 Guy Badeaux (BADO) ICANADA | |
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Guy Badeaux went to one of Europe's most illustrious art schools but he never got a degree. Why not? Even though he went to all the necessary classes at Paris' renowned École des Beaux-Arts, he was never enrolled. He just showed up at the school, went to classes, and no one bothered asking him if he belonged there or not. The year was 1971, only three years after the famed Paris student uprising. Students reenacted the famous barricades while Badeaux looked on from the sidelines fearing deportation. Badeaux (known to thousands of readers by his "Bado" signature) had just graduated from art school in his native Montréal and was taking a year to travel Europe. When the young Canadian came to the École des Beaux-Arts it became a second home. "I merely hung out there," Bado says. "I wasn't enrolled, but I went to all the classes. It was a very beautiful year. It's hard to put that on a résumé, though... but sometimes I do." Bado is now based in the Ottawa/Hull region. His work, a fixture in the French-language Le Droit for the last 18 years, earned him a National Newspaper Award in 1991. Bado knew he wanted to be an artist at a young age; he occupied his school time by drawing caricatures in his notebooks. He wanted to follow in the footsteps of his great grandfather and two great uncles, who were all accomplished artists. "I was smart. I always drew in the middle of the notebook, where I could pull the pages out," Bado laughs. When Bado returned to Montreal from Paris, he got work doing profiles of captains of industry for the Montreal Gazette's business section. It was there that he fell under the mentorship of the great Aislin. Bado also began doing in-between drawings for a Montreal animation studio, for a half-hour cartoon called The Happy Prince. But he soon found he didn't like labouring on someone else's work. "I got bored with that very quickly." admits Bado. "It was good school for me, because I was drawing all day long. But it was not very exciting work." Bado then hooked on with Le Devoir, where he did caricatures of famous literary figures (including the great Alexander Solzhenitsyn). But he was soon swept away when the art section editor left the paper. Desperate, Bado got work doing comic strips for Canada Steamship Lines' newsletter. As he was drawing cartoons about boats, buses and trucks, Le Jour, a nationalist newspaper, was looking for a cartoonist. "At first, I was uncomfortable about it," he says. " I was reluctant to go to a PQ paper. But Aislin kept urging me to forget about the politics of the situation and go anyway." But before the nationalist bubble would burst when Quebec returned a "no" vote in the 1980 referendum, Le Jour went out of business. That's when Bado began drawing for Croc, a National Lampoon-like magazine that was at the time one of Quebec's most vibrant publications. That was his last job before becoming a regular editorial page cartoonist. While he still misses doing comic strips, he finds that caricatures and political cartoons are good therapy. "I get really mad when I read the paper," he says. "I think to myself, 'How can they do this?' By doing cartoons, I feel that I can maybe help right some wrongs. " | |
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