Michael Leunig
Michael Leunig
Michael Leunig, typically referred to as Leunig, is an Australian cartoonist, poet and cultural commentator. His best known works include The Adventures of Vasco Pyjama and the Curly Flats series. He was declared an Australian Living Treasure by the National Trust of Australia in 1999...
NationalityAustralian
ProfessionCartoonist
Date of Birth2 June 1945
CountryAustralia
guests interviews reason
What makes an interview 'difficult'? Well, there are many reasons, but the end result is usually the same: The guest just doesn't seem comfortable answering the question.
suffering
There is some suffering that awaits us all.
art done world
The most joyous painting is not done for the art world, it is done for the inner world.
hate giving balance
Don't give in to hate - it puts you off balance
expression self views
A world view is probably an expression of self.
elude-us creative ego
The creative act is also in a small way a suffering act - we start out with our ego, this hope of making this thing whatever it be, but so often it eludes us and it collapses and we kind of regress into this mental suffering, we can't find what we're looking for.
art children mind
I didn't mind my own company as a child; I was happy playing alone in the sandpit.
art hard-work ideas
Ah, whimsical. It's terrible the way words get attached to you like barnacles. As is what I do is acting on a 'whim'. If only these were gifts from God when I get an idea, but everything I have done that I really love has had a lot of hard work behind it.
giving balance tasks
The cartoonist’s task is not so much to be balanced as to give balance, particularly in situations of disproportionate power relationships such as we see in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
easter jesus reflecting-upon
Easter is reflecting upon suffering for one thing, but it also reflects upon Jesus and his non compliance in the face of great authority where he holds to his truth - so there's two stories there.
nature cutting thinking
At the very simplest, I think as Van Gogh said and St Francis would have said, we must find nature. Just to be in the presence of nature your feelings and 'little seedlings' start to awake. So if we disassociate ourselves from God we cut nature out, too. More and more we turn nature into a commodity, into eco-tourism. But we must integrate it into the way people live every day.
father imagination world
Is a brazen and innocent confrontation with paternal authority an unbearably terrifying prospect to some? Are the consequences of a fathers anger and displeasure so catastrophic in the primal imagination that every semblance of it in the world both literally and metaphorically must be denounced in the strongest possible terms? It would seem so.
wisdom lonely loneliness
There was all this loneliness in my cartoons and people would say, "Gee, these characters are so lonely, disconnected, depressed." And I'd say, 'Yeah well, that's not me. I'm just interested in that because I think it makes a funny drawing.' But later I understood it was me in many respects; my hand was doing it ahead of the head's understanding.
order truthful speak
In order to be truthful we must do more than speak the truth. We must also hear truth, receive truth, search for truth.