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The Abbot Hall art gallery in Kendal is offering Extra members a 2 for 1 deal on tickets to see the Loneliness of Lowry

This summer, the Abbot Hall art gallery in Kendal is curating the first major exhibition of work by L.S Lowry be shown outside The Lowry Gallery in Salford in five years.

Featuring some of Lowry's most powerful pictures, the show illustrates a lesser known side of one of the UK's most popular artists.

Better known for his northern industrial landscapes, the exhibition examines a different side of Lowry, looking beneath these scenes at an artist who cites his inherent loneliness as one of the main influences on his work. He said: "Had I not been lonely none of my works would have happened."

The exhibition will show approximately forty works, including oils and works on paper from both private and public collections throughout the country. It features some of Lowry's most powerful pictures focusing on portraits, landscapes, urban landscapes and seascapes.

The Abbot Hall in Kendal is offering Extra members a 2 for 1 deal on tickets to the exhibition, saving you £5.75. You can Gift Aid it for £6.75.

Read The Guardian's Review here

Offer valid until 31 August 2010

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Born in Transylvania, twins Gert and Uwe Tobias paint, sculpt and draw with a typewriter. It's bold stuff, says Adrian Searle, and the product of a lifetime of shared obsessions

There have been several pairs of twins who make art collaboratively. In the 1980s, the American Starn twins began working together on sophisticated photographic projects. The British artists Jane and Louise Wilson, who dislike being referred to as twins, continue to work in film and photography, although like the Chapman brothers (not twins) they have sometimes played up their sibling rivalries in their art. Gert and Uwe Tobias make art that looks as if it has evolved from the kind of private language twins occasionally develop, from mutual shared obsessions, with its repetitive motifs. The work of these Romanian-born identical twins is full of funny heads and scary faces, weird beings with pendulous noses, creepy expressions and peculiar extruded bodies.

But there is more to them than funny faces. Theirs is a hybrid art that mixes the old but complex technology of woodcut printing with painting, typography, and the creation of image-poems; they use a typewriter to tap out, rather than draw, hollow-eyed, drooling and grinning satanic faces. Occasional words and exclamations erupt among the red and black "x"s and "o"s, the dashes and dots, like a kind of magic, automatic writing. In fact it is a laborious technique, much used by concrete poets, and by writers and artists as diverse as Carl Andre, the late BS Johnson and by Lawrence Sterne, in his 1759 novel Tristram Shandy.

Like Sterne, the Tobias twins parody and recycle all sorts of styles and quotations in their work. Their sometimes mural-scaled woodcuts are on occasion entirely abstract, using repeated forms and shapes taken from Romanian folk-art decoration and 1920s Russian suprematism, to create a sort of complicated geometric abstraction that looks like painting, or poster art, but is neither. Other woodcuts appear both folkloric – shapes that look cut out with pinking shears – and peculiarly modern, playing on the carnivalesque and the biomorphs of Joan Miro. But the Tobiases are good at covering their tracks; it's hard to know exactly where their influences lie. Their art is a sort of grand fabrication.

In this show, the presentation of their work (which includes prints, paintings, collages, ceramic sculptures) is further complicated by painting directly on the walls behind and in between. The twins are playing games with us. In one corner, a group of ceramics crowds a shelf. A misshapen, lumpy head emerges from a commercial jug. A turd-like thing stands on a bird's-foot-cum-tree-root in a little bowl. There are dirty, slip-glazed, excremental figures, horrible shiny white creatures with brown stains running down them that you wouldn't want to touch. All this is very deliberate and scatological.

Among the woodcuts, there is a figure (pictured, top left) whose ear is a lamb chop or a map of South America; an eye like a fish set in a doily; a red tit with a white nipple grows inexplicably out of his forehead. Oh, deary me, I feel for this figure. I also feel my credulity is being stretched. Some of the Tobiases' small, delicately painted, translucent heads are more like photographic negatives of ghosts, or scraperboard illustrations of long-dead relatives.

