Steve Whitaker 1955-2008
Steve Whitaker, originally uploaded by The Glass Eye.
PHOTO: John Peel lookey likey Steve Whitaker
Steve Whitaker was my mentor. No, that's too possessive a title. He was a teacher to many people. But he taught me a lot. Thanks to him I learned how to ink, how to pour a Martini, and he introduced me to many varieties of interesting cheese.
Steve gave me so much. The year we shared a home together was one of the happiest of my life. And when Motoko arrived he went out of his way to make her welcome.
The one thing you could not get away from with Steve was his sheer creativity. Stuff just gushed out of him--drawings, ideas and bad puns.
I asked him about it and he hinted that it was, in part, the product of his student days. Art school opened him right up and exposed his soul. "It turned the creative taps on full," he told me. Problem was, he couldn't turn them off.
It was both a blessing and a curse. He couldn't stop taking in the world. His senses absorbed everything, unfiltered, and then dumped it back out in a chaotic jumble. Looking through Steve's eyes was like seeing a world new minted and strange. He perceived things I couldn't and he'd use that as the raw material for a drawing or a joke.
That hyper-receptivity also meant he saw things that weren't there. He would misinterpret social situations and imagine he'd given offense when he hadn't. I often found myself persuading Steve that some supposed snub by a friend was nothing of the kind. He was easily bruised, but his reaction was never to get angry, but rather to withdraw.
He had made the decision that he did not want to hurt people. Like 'The Dude' in The Big Lebowski--a movie that resonated deeply for him--he wanted to be a completely benign presence amongst his friends. He achieved that, though at what seemed like great cost. He intimated that there'd been times in his past where his ego and jealousy had gotten the better of him, and he didn't trust himself not to repeat those mistakes. Beneath the diffidence was a raging ego and he wanted to protect people from that.
That hobbling of ego and ambition was, I believe, one of the things that cost him work and success and prosperity. But also it made him much loved. And I suspect, if he was here to ask him about it, he would tell me he had the better part of the bargain.
We'll miss you, Steve. We loved you very much.