“You wanna see a horse?”

In a strange way, Ralph Steadman’s career owes a lot to horses. I’m speaking to him via Skype, and he’s in his studio in Kent, England, the same one seen in the Johnny Depp documentary For No Good Reason and the short 30 for 30 film Gonzo @ the Derby that ESPN will air this weekend to correspond with this year’s equine extravaganza at Churchill Downs.

In 1970, Steadman was a rising star illustrator who, thanks to the geniuses at the short-lived magazine Scanlan’s, hooked up with the radical, self-aggrandizing and acutely insightful “gonzo” journalist Hunter S. Thompson. Thompson was a local Kentucky boy who had already found notoriety living among the Hell’s Angels biker gang. Steadman was a British weirdo whose exaggerated characterizations (“filthy scribblings, Hunter called them”) would capture the “horrible face” of what these counter-culture punks considered the ultimate squaresville display of excess: the Kentucky Derby. The pair continued to work together until Thompson’s suicide in 2005.

The poster for Gonzo @ the Derby, featuring Steadman’s illustration.

That first collaboration, “The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved” (which can be read in Thompson’s The Great Shark Hunt collection that you no doubt bought in college, but is also available in probably legal form here, is a legendary piece of journalism/literature/sociology/comedy, as Gonzo @ the Derby (and its many talking-head subjects like Sean Penn) make clear.

“I’ve never been back to Churchill Downs,” Steadman tells me, but he continues to lay a bet every year. “I’m [going in] with one called Tip Toe. I don’t know why. That’s a good name for a horse, though.”

Tip Toe does not appear to be competing in this year’s race, but I’m not going to be the one who tells him. This was the man who sketched deformed portraits of people in 1970 Kentucky and gave them as gifts, nearly causing a fight at a Louisville pool hall. “The bloke I was playing billiards with almost gave me a whack with his stick! He thought I insulted his wife!”

Thompson’s story credits Steadman’s hellish illustrations as “sketched with eyebrow pencil and lipstick,” but it turns out this is not an embellishment. Prior to coming to Louisville, the British Steadman was in New York. His editor at Scanlon’s, Donald Goddard, was married to a representative from Revlon, the cosmetics company. Prior to flying to Kentucky, he went out to dinner with them and left his inks in a taxi. But Natalie Goddard had “given me makeups and things, so that’s what I used for the pictures.”

During the boozy euphoria of the race itself, which Thompson described as “thousands of people fainting, crying, copulating, trampling each other and fighting with broken whiskey bottles,” Steadman took a small camera, held it down at his belly, and turned toward the crowd to try and capture the madness. One of the rowdy onlookers angrily shouted, “Hey, buddy, you’re facing the wrong way!”

Despite the somewhat, um, colorful portrayal of Derby-goers, Steadman never heard of any official grievance. “Nobody ever complained, because I think, in a way, they knew it sort of happened.”

A Critical Critters painting of an orangutan. Courtesy of Ralph Steadman.

Today Steadman continues to balance his fine-art career with commercial enterprises. If you’ve ever looked at a bottle of Flying Dog beer and thought the label looked a bit like the cover of Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, that’s because Steadman, almost 80, keeps busy. He’s currently working on a series of paintings called Critical Critters, and had I recorded my Skype session as he showed off those paintings we’d have a short film far stranger than the one broadcasting on ESPN.

“This is a Przewalski’s Horse. P-R-Zed! And I’m trying to remember what the hell this is called … A Humphead Wrasse! You want to see a lion?”

Steadman nearly burst out of his chair showing me photos and paintings of exotic creatures, though he has mixed feelings. “All these critters, we’re trying to save them—they shit everywhere! They don’t use the toilet!” Steadman incorporates what he calls “dirty water” in his splash painting technique. “I’m cheating by letting nature do the work, you can tell people I am a cheat and a liar. Here’s the rhino.” Whether it’s Louisville blue bloods or the animal kingdom, Ralph Steadman isn’t afraid to go gonzo.