Their work has always intrigued me, not least because of its collision between outmoded skills and a knowing postmodernity. Their art is unmistakable, but unplaceable. Sometimes they are like faux-naive outsider artists playing at being insiders, or, conversely, art world operators playing at being visionaries. Much is often made – not least by the artists themselves – of their Transylvanian childhood, and of the Dracula legend they were entirely unaware of until they moved to Germany when they were 12. All this, too, has been morphed into their art.

At Nottingham Contemporary, the Tobiases share the gallery with a large selection of photographs by Diane Arbus, one of the best of the travelling Artist Rooms devised by collector-turned-donor Anthony D'Offay. Arbus's photographs of mental patients dressed up for Halloween, proud transvestites and a catalogue of bizarre and alarming eccentrics, are far stranger, as well as more sophisticated and direct, than anything the Tobias twins have yet cooked up.

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Inspired by 'outlaw architecture' this Seattle native channels the extreme DIY and freethinking of hippy survivalists going off-grid

Oscar Tuazon's art may be vulnerable, but you'd never guess. His sculpture-cum-architecture has used raw slabs of concrete, steel and untreated wooden beams, bark-encrusted tree trunks and weighty metal chains. For his current installation, My Mistake, at London's ICA, the artist has assembled what looks like a massive climbing frame from tree-size pine beams. Almost too big for the gallery, one girder even bursts through a wall.

Born in 1975, Tuazon grew up outside Seattle, coming of age watching bands like Mudhoney and Nirvana (one spell in the mosh pit was so frenzied he once broke his leg). Having graduated from the elite Independent Study Program at New York's Whitney Museum in 2003, he cut his teeth working for renowned extremist Vito Acconci, a performance artist and poet-turned-architect. After moving to Paris in 2007, Tuazon set up the gallery castillo/corrales with a group of artist and curator friends, and the past three years have seen his constructions of wood and concrete take over exhibition spaces across Europe.

Inspired by what he calls "outlaw architecture", Tuazon channels the extreme DIY and freethinking of hippy survivalists who decide to go off-grid. If his industrial materials suggest a minimalistic stress on concept over making, he's just as interested in the physical side of sculpture. He is not afraid to get his hands dirty: working with riggers and technicians, he starts off with a sketch, chain-sawing wood, developing ideas and patching up problems on the hoof. From the impromptu-looking concrete slab that intersects the two-storey wooden frame of his 2009 work, Bend It Till It Breaks, to the neon strip light glowing two and a half metres up an untreated tree-trunk buttressed by planks in I Wanna Live, his structures have a rough-shod, improvised feel.

As muscular and uncompromising as it can first appear, Tuazon's work is ephemeral. Like the hippy idealists defining their environment on their own terms, the artist will always have to pack up and move on. Yet while they stand, pushing at walls and ceilings and taking over space, these makeshift constructions remind us of the imaginative struggle to make what we want of the world, no matter what rules and boundaries seem to press down on us.

Why We Like Him: For Kodiak, a 2008 installation including a water tank, window, wood beam and lantern, created with his brother Eli Hansen and based on the 10 days they spent living rough on a wintry Alaskan island. We also love his 2007 book, Un-house – The Architecture of Dwelling Portably, which chronicles his experiences on the road while tracking down nomads in the forests of Oregon.

Freestyle: Since they were teenagers, Tuazon and his bro have covered themselves in homemade tattoos, making up the designs as they go along.

Where Can I See Him? My Mistake is at London's ICA until 15 August.

Art historian and biographer, her work infused large, iconic subjects with new life

Carola Hicks, who has died of cancer aged 68, was a glamorous academic and a serious populariser of art. She created something new in the world of contemporary biography, writing the life stories and afterlives of iconic works of art such as the Bayeux tapestry and the stained-glass windows of King's College Chapel, Cambridge. She swept the dust off old masterpieces, explained their cultural contexts and infused them with life for a new public.

