KATE GREENAWAY MEDAL interview for ‘Books for Keeps’, UK, 2020
An interview following the announcement of Tales from the Inner City as the winner of the Kate Greenaway Medal for illustration.
Exploration of the relationship between the urban and the wild feels very topical and timely. What has nature meant to you? How did you decide on the animals to feature?
In a way, animals chose me. I write and doodle plenty of different things in small sketchbooks, and some of these congeal into little stories on the page, where one thing connects with another to form a narrative. Most don’t, but some do. And those that do often feature animals, which you can see in other stories long before this collection. In Tales from Outer Suburbia, for instance, there’s a blind reindeer, a water buffalo in a vacant lot, dogs, turtles, cats, even a dugong beached on a front lawn. It could be that animals are just such a fun, provocative and even easy entry point into telling human stories, their presence has a way of instantly puncturing one reality and letting in another, of entering a realm of dreams and ancient history. This might be why animals are the mainstay of human storytelling, from ice-age cave drawings to children’s literature in the 21st century. They are the backbone of early human imagination and mythology. Perhaps it’s the ability to displace emotion and thought onto another, which can loosen up themes and render them universal. Perhaps it’s an even deeper memory of being other animals ourselves. After all, we weren’t always homo sapiens.
At a more personal level, our daughter was born around the time I first started thinking about Tales from the Inner City, in 2013. As she grew our family spent a lot of time at Melbourne Zoo, which was just down the road, and I realised how much of early childhood revolves around images of animals (there was a lot of pram-pushing and time to think about it). Not just the zoo, but all of her board books were about animals, not people, and particularly African megafauna, as if there’s some deep memory about that, so deep even a baby can recognise it. At the same time, we live in a very urban, very human landscape of inner Melbourne, seeing none of those animals first-hand (except of course at the zoo, in quite contrived and mediated conditions). How strange, I kept thinking. I wondered if our abstracted urban existence actually ferments a deep longing for the things we have moved away from; the deserts, the jungles, plains and wild coasts of very old ancestral memory. What if those things started coming back into the city, how would we feel? How would we react? This was my starting point for writing and painting. I started with crocodiles filling an entire floor of a skyscraper, an idea that occurred while waiting too long for a tram in the city centre, and everything just flowed out from there. Conceptually, it did not require much force. It felt very natural to write these stories and paint these images, maybe more so than anything else I’ve worked on to date.
I should also mention that I’m a West Australian boy, and it’s hard to grow up in that state without a strong sensory experience of nature, whether the forested southwest or the arid north, the vast inland desert, the endless beaches. Our family spent a lot of time fishing, crabbing, prawning, basically killing a whole lot of edible creatures – and there’s a remorseful story about that in the book. But that same foraging also nurtured a sensitivity to the landscape, its texture and connections and its seasonal changes. Also a fearful respect, of the sea, of fires, of storms and the sheer scale of things, both in space and time, how old things were. I spent a lot of time as a teenager painting the coast (often while my family was fishing), becoming more and more aware of how tiny and transplanted I was as a well-clothed, well-fed human. A lot of those early paintings show huge granite outcrops tumbling into the sea, with human beachcombers so small they are a dot of paint, a little interloper, you’d miss them if you blinked. I was also reading plenty of science fiction under those same outcrops, and the stories I now write are possible a fusion of these mismatched experiences. Or not so mismatched.
The book’s design really adds to the visual experience with its use of justified text creating parallels with the brutalist architecture and white space adding to the drama and suspense of the spreads. How involved were you able to be in the process of design and layout for the book? How important do these aspects feel to the overall reader experience?
