Saul Steinberg

at the Dulwich Picture Gallery.

Go, go, go! I've never seen so many pictures I've lusted after & wanted to own so fiercely, all in one exhibition. (He was a famous illustrator for the New Yorker for years, mates with the Abstract Expressionists, born in Romania, escaped Fascist Italy whilst an architecture student by the skin of his teeth,wound up in Manhattan.) There is something very bracing, very restful in looking at a perfectly drawn line, at someone who can really, really draw. It's not just aesthetically pleasing though, there's real wit and intelligence, some weighty ideas behind this stuff. I refer you here to find out more.

Other illustrators that have given us pleasure over the years:

Quentin Blake. Of course. The Maestro. (He is setting up a Museum of Illustration in Kings Cross, where I would sell my soul to get a job.) When I was a kid, I didn't like them so much, I preferred drawings that were a bit more pretty and decorative, it's only as a grownup that I can appreciate the brilliance, the humour and joie de vivre and beauty of his work.

Gerald Scarfe. Wicked imagination. And wickedly cruel. I remember seeing him on some programme where he was for some reason being a consultant on a Disney film. One of the Disney artists was saying how she had drawn an animal to look cute. He looked utterly baffled and dismayed. 'Why does it always have to look cute?' He started drawing when ill as a child - you know that line in Pink Floyd's Comfortably Numb, 'When I was a child, I had a fever, my hands felt like two balloons'? That came from Gerald Scarfe, that did.

Andy Warhol - He was a great graphic artist, before he became a bona fide artist (though that's still a contentious idea.) Great colour, sense of humour too.
Posy Simmonds - skewers the middle classes brilliantly, draws like a genius. I wish she'd start her strip in the Guardian again, most broadsheet cartoonists are pants and can't write for toffee.

Ralph Steadman - I love that hallucinatory, satirical style. I went to see an exhibition of his pictures for Alice in Wonderland years ago, it was a perfect fit of style and subject matter.

And of course, our own blogging Lucy Pepper. Words can not express how much I love her style. And it's not just drawing, her recent paintings of Devon are so ridiculously beautiful. Bah. Some of us were born to be artists, some of us art appreciators, I guess.