Her first book to reach a wide general audience was the acclaimed Improper Pursuits: The Scandalous Life of Lady Di Beauclerk (2001), a gripping account of an 18th-century aristocrat, an earlier Lady Diana Spencer. This Lady Di defied convention: she abandoned her husband, the second Viscount Bolingbroke, for a secret liaison with Topham Beauclerk, concealed her illegitimate child, divorced, remarried and earned her living by becoming an accomplished painter. Carola's biography illuminated 18th-century artistic life and exposed the consequences of transgressive behaviour by women.

Her next book, The Bayeux Tapestry: The Life Story of a Masterpiece (2006), was the first of her innovative biographies of works of art. Carola brought fresh insights to this medieval strip cartoon and instrument of political propaganda. Most groundbreaking was her investigation of the afterlife of the Bayeux tapestry: its rediscovery by 18th-century antiquarians, its survival though the French revolution, its reinvention by the pre-Raphaelites, its skewed interpretation by over-reachers from Napoleon to Heinrich Himmler.

She followed this success with The King's Glass: A Story of Tudor Power and Secret Art (2007), which Radio 4 serialised as its Christmas book of the week. As Henry VIII's queens disappeared, they were erased from the stained-glass windows of King's College Chapel. When he replaced orthodox Catholicism with his own Supremacy and Reformation, the glass was adapted to reflect this, too. The magisterial images were made by immigrant craftsmen handling tiny pieces of luminous glass. "This book is in part a hymn to their light, with glass of beryl and amethyst, sapphire and emerald … in miniature the story of the nation," Peter Ackroyd wrote of it.

Born in Bognor Regis, West Sussex, Carola was the daughter of actors, David Brown and Margaret Gibson. After her father died on active service in North Africa in 1943, Carola was brought up by her mother, who continued her stage career. Carola was educated at the Lady Eleanor Holles school at Hampton, Middlesex, and then at Edinburgh University, where in 1964 she took a first in archaeology, and was one of the stars of the department.

True to her thespian inheritance, she played Olivia in Twelfth Night on a student tour of the Highlands and Islands. During one exploit, she and fellow actors constructed a Loch Ness monster out of hessian, wire and newspaper and faked a sighting, reported in the national press. After acting in repertory and television, Carola returned to Edinburgh and gained her PhD, in 1967, on "the animal style in English Romanesque art".

She worked on Reader's Digest and Woman's Own and for the Council for British Archaeology before becoming a researcher in the House of Commons library. Carola said you could always tell what MPs were really like by the way they treated their staff. She met her future husband, the lobby journalist and now fellow author, Gary Hicks, in the Strangers' Bar. They married in 1969.

She worked at the British Museum on the account of the Sutton Hoo Ship Burial, whose three volumes were published in 1975, 1978 and 1983, before becoming a research fellow at Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge, in 1978 and writing her first book, Animals in Early Medieval Art (1993). For several years from 1984 she was curator of the Stained Glass Museum at Ely Cathedral. She became a fellow and director of studies in art history at Newnham College, Cambridge, where for more than 20 years she taught as she wrote, in a lively, accessible style that combined erudition with enthusiasm.

A keen gardener, amateur photographer, ice-skater and botanic drawing student, with a lifelong love of theatre, Carola was witty and irreverent, wrote wickedly funny articles for the Literary Review, and especially enjoyed Biographers' Club events. Days before her death she had almost completed Girl in a Green Gown, a "biography" of Jan van Eyck's enigmatic portrait The Arnolfini Marriage.

Six months ago, Carola was diagnosed with cancer, which she faced with clear-eyed dispassion. She died at home, stylish to the last, with a red rose from the garden on her pillow. She is survived by Gary and their children, Colette and Toby.

• Carola Margaret Hicks, art historian and author, born 7 November 1941; died 23 June 2010

London museum unveils gravestone of Robert Seymour, the artist who killed himself after 'being dropped' by Charles Dickens

The scene on 20 April 1836 was horrific: the artist lay in a welter of gore on the floor of the summerhouse at his London home, his coat and waistcoat burning from the ferocity of the shotgun blast which had killed him.

