By JESSE GRAHAM
AFTER 40 years of putting ink to paper, Danny Zemp’s advice to young cartoonists is simple – “Head down, bum up, follow your passion.”
Mr Zemp, a Healesville resident and the Mail’s resident cartoonist, said the key to developing a skill like drawing was routine and practice.
“I think if you just draw when you have to, you become detached,” he said.
“But, if you’re working towards a deadline and set yourself a goal – like, by Wednesday you want to send out a cartoon to the Mail … hopefully it works.
“You’ve got to get into a routine, into a habit of doing it.”
He said that he started “when I was a wee little lad”, and that his inspiration largely came from French cartoonists and from reading Asterix and The Adventures of Tintin as a child.
“My dad’s still cross about me, because I inked … his original Asterix cartoons,” Mr Zemp said.
“It was just funny, and I just filled it in, and that’s how you start – you start copying someone else’s style until it becomes your own.”
Mr Zemp’s style of political cartoons is no-nonsense. Covering topics from illegal rubbish dumping, to policing motorcyclists, and political mud-fights, his works are often simple and cut through the spin to show a different perspective on an issue.
After the news of the Yarra Ranges Council endorsing a $28 million rebuild for their Lilydale offices earlier this year, Mr Zemp’s cartoon featured a man sleeping on a park bench, covered only by the Mail with “Shire’s $28m offices” on the front page.
“As a political cartoonist, you always see the cynical side of it, and you have to be critical about what’s there, what’s out there – and sometimes, it’s holding a mirror up to the people,” he said.
“I’m not a politically active person, but I like to sit on the fence and see how things unfold, and that’s where I take my inspiration.
“I don’t have a swing left or right – I’m fairly neutral, but I like to see how they beat each other up, metaphorically speaking.”
Working as an arborist during the day, Mr Zemp said his goal as a cartoonist was to earn a steady living from selling his art.
He said that, while he still completed many of his works with paper and ink, he now utilised tablets and a desktop computer for much of his work.
“I was fairly traditionalist … (but) you’ve got to be able to move with the times as well,” he said.
“From a collector’s point of view, it’s sacrilege in a way, because if you do that stuff digitally, how do you hang an original on the wall?
“There’s so many avenues you can do – there’s no such thing as saying ‘You have to do it that way’, or ‘Learn to do it by hand first, then work on the computer’.”
He said an editorial cartoon should be about a current news event or accompanying an article, and should sum up the story in one image.
“If you do a political cartoon, it’s a one-day fly – it’s accurate today, it’s non-existent tomorrow,” Mr Zemp said.
“It should be closely working with the editor – sometimes, the editor goes ‘I have a feeling about this, but in words I can’t quite put it together – can you put something together?’
“It might be challenging and you can’t get it right, but it’s not the point about getting it right all the time – it’s about making a statement and see what your thought process of it is, what you feel about it.”
Mr Zemp’s work can be viewed at www.dannyzemp.com, Zemp Art – Cartoons and Illustrations on Facebook and regularly in the pages of the Mail.
