Cartoonist pens a Courier special Tunbridge wells

Jane Bakowski

EVERY now and then, a new face lands like a ripe plum on the cartoonist's blank page.

Hamster-cheeked disgraced celebrity Jonathan Ross and his sticky-haired cohort Russell Brand provided easy pickings, and Sarah Palin's "hockey mom" features were easily re-arranged around her reckless mouth.

After studying images of past leaders, Chris opted to place US president elect Obama on the iconic Lincoln Memorial statue, scene of Martin Luther King's I Have a Dream speech in 1963, in a cartoon presented for the first time on this page.

"The hardest to draw are the beautiful people, because their faces are so balanced," said Chris Burke, who sends his characteristic detailed, multi-layered pen-and-ink cartoons to newspapers and magazines across the world from his studio in Upper Grosvenor Road, Tunbridge Wells. David Beckham is difficult, there is nothing to latch on to there."

Better by far are the lopsided, the fat and the bald, the spotty, the hairy and the plain ugly.

"Boris Johnson is a gift, and so is John Prescott," said Chris, whose current projects include work for the Financial Times and upmarket men's magazine GQ.

One of the first to draw the then newly-elected Tory leader David Cameron, the artist opted to present him as Tweedledum to Tony Blair's Tweedledee, New Labour alongside New Tory, two tubby schoolboys in strange tandem.

Chris, 53, who lives with his family in St James' Road, has been drawing all his life.

"The first picture I really remember was when I was about five years old. We lived near the centre of London, so my mother always dragged us off to things like Trooping the Colour and the Lord Mayor's Show. It was Princess Margaret's wedding, and I drew a long line of soldiers, each more elaborately dressed than the last, right through to a fully-decorated general at the end.

"When the nun at my Catholic primary school gave me a sweet and made me stand on a chair while she showed the other children I became a minor celebrity, and I thought, 'This is all right, doing something I enjoy and getting rewarded for it!'"

His first commission, for the Radio Times, fulfilled a childhood dream of working for a publication with a proud history of top quality cartoons. It was followed by a long stint on the Sunday Times plus a steady stream of other commissions, establishing Chris as one of the country's most successful cartoonists. However the job is not always plain sailing.

"I did a picture of Jeffrey Archer once, before his fall from grace, and the editor, who was a friend of his, phoned me and told me I'd made him look too weasely, so I had to pretty him up a bit. And I was also told off for making David Cameron's forehead too big, with too little hair on it!"

But if what now looks like an uncanny ability to foresee the future doesn't always go down well with editors and their chums, Chris is philosophical about such things. "My job is to annoy people a bit, after all."

To see more of his work, visit www.thisiskent.co.uk/links