Drawing an unlikeness

Doodling the Kentucky Derby with the help of Ralph Steadman

The Churchill Downs bugler

Hey y’all,

My mom was in town this weekend and she loves watching the Kentucky Derby, so Saturday afternoon we plopped down in front of the TV and started drinking mint juleps. While we were watching the pre-race coverage, I pulled out my pristine copy of Ralph Steadman: A Life in Ink and my crumbling hardcover of Hunter S. Thompson’s The Great Shark Hunt, which contains the text of the writer and illustrator’s first collaboration, “The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved.” (ESPN produced a whole mini-documentary about the 1970 piece.)

I forgot how the story is really less about the Derby and more about them meeting each other. Thompson was a Louisville native, on his home turf. Steadman, an Englishman, had not only never heard of the Derby, he’d never even been to America. A significant portion of Thompson’s text describes the comedy of traipsing about the racetrack with somebody who was drawing all the time:

[Steadman had a] habit of sketching people he met in the various social situations I dragged him into—then giving them the sketches. The results were always unfortunate. I warned him several times about letting the subjects see his foul renderings, but for some perverse reason he kept doing it.

Thompson continues to berate Steadman for his “horrible drawing,” as Steadman tries to capture the faces in the crowd. The piece devolves into their drunken debauchery ends with Thompson kicking Steadman out of a car at the airport and shouting insults at him and telling him to get lost forever. (A fitting beginning to a legendary partnership which Steadman often jokes ruined his life.)

One of the details I like in Thompson’s piece is how bewildered Steadman is by how upset Americans are by his caricatures of them. “It’s sort of a joke,” he says. “Why, in England it’s quite normal. People don’t take offense. They understand that I’m just putting them on a bit.” 

While paging through Steadman’s drawings, I got the urge to draw. So I started to make some blind contour drawings of the TV without looking down at my pen and paper. I drew the bugler, the jockeys, the owners, and even a few horses. The whole time I was thinking about Steadman’s monstrous drawings, how liberating it is to be unafraid of flattering the subject of your drawing. A likeness is not what you’re going for, in fact, you’re going for a kind of unlikeness.