Cirrus@Austlit

Tohby Riddle says his early career as a cartoonist at The Good Weekend was instrumental in developing his 'a habit for looking for ideas and generating them through different ways of thinking' (8). An 'art school graduate with an interest in architecture' city-scapes, buildings, and alleys form a common link in his work, a fascination Riddle says, 'began from the age of twelve or thirteen, when we moved closer to the city from a fairly bushy area north of Sydney Harbour' (9). Roy points out that Riddle's work conveys 'a certain lightness and joy' that makes his urban landscapes 'light and myterious' rather than'dark and unnerving' which Riddle arrtibutes to his love of cities eventually developing into an interest in 'the archetypal metropolis' (9-10). Riddle says, "I want my cities to appear as places where so many things are going on at once rather than some type of dystopian nightmare...reality is ambiguous and random and chaotic, and if you can just get a nice authentic slice of that into a book, then it bears repreated readings, repeated discussions about the possibilities of the meanings...' (10).