DAVID LOW.

Press, Volume LXIII, Issue 19156, 12 November 1927, Page 8

DAVID LOW.

1 FAMOUS N.Z. CARTOONIST. APPRECIATION OF HIS WORK. (raoH ora ew» cobbsspokdwtt.) •' LONDON, October 4, . Mr Davidi Low, the cartoonist, who left New Zealand some years ago to work for the "Sydney Bulletin" and subsequently gained fame in London, is to join the staff of the "Evening Standard" at the end of this month, after eight years with the "Star." The "Sunday Observer" devotes a column to this successful New Zealander. "Low and I," says the "Observer's" representative, "had become almost as native to the lighter side of London as Dickens and Cruickshanks. But after a talk with Low at his Golders Green home, I am persuaded it is merely a matter of relaying Piccadilly. Low will still delineate topical events, providing his own letterpress in the guise of captions. * "The reason for the change is not political, but —shall we say?—domestic P" declared Mr Low. "The political side of cartooning has always meant a great deal to me —more than you might think. I am a Radical. But no Party can lay exclusive claims to virtue. My political cartoons in the "Standard" will be non-party, and as such they will, I feel, afford me a wider scope." So there it is, in a nutshell. The rest of my talk with Low was by no means in a nutshell; it was discursive and informal, and I shall not attempt to spoil it, verbatim. The first person is sometimes the last person one should quote. It is not what one says that matters so much as what one thinks and means. Low is like his cartoons, inasmuch as you must first watch the face to get the full flavour of the caption. It is a strong face which smiles all at once, every inch of it—and there is a Puck in the eyes who can put a girdle round a sentence in a fortieth of a second. Low's Draughtsmanship. The first thing I gathered about Low's acute draughtsmanship was that he draws a face for each successive cartoon as if he had never. drawn it before. He does not draw, say, a Mr Baldwin Glad and a Mr Baldwin Sorrowful, put them into stock, and use them like rubber stamps as the occasion suits, in the manner of the stereotyped cartoonist. "I may have drawn a subject a thousand times before," he says, "and then I suddenly discover I can make nothing of it, and have to start afresh. That often happens." Which means that his caricatures, like all caricatures '.with the breath of life in them, evolve arid change .with their subjects. "The Mr Baldwin of yesterday's cartoon will not do for the" Mr Baldwin of today's." Once, however, in Australia, just to try out the rubber-stamp expedient for fun, he made some stencils of politicians, both sad and sorrowful, and built up from them rival cartoons for both the Government and Opposition papers. . . . And it worked very well: but it wasn't Low. Low will never temporise with photographs and descriptions. "If you want a caricature worth while." ! he declares, ''you must see your subject vis-a-vis, and pet a straight look into his eyes." Most Goliaths are only too glad to sit to this dare-devil David. Mr Churchill, for instance, enjoys it immensely, and whenever Low does a particularly mordant one of him, at once sends for the original. "Jix's" method of greeting him is to display on his desk a collection of his visitor's deadliest perpetrations. Mr Lloyd Georce is amenable, Mr Baldwin less so. Women are usually extremely affable, about the invitation, but they

find it, don't you know, rather inconvenient. Stalking the Game. Sometimes the desired one is definitely resistant—Dean Inge, for instance,' or Mr John Galsworthy. Low, thereupon sleuths them and gets them when they least"''suspect it. He barnstorms some meeting to which he was never invited. Mr Galsworthy ne gets close up, a.fc a function for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, and Dean Inge—well, guess! The outcome, in any case,' is a sly, cherubic smile for readers of the "Star," which wreathes smoke-like into a weU-did-you-ever ? brand of laugh. Low will have that laugh at all costs, even though there* lie a sharp bite in it. He does not believe in the Kladderadatsch-Jugend-Simplicissimus style of hate-caricature, which is fierce, bitter, and Satanic. "It won't do—in this country," he says. "It defeats ends. Your cartoon must have urftanity, fairness, humour. ■ During the war our hfcnour was brutal ised. 'I sometimes look at the work I did then in Sydney, work one simply could not avoid doing at the time, and—wonder. That spirit destroys real art." A Promethean Itaughter. Another thing I discovered was that Low is one of those natural, wholesome men who confound the cynics by laughing at their own jokes. Js the world so full of good jokes that one can afford to overlook one's own. Low has a studio at Hampstead, away across the Heath, where no one but himself ever dare go, Bohemianism is anathema, and the sole order work. He confessed to me sans blush hat, pent in there alone over his cartoons, he not only chuckled to himself betimes, but shook the rafters with Promethean laughter.. A sly peep at one or two. unpublishables —Saklatvala breaking political bread with Lord Birkenhead, and a post-prandial study of Mr J. H. Thomas "doing his bit for the working classes"—and.we parted. I had discovered everything I already kne.y from the cartoons themselves. I had confirmed beyond doubt an old suspicion: that Low's only bad caricature is_ that of himself. There is nothing of the real, forthright Low in that Ohaphnesque imposter with the little smudge moustache who masquerades in "Low, and I:" When a fisherman of "Westboume street, Hull, was fined 10s 6d at Hull for being drunk in charge of a child, ho said he had received 33s a week from the Labour Exchange, and spent 13s a week on drink.