to deal with in every sense. Yet there is also a suggestion that the human condition consists in exactly this ability to hover over the abyss in our chairs, fuelled by hot air.

The larger and more general irony is that we are invited to identify with the quarrelling things as human beings entirely on the grounds that they are quarrelling and seem to sit in chairs. The unnamed black entity in the foreground sprawls in a post-prandial state of discomfort, fixing the viewer with an insolent stare. The legs in the air may imply death or a more temporary rest, while the lewd, open anus suggests a venting of wind.

The two people are themselves constructed along quite different principles. On the left, the male? figure seems to be made out of bones or he resembles an ancient white horse cut into a chalk hillside. The female? figure, made of smaller patches, manages to capture some of the background grey in her outline to make her appear more sculpted, as if light is reflected off crumpled garments. On each of them the symbol of erect hairs connects to the angry claws of the cat. The flatness of the design is nearly total, though the large swollen paw that reaches towards us suggests an attempt at foreshortening.

Born in 1947, André Hector Quash came as a surprise to his mother, Mary O'Stern. She had been friendly with several foreign servicemen during the war but she blamed her pregnancy on a secret ray directed at her ovaries. Religious scruples prevented abortion, as did the fact that André had already been born. She sent him away to be schooled by the Procrustian Brothers at Vermouth College, where he was unpopular on account of an unusually long and trailing umbilical cord. He took refuge in art, which was doubly unfortunate as he possessed neither talent nor self-confidence. He did, however, possess paper and crayons.

His work can be said to display startling consistency from the beginning to the end of his career, though it should not be assumed that he was precocious at the beginning so much as retarded throughout. By the age of eight, he had invented Scumpuppy and Miss Kitty, though they were yet to be named. In the earliest cartoons, Miss Kitty goes under various aliases, here she appears as Mrs Cat.

© André Quash, first published 2001

Forces of Evil are dehumanizing us, vector graphic
based on a drawing of 11th January 1956

Half size JPEG from original PICT

André here uses his favourite method of using the tension between the characters and the tension between the drawing and the caption to give the whole a depth it might otherwise appear to lack. Would we know that Miss Kitty is singing the blues, if the caption did not tell us? The caption also introduces the chilling notion that the creatures depicted were once human and have been subjected to a terrible change. The colour is subdued but telling, in keeping with the underlying solemnity of the theme. I asked André if it would be possible to see the drawing as his way of singing the blues. He thought for a while and then forgot the question. I regard this as being, in its way, a very beautiful answer.

 

The title suggests a superstitious concern with the dangers of depiction. The drawings are primitive - as if André wishes to reassert the holiness that portrayal had for earlier societies. By refusing the photo-realistic chalice, he finds himself using surfaces to defeat surfaces. Austerity even drives him to suggest the dots of newspaper reproduction, while the horizontal lines may suggest an old-style television screen. It has been suggested that Miss Kitty's head resembles an ancient burial mound with a red-hot lake at its foot, while her snaking limbs and shaded nether-regions are more like the abstractions of a map. When I asked André what he intended, he laughed and simply pointed to the drawing. "That" he said.

André played with resizing his pictures so much that I came to feel the resizing was the most important tool in the box for him. He seemed to feel that no matter how dreadful the drawing, it could somehow be rescued by finding its ideal size. For that reason it is difficult to tell which was the definitive version. Almost never the first. This resized JPEG seems to have stretched the original horizontally, causing some distress to the fonts, yet the distortion cannot have been very large as Scumpuppy's face is always round.

André's concerns throughout his life remained sternly spiritual. In this example, his gleeful discovery that fill patterns can be used with unpredictable results along curves as well as in closed forms is applied to a typically inside-outside dichotomy. The round and contained face of Scumpuppy contrasts with the spreading and threatening dance of Miss Kitty. Her painted lips are suggestive of her sexually predatory nature but they are also expressive of an unhappiness she denies. Scumpuppy's doleful countenance always hints that whatever motivates him will not be found in the external world.

André appeared to find in the romance between a cat and a dog a symbol of the dual nature of the human soul. Scumpuppy is introverted, pessimistic and bleak while Miss Kitty maintains a façade of happiness in order to disguise an inner emptiness. The obstacles to their relationship cannot be overcome and probably shouldn't be. I said to André that maybe they were both aspects of himself and his reply was revealing: "They're just drawings". Were they intended to make people laugh? I asked him. "Well they do", he said.

One last story, in his final weeks I found him smiling with great serenity: he had heard a story of a man who choked on his own vomit. I think André had grasped the merciful happiness of choking, if ever we must choke, at least on our own dinner.

© James Beswick Whitehead, 2001