Anthony Earnshaw

English artist, author, illustrator and self-styled "armchair anarchist".

Earnshaw was born in Ilkley, West Yorkshire. He attended Harehills School and left at the age of 14.

After school, he worked as an engineering fitter. Later, he was a lathe turner and indoor crane driver, while educating himself at Leeds City Library.

Aged 20, he became interested in surrealism, and with his lifelong friend, Eric Thacker devised surreal activities such as boarding and alighting from buses and trains at random.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, he met several like-minded people, including: Patrick Hughes, Ian Breakwell, John Lyle and George Melly.

Patrick Hughes persuaded Earnshaw to hold a retrospective at the Leeds Institute Gallery in 1966, which was followed by  invitation by John Lyle, to show work in an exhibition in Exeter, “The Enchanting Domain”.

He met Gail Earnshaw in 1968 with whom he collaborated and showed work in a series of  ‘Another G n T’ exhibitions. They married in 1985.

After leaving factory work in 1967, he began part-time teaching at Harrogate School of Art, then Bradford College of Art.

In 1972 he took up a fellowship at Leeds Polytechnic, Fine Art Department.

He left teaching in 1985 to concentrate on making art, writing aphorisms and making boxed assemblage.

In 1968 he collaborated with Eric Thacker on an illustrated novel, Musrum, published by Jonathan Cape, London, which became a cult classic. It was followed by a sequel, Wintersol, 1971, and Seven Secret Alphabets,1972.

Other publications include a cartoon, in the Times Educational Supplement, a wheeled bird named Wokker.

His work is in many private and public collections.

The Tate purchased an early work in 2012.