Anthony Earnshaw was a British artist, illustrator, educator, and author. He loved creating surreal and often anarchic works.
Background
Anthony Earnshaw was born on October 9, 1924, in Ilkley, West Yorkshire, England, United Kingdom. His father, a watchmaker, and jeweler had died before he was born. His mother, a plumber's daughter, ran the family shop until it went bankrupt in 1930. The family moved, first to Redcar, then to Leeds.
Education
Anthony Earnshaw attended Harehills School in Leeds until the age of fourteen. He had to leave to support the family.
Career
Anthony Earnshaw became an apprentice engineering fitter, during three decades in the industry, to become a lathe turner and a crane driver. In his teens, Earnshaw also embarked on an auto-didactic voyage within the city's central library. At the age of twenty, through his interest in poetry and literature, he discovered surrealism, and it changed his life.
By the early 1960s, he had met Patrick Hughes, then teaching art locally, and, among others in the crew drawn to the philosophy and practice of the almost moribund surrealist movement were the artists Ian Breakwell and Glen Baxter. It was Hughes who later persuaded Tony to hold a retrospective exhibition at the Leeds Institute in 1966. After leaving factory work in 1967, he began part-time teaching at Harrogate School of Art, then Bradford College of Art. He met Gail Earnshaw in 1968 with whom he collaborated and showed work in a series of "Another G n T" exhibitions.
In 1972 he took up a fellowship at Leeds Polytechnic, Fine Art Department. He did collaborate with Eric Thacker, who had become a Methodist preacher and moved, via the church of England, into the arms of Rome, on two illustrated books, Musrum (1968), about a rather Maldoror-like hero at war with the Weed King, and Wintersol (1971), a revelation of the criminal nature of Father Christmas. He left teaching in 1985 to concentrate on making art, writing aphorisms and making boxed assemblage.
As an artist, he constructed scenes from ordinary "found" objects, such as plastic dolls, shoes, wheels, combs, and pebbles, arranging them in absurd, even jarring scenarios that tended to surprise and unsettle the viewer. The arrangements were described by some as simply pugnacious, but by others as grotesque and sinister. An example sometimes cited by critics is the image of a snowman tied to a stake, to be burned by the fire that will destroy his bonds and his image, only to be extinguished itself by the melting snow.
Earnshaw’s own art was published in 1972 in Seven Secret Alphabets, a collection of drawings that depicted characters in thought-provoking, sometimes disturbing attitudes; for example, the letter "V" is represented as the outstretched arms of a person submerged in quicksand. The artist also created a cartoon series featuring the puckish character "Wokker," a bird with feet made of wheels.