Now, a century after Robert Seymour's memorial disappeared, the stone commemorating him is to be unveiled at a ceremony in the back garden of 48 Doughty Street, the museum in Charles Dickens' only surviving London home.

Seymour had taken his own life within 24 hours of a last meeting with the author Dickens, after completing the final illustration – named Death of a Clown – for the writer's first novel, the Pickwick Papers. Almost certainly Dickens had told Seymour he was being dropped as the artist for the serial, which when bound together would become his first runaway best seller and launch his career.

The gravestone, which had been missing for more than a century, was tracked down by Stephen Jarvis, a scholar, and rescued from the damp crypt of a London church. Its re-dedication will be some reparation for a grave injustice which some blame on Dickens.

A number of admirers of Seymour certainly believe that morally Dickens was responsible for his death. The wretched artist is thought to have believed his genius had been stolen and that the book would make another man rich and famous.

Seymour died literally heartbroken: the inquest found that the blast from the fowling weapon, an early type of sporting gun, which he turned on himself, disintegrated his heart.

David Parker, a former curator of the Dickens House Museum, in north London, and an expert on the Pickwick Papers, said: "I don't think Dickens can be blamed for Seymour's suicide. That's not to say that he handled his transactions with Seymour perfectly, but blame is another thing … If there is any truth in the hypothesis that the distinguished illustrator couldn't bear to be bossed around by the scribbling whippersnapper, then it has to be said that Seymour had failed to grow up and come to terms with realities."

Seymour took his own life within 24 hours of that last meeting with Dickens. Before he killed himself he destroyed his private papers, just as Dickens would 34 years later.

Seymour was replaced as Dickens' artist by Robert W Buss, but he too was quickly replaced by the illustrator most famously associated with the author, one who would work with him for decades – Hablot Knight Browne, nicknamed Phiz.

When the publishers Chapman and Hall brought Dickens and Seymour together in 1836, the latter, whose work had been compared to that of Hogarth and who had been dubbed "the Shakespeare of caricature", was certainly better known than the young journalist and author.

Within the year that changed forever: Dickens and Pickwick, when the serial was bound together into his first novel, became a sensation.

But the idea for the book was Seymour's. The illustrator was known for comic sporting prints, and he dreamed up the idea of The Nimrod Club, the adventures of sporting friends, which would have his pictures linked by texts supplied by a hack writer. Dickens protested he knew little of sports – and took control of the whole project. Seymour's title was dropped in favour of the Pickwick Papers, and though in two of the best-loved passages Mr Pickwick and his friends go ice skating and play cricket, most of their adventures occur in coffee houses and inns.

After a couple of the stories were published, disagreements between the artist and author became insoluble, and it was clear which rising star the publishers would back.

The clash and then the death of Seymour is still a sensitive subject for Dickens scholars.

Dickens and his publishers had been at pains to play down Seymour. In a later edition Dickens wrote: "Mr Seymour never originated or suggested an incident, a phrase, or a word, to be found in the book."

Jarvis, who hunted down the gravestone, is a member of the Dickens Fellowship, and is working on a biography of Seymour. He traced an 1889 magazine report noting "the painfully neglected condition" of the grave at St Mary Magdalene in Islington, London. Gravestones were later removed to the church crypt, where Jarvis found Seymour's by torchlight.

The stone's three-line inscription just records Seymour's name, age and date of death. Jarvis believes Seymour's family fell into poverty, and could not afford to add later deaths to the stone. The suicide blighted their lives, he says, leading indirectly to the suicide by drowning of his son, whose landlady recorded the piteous remark that he was so lonely he thought he would go insane.

Jarvis felt he owed it to Seymour not to abandon this single memorial to another century in darkness. It took him five years to get permission to move the stone to Doughty Street, a move which he sees as both honouring Seymour and righting a historic wrong.