Much of the design is thanks to the wonderful Nghiem Ta, with whom I’ve worked previously on a number of projects in the UK. We work together quite closely and are always on the same page, so to speak. The intention was to keep things fairly simple, following the principle of text and illustrations being cleanly separated, which is not actually common for me. I usually enjoy mixing them up, as in Tales from Outer Suburbia, which also has a variety of styles, like a fun magazine employing different illustrators. But as Tales from the Inner City evolved, the style of the paintings became more uniform, a kind of dreamlike naturalism, and while there’s a variation in tone between stories, they all seem to come from the same world, they are disciplined by a common idea, of an animal entering an urban space. The layout of these elements is very much about shaping an experience for the reader, particularly a clean and uncluttered space for their own thoughts. It’s also as if the words are for our literate, culturally trained selves, and the pictures are for our more elemental, wordless selves, hence the separation. The beauty of books is that they move backwards and forwards quite easily, they have no specific duration, they invite re-reading, re-looking. The use of space in design helps that along too. There are absences, missing connections, things that the reader needs to come in and fill with their own speculation, their own imagination. It’s a book of gaps and silences, in spite of being my most wordy publication.
The illustrations have extraordinary composition with incredibly thoughtful and well-considered points of view and perspective that draws the reader in, can you tell us a little about how you achieve that?
Thanks for that appreciation. It’s fairly intuitive and I’m not always sure of the reasons until later. As a younger illustrator I used to think carefully about perspective, angles, things like that in a very conscious way, how they convey meaning or point of view, but now I generally just work in a daydreaming kind of way, listening to whatever elements form as subconscious whispers. Doodling quickly with a ballpoint pen in cheap notebooks – so as not to feel like important art – does seem to help. Maybe that’s the benefit of experience, like a musician that’s spent enough time with his or her instrument, you can think more in terms of an emotional flow than something architectural or calculated. So I have these vague mental or doodled pictures, and then set about finding real-world references that might draw them more sharply into focus. At least that’s the conceptual part.
Realising an image, especially a realistic one, then requires a bit more engineering. With this book I used a lot of physical models to do that. Some were actually animal toys, placed in little cardboard rooms or forests make of sticks and coloured paper, lit with desk-lamps, photographed, printed out and painted over to develop preliminary ideas. In the case of the lungfish story, I sculpted, cast and painted a whole bunch of plaster, human-faced fish, arranged them carefully on a table, and that became the basis for the illustration. Light becomes a critical element; I believe painting is essentially thinking about light and shadow, and using physical objects means you can play with that a great deal. In recent years I’ve been using objects and sculptured figures more and more as the basis for paintings, my recent book about office drudgery, Cicada, was as much sculpted as painted, most time spend sculpting a big insect and building tiny office spaces from cardboard. It’s a wonderful way of playing with composition, returning to a kind of sandbox play with toys, and realising those visualisation processes are some of the best. Not just entertaining and fun, but very skilled and engaging a range of senses, not to mention potent memories of childhood.
So the resulting sketches are a combination of drawing, photography and digital manipulation. I will use any kind of material that works, and they can often look incredibly scrappy, a sort of illustrator’s equivalent to a doctor’s prescription. But all the spirit of a final painting should be there, a condensation of visual notes. Then begins the process of translating that onto a larger canvas, adding finer details. The paintings for Tales for the Inner City are the largest I’ve ever done for a book, most images being set on canvases about 150cm by 100cm. I used oil paint, the medium with which I’m most comfortable, mainly because it’s quite forgiving when you change your mind – easy to repaint, wipe off, glaze. It’s also a slow medium, it suits the pace of my thinking. One reason for the large scale was my love of using big palette knives, scrapers and shower squeegees to put down rough swathes of paint using whole arm gestures, instead of just the wrist. These are great for creating unpredictable effects and textures, whether it be the stains of concrete walls, forest undergrowth, a rising black wave or the dreamlife of a hippo. This is why I love paint, it always slips out of your control a bit, and the older I get, the more I want it to do just that, to embrace more accidents. To approach a more natural, spontaneous, less contrived state of image-making.
Alongside the spreads, there are stencilled silhouettes of the characters which feel a little like stencilled tags, can you tell us how the idea for thee arose and whether these were influenced by urban art?
