The Thousands

Scratchy cartoons, a term I just made up, are cartoons that are drawn on the spot without any (obvious) pre-planning or refinement. Didn’t render that pigeon correctly? Just scribble it out and draw a new one next to it! Can’t draw hands? Make the child an amputee! To do scratchy cartoons well (and there are millions who are NOT doing it well) you have to have an innate funny mojo, of which Quenton Miller has oodles.

I have no idea what Quenton’s new exhibition Grey at West Space is about, but I predict that it’ll be great, dangerously over-intellectualised artspeak promo notwithstanding. Two Quenton examples: A cassette tape sits at the foot of Edgar Allan Poe’s tombstone and some text next to it reads “He ain’t gonna listen to your demo”. A skier crashes, text reads “Pro skier distracted by a fallen log that looks like his ex-wife”. Quenton’s work plays with smart/silly semantics: Chomsky haikus in the voice of Elmo.

In the world of scratchy cartoon art David Shrigley is famouser, but Quenton Miller is funnier. Newspapers ain’t going to syndicate Quenton’s work anytime soon, and the tea lady could easily draw a better sandcastle, but his work will cut through to your cerebral cortex and give it a hilarious deadleg.