At the museum, which is planning celebrations for the bicentenary of Dickens' birth in 1812, the director, Florian Schweizer, said: "We welcome the monument as an important addition to our collections – but I don't think one can blame Dickens for his death at all."

Scholars doubt recently-cleaned canvas is work of Italian master as Vatican newspaper changes its mind about initial attribution

Art officials today unveiled the painting at the centre of the latest Caravaggio mystery, after the Vatican newspaper suggested and then denied that the canvas was the work of the Italian master.

The Martyrdom of St Lawrence will now be subjected to X-rays and other analyses to evaluate its attribution. But art officials and scholars attending the unveiling felt the painting looked less like a Caravaggio than the work of one or more of his followers.

"It's a very interesting painting but I believe we can rule out – at least for now – that it's a Caravaggio," said art superintendent Rossella Vodret. "The quality of the painting doesn't hold up."

Vodret theatrically opened the curtain on the painting in a Jesuit church in Rome, revealing a canvas dominated by the figure of St Lawrence being grilled to death, his three executioners in the backdrop.

The 183 cm by 130.5 cm (72in x 51in) painting was recently cleaned and features the dramatic chiaroscuro typical of Caravaggio and his school.

The Vatican newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano, set the art world aflutter last week with a front page article headlined "A New Caravaggio".

The article made clear that the attribution was uncertain and that further tests were required. But the definitive-sounding headline, and the fact that the claim was made on the day marking the 400th anniversary of the master's death, raised expectations. The Vatican has in the past announced such art-world news in L'Osservatore, sometimes coinciding with an anniversary.

But on Monday the newspaper reversed its position and published an article by the Vatican's top art historian shooting down the claim. Under the front page headline "A New Caravaggio? Not really", Vatican museums chief Antonio Paolucci wrote that the work was not of Caravaggio's quality and described it as "modest" at best.

The painting, which belongs to the Jesuit order, had been kept for years in a private room in the Chiesa del Gesu in Rome, said the church's rector, the Rev Daniele Libanori. When the cleaning process revealed an interesting work, art officials were called in.

But Libanori said the original claim in L'Osservatore came as a surprise to the Jesuits, too.

Mystery still surrounds the history of the canvas. Libanori was secretive about its origin, declining to say what city or Jesuit venue the painting had come from.

Vodret argued that the most interesting element is the position and perspective of the saint, who is shown on the grill, one arm extended, his figure illuminated. Such unique iconography might have suggested the hand of Caravaggio, known for depicting scenes from unusual angles.

Vodret also pointed out that the hand of one of the executioners, holding a stick to keep the saint down, is of good quality. But she and the other experts noted that certain elements were poor, such as the bodies of the executioners, the cloth covering Lawrence, and one of the saint's legs, which appears to be awkwardly attached to the torso.

"The leg looks like a frog's leg. Caravaggio would never have made such a mistake," said Marco Bona Castellotti, an art historian. Even as he saw the painting for the first time at today's unveiling, he had no doubt it was not by Caravaggio.

Experts believe the work may have been done by a follower, perhaps in Naples, Sicily or Malta, all places where the painter spent time during his tumultuous life.

Caravaggio died in mysterious circumstances in a Tuscan coastal town in 1610, and a group of Italian researchers said recently that they had identified his remains.

Tests on The Martyrdom of St Lawrence will begin in September, accompanied by research of archives and documents in order to trace the history of the painting and learn who commissioned it. The research will take several months.

Leading figures warn that cutting investment in the arts, which have thrived over the past decade, will affect economic recovery

Artists and arts chiefs from north-east England joined forces yesterday to warn of the dangerous impact of "deep or hasty" funding cuts.

The north-east has been a cultural success story over the past decade, from the arrival of the Baltic for contemporary art and the Sage for music to theatrical success at Northern Stage and Live Theatre.

