A few years ago I placed a letter in The Jester (The Cartoonists' Club monthly newsletter) asking if anyone had any information on Stephen Nemethy, a caricaturist whose work used to appear in the TV Times in the mid to late 1970s.
He was probably the first artist to get a quiet eight-year-old boy in nerdy NHS specs from the wilds of east Kent interested in this branch of cartooning. I used to collect his drawings and stick them into a scrapbook! Yes, I know, sad isn't it? What an anorak.
Unfortunately I got no reply and so was once again left wondering what had become of him, and why he seemed to stop producing caricatures around the early 1980s. I vividly remember excellent drawings of Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan done in the run up to the 1980 presidential election, but very little after that.
At this point the only reference to him on the internet was a small cartoon he'd done for Ronnie Scott's website, and my old scrapbook had long since disappeared. Then, one evening I got chatting to fellow caricaturist Steve Garner. Have you tried the newspaper and magazine archive at Colindale, he suggested. I hadn't, so the following week I went along and ordered up the TV Times for 1976 to 1978. Bingo! After a couple of hours of intensive thumbing I found the examples that accompany this article.
Recently I've been thinking about doing a series of articles on caricaturists for The Jester, rather than my scheduled talk at next April's meeting. I decided to do a Google search once again, and this time it came up with an artist called Stephen Nemethy who did religious illustrations on a Benedictine Arts and Study Centre website. I emailed them to see if they were actually one and the same person, and received a reply from Father Peter Burns.
Continue reading FINDING NEMETHY – by PAUL BAKER
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