| Steve Was My Friend |
[Feb. 23rd, 2008|05:05 pm] |
My dear old friend Steve Whitaker died yesterday. He was 52 years old.
I first met Steve when I was about 18 years old, and he was about 29 - so, nearly a quarter of a century ago now. As a young and unformed suburban teenager, I had never met anyone quite like Steve before - someone who not only knew seemingly everything there was to know about comics and pop music but who could also enthuse about Rivette, Sisley, Albert Ayler - high culture, low culture, any culture at all...all wrapped up in a pun, a joke, a spot-on-quote. Steve's love for THE COLOUR OF POMEGRANATES was as genuine as his passion for KONA, MONARCH OF MONSTER ISLE - it was all input, stimulus to thought, and to his own creative work. He lived and breathed the art life ALL THE TIME, and his example was inspiring and challenging and total fun. The kind of fun you think is never going to end.
Time and again, Steve made it clear to me that sharing - knowledge, time - was more than half the pleasure and always the whole point. As others have noted, Steve loved people who could match his own passion and thirst for knowledge, and he was almost as good a student as he was a teacher (and there's no doubting that he was a very good teacher indeed.) For me, it was a thrill to be able to turn him on to my latest jazz discovery, or present him with a new gem by an old favourite. Hearing an alb in his company, or seeing a movie with him, was certain to result in a GREAT conversation afterwards.
Steve's varied life experience, and in particular his time spent as a fine artist at Chelsea School of Art where he worked on the magazine CIPHER with Jake Tilson, gave his opinions on all things aesthetic a unique and highly personal authority. It also meant that whatever project he worked on - be it apazine, comic strip, review, a workshop, a checklist, photos of flats that his friends lived in - was always executed with the eye and mind of an Artist, with a capital fuckin' A.
There's so much more I want to say, but the truth is that Steve's passing has hit me very hard and at the moment it upsets me too much to think about him not being with us anymore. One of Steve's very favourite comics was THE MAN by Vaughan Bode - a beautifully simple story of loss and friendship. All I know is, Steve will never be forgotten by those of us proud to call him a friend. |
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