Yesterday playwright Lee Hall, who wrote Billy Elliot and the Broadway-bound The Pitmen Painters, said huge cuts for arts organisations would be "economically and culturally disastrous". He said arts investment returns much more to the economy than it takes out. "Theatre in Britain is an economic powerhouse and the VAT on the West End alone brings in more than the subsidy – it's simply crazy and short-sighted to cut off the blood supply. Nearly every commercial cultural project providing jobs for thousands of people was in some way initially funded by government subsidy. This is a cultural disaster and economic insanity. I strongly urge Jeremy Hunt and the coalition government to think again."

Erica Whyman, CEO of Northern Stage, said: "Of course times are tough, but modest and reliable investments in the arts in this region have reaped enormous rewards. We couldn't have brought to the stage Peter Flannery's Our Friends in the North, the work of Robert Lepage or Peter Brook, or even Kneehigh without it, and these artists have put Newcastle and Gateshead on the international map and attracted new audiences. This summer we premiered the first stage adaptation of Apples by Middlesbrough writer Richard Milward, acclaimed by the press as the next Irvine Welsh. Young people queued round the block to see the play. This is what makes the north-east a vibrant and optimistic place to live. A cultural sector allowed to thrive could play a significant role in our economic recovery."

Flannery joined the chorus. He said: "This economic situation needs to be approached rationally. It would not be rational of the coalition to make deep cuts into the relatively modest budget for arts subsidy in a place like the north-east. It's a given that this cultural investment repays the local economy and the national exchequer many times over.

"Here's an example. We filmed the first seven episodes of Inspector George Gently in the Irish Republic. This year we brought the series to its natural home in the north-east of England. This was made possible by a small but significant investment from the Northern Media Fund. In return much of the show's £2m budget was spent in the area and taxes flowed to the UK Revenue. Without that investment, it is quite possible that future episodes of the series will once again be filmed out of the country.

"It makes about as much sense for government to cut arts subsidy in the region as it does for George Gently to roam around the Irish countryside pretending he's in Northumberland."

There is a genuine fear that the October spending review could turn the clock back in the north-east. Godfrey Worsdale, director of Baltic, said: "What has happened in the north-east in recent years is nothing short of remarkable. Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, alongside its partner institutions, has been instrumental in delivering the highest quality, international artistic offer into a region of the UK not previously well known for its cultural credentials. A decade or so along that road not only sees the incredible evolution of the north-east's own creative talents, but a tangible transformation of the character of the region."

The Sage's director, Anthony Sargent, said: "In the past 10 years the north-east has developed one of the most vibrant and exciting cultural offers in the UK, thanks to the substantial strategic investment in the region's capital infrastructure. That investment, together with a period of consistent, stable support has built a really strong arts community as well as encouraging local donors, philanthropists and businesses to add their own support. Those firm foundations now enable local creative talent to flourish as well as enabling us to welcome some of the world's greatest artists to visit and work in the region at prices within the reach of the local community."

To kick off a summer of new talent, our celebrated cartoonist defends the innate unruliness of his art against a world of spin

Sometimes life at the cartoon face can be tough, but not that tough. Nobody's shooting at you, though some of the comments on our website can feel like that. It is important to take a break, though, from the relentlessness of daily double deadlines; so when I asked Martin Rowson if he could cover for me this summer and he said he was busy working on his new version of Gulliver's Travels, a problem arose.

Martin came up with an elegant solution. We are both constantly badgered by young cartoonists waiting for us to die (as indeed Martin himself once urged me to), as well as editors complaining about how difficult it is to find fresh talent. He suggested using our longer than normal holiday period of six weeks to showcase some of the talent we know full well to be out there.

Political cartooning has no strict career path and no particular age or gender limit, in spite of the obvious fact that all the leading newspaper practitioners are white, male, middle class and getting on a bit. The six we chose are the best we know of. They range between 19 and 48; three women and three men and with an uncanny ability to think, draw, make a point and even have a laugh. Doing all these things simultaneously and hitting a deadline is more than a little challenging.

