John Glashan - Life and Work

Life and Work

Born in Glasgow and the son of a portrait painter, McGlashan studied painting at the Glasgow School of Art after national service in the army. He moved to London with the intention of making a living from painting portraits, but was unable to do so. After switching to cartooning and illustrating he curtailed his name to "Glashan".

Glashan's cartoons appeared in Lilliput, Harpers & Queen, Private Eye, Punch, and various London newspapers, as well as Holiday and the New Yorker.

A series of humorous guidebooks created with Jonathan Routh in the late 1960s allowed extensive expression of Glashan's graffiti-like style, combining small figures (often bearded men) with scrawled text - but, even here, often with elaborate backdrops.

The "Genius" cartoons, which allowed Glashan to use colour and a great expanse of space, ran in the Observer Magazine from 1978 to 1983, whereupon he concentrated on landscape painting. His cartoons reappeared from 1988 in the Spectator.

Read more about this topic:  John Glashan

Famous quotes containing the words life and, life and/or work:

    O to dream, O to awake and wander
    There, and with delight to take and render,
    Through the trance of silence,
    Quiet breath;
    Lo! for there, among the flowers and grasses,
    Only the mightier movement sounds and passes;
    Only winds and rivers,
    Life and death.
    Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894)

    The shortest way out of Manchester is notoriously a bottle of Gordon’s gin; out of any businessman’s life there is the mirage of Paris; out of Paris, or mediocrity of talent and imagination, there are all the drugs, from subtle, all-conquering opium to cheating, cozening cocaine.
    William Bolitho (1890–1930)

    Working women today are trying to achieve in the work world what men have achieved all along—but men have always had the help of a woman at home who took care of all the other details of living! Today the working woman is also that woman at home, and without support services in the workplace and a respect for the work women do within and outside the home, the attempt to do both is taking its toll—on women, on men, and on our children.
    Jeanne Elium (20th century)