I was very fortunate when I first approached the Guardian, way back in the mists of time in 1981. They happened to be looking for a homegrown strip to run alongside Doonesbury. I'd been doing strips in children's comics, in lefty magazines and latterly a weekly strip for Time Out called Maggie's Farm. But a daily cartoon is a much more difficult proposition. When I went to meet the then editor, Peter Preston, and he invited me to do a month's trial, I was thrilled to bits, then terrified. The deal was that they would pay me to do the strip for four weeks, and if they liked them, they would use me. My first faltering efforts at the If… strip were never actually published, and I'd been doing a strip six days a week for nine years before I ever got to do a "big one" on the Comment page in November 1990.

For me, cartooning in this position in this paper is the best job in the world. Not only does it mean I get to draw and paint everyday, but it also presents a perfect opportunity to shout back at the torrent of preposterous rubbish issuing from radio, television and any other media yet to be devised every single minute of every day. There is nothing quite so satisfying as turning politicians into cartoon characters and then, capriciously, insolently, toying with their fate.

It does require a certain arrogance to sit in judgment over the great and good, as well as the not so good and the less great who rule our lives, but I've had a political agenda as long as my arm since I was in flared trousers, and have never been expected to express any point of view other than my own. The fact that I've been trusted by the Guardian to do it for so long is something for which I am eternally grateful. Yet the very nature of what I do compels me to not only bite but despise the hand that feeds me.

I've worked for the paper from the days when I regarded it as a bourgeois, SDP-loving crapsheet. In some ways nothing has changed, except that nowadays the SDP-lovers would be considered far too leftwing. There is a kind of innate unruliness in a cartoon that disrupts the carefully laid-out and authoritative design lines of the modern newspaper. It has to be autonomous and speak for itself, floating on a sea of text, but more often than not directly contradicting that which surrounds it. It can be read in an instant or digested at length. It can cause paroxysms of laughter, love and loathing – or comment simply and eloquently without any words at all.

Yet the cartoon is often thought of as trivialising issues and contributing to a growing cynicism about politics and politicians. It is also resented because of its licence to be the very antithesis of responsible journalism. This is in part a result of prejudice. Cartoons and comics are regarded by some as irredeemably vulgar, the humour coarse and imagery frequently scatological. Cartoonists, it would seem, are not fully developed psychologically, and remain fixated on faeces and bodily fluids. I would maintain that – while fully understanding that people don't wish to be put off their breakfast – if you are unable to laugh at your own waste products you may be the one with the psychological problem.

I would also assert that it is politics itself that makes people cynical. When manifest drivel like the "big society" goes through a whole election campaign largely unchallenged, cynicism is the only healthy response. Far from being a growing irrelevance within the dying medium of printed newspapers, there never has been a greater need for cartooning. While politics is so obsessed with image control, cartoonists are uniquely placed to take such imagery apart and reassemble it in whatever ludicrous or intriguing manner they think fit.

This is not only taking the piss; it is a vital and necessary part of our democracy.

Nonetheless, the way cartoons work is still a mystery to me, though I've been doing them professionally for more than 30 years. What I do know is that a cartoon can hinge on the slightest detail, and discovering whether a drawing works or not (which you can only judge on seeing it, in cold print, the day after you've drawn it) is a constant source of delight. You have to try things out, and you do have to take some risks. Strangely, there are times when you need to dare to be bleeding obvious (as happened with the first big one I ever did for the paper, after Geoffrey Howe's resignation speech put paid to Margaret Thatcher). Quite often those turn out to be the best and most effective of all.

This is something of a baptism of fire for our posse of cartoonists, but over the next six weeks you will see something very special in development. Their styles are all very strong and distinctive. It may turn out to be professionally suicidal for Martin and I to encourage such talent, rather than break its fingers, but we think you will agree that the future of political cartooning in this paper is assured for some time to come.

Buckingham Palace has launched an account with the online photo management site, streaming images of recent engagements and archive pictures from the Royal Collection