Yes, very much so. The thing about stencil graffiti is that it has such a wonderful ghostly presence. It puts me to mind of the human shadow etched in stone, found after the Hiroshima bombing, but also less violently of fossils, the leaves of a fern or an ancient fish that you might find in split shale. My one older brother grew up absolutely obsessed with palaeontology – he turned his bedroom into a museum with this amazing backlit wall display – and his obsessions have always had a strong influence on me. I once asked him about the fascination with fossils and rocks, and he replied simply that they were older than anyone could imagine, and yet you could hold them in your hand. He was not interested in dinosaurs, much to my junior disappointment, because they weren’t old enough! He preferred fish and molluscs from around 500 million years ago. More recently I’ve been thinking how everything is old. How our bodies are old, are actually related to those early fossils, how all animals are just really, really, ancient. The endurance of their evolving forms in time and space is just remarkable. And yet here they are, going extinct one by one, in a rapid decline, after all those ages of survival. I wanted my silhouettes to have some resonance of that, of contemporary fossils, of something that might one day be little more than a memory, a tag on a wall, perhaps uncovered in the rubble by some future archaeologist. Animal shadow etched in stone.
On page 217 you describe ‘the crazy fluke of existence’. In many ways, that feels to encompasses much of your work, that sense of wonder, awe and the unusual. An emotional reaction or stimuli that provokes depth of internal thinking and understanding around things which are external to us. There is something exciting and vibrant around this type of ‘engaged’ reading of art… What captures your attention in conveying these ‘crazy flukes’?
Interesting you point that out, I thought about that particular phrase a lot after scribbling it in a notebook. I guess going back to my brother’s fossils, he was very interested in the accidents of evolution too, the gamble of it, and how we humans are one thread of many possible living outcomes. Then how amazing to have the consciousness to look upon ourselves and recognise this crazy fluke, that we are improbable, that everything around us is highly improbable, and basically miraculous. It’s funny, because it’s not an idea you can hold in your head very long, everything soon reverts back to the normal, everyday problems, of common things and quotidian experiences. But I love any art, science or simple conversation that triggers again that latent realisation, that everything is actually bizarre and unusual, that we are only tricked into thinking that it isn’t, lulled into a fog, the way we take weird dreams for granted in our sleep, hypnotised by provisional realities. I suppose your question is: how do we get to those moments of wonderful awareness? That’s also a question I’m constantly asking myself.
Drawing in a sketchbook is certainly one way, such as the sharp observation of an object in real life, a landscape, a person’s face, a simple glass of water. The more you study things in stillness, the weirder they become. The more you appreciate their uniqueness as phenomena, rather than just recognisable or useful things of preconceived value. They become special. The other kind of drawing that works is random doodling, a bit like finding shapes in clouds. The fact that lines do funny things, create odd illusions on the page, means they open up a kind of conversation with reality, and then again you tune into the special qualities of that reality, a reality of memory. Words and writing of course do the same.
Interestingly, a new way of looking at things also happens with accidents of perception. Things like misheard phrases or contextual errors. The story in Tales about horses, for instance, came from a comment our two-year-old daughter made during a night drive. She called out ‘elephants running!’ and I could see her looking up at passing electrical wires. To me it immediately conjured the image of animals running alongside us, or ghosts of animals on wires. She was actually commenting on the music in the car, which perhaps was Henry Mancini’s Baby Elephant Walk, but the error of interpretation was enough to make me think about the history of animals in urban spaces, especially animals used for transport, and so I began researching that, and the story and painting about horses resulted. I believe it takes a little derailing from ordinary thinking to develop any new insight, a little stone on the tracks of our neural networks. Otherwise it’s quite hard to break with programming.
‘We searched for words that didn’t exist, wondered why we needed them so badly, then went home.’ P67 This feels almost a mission statement for what illustration can achieve and for its directness. What are the qualities in illustration that make it an exciting form through which to express yourself and how does this inform your work?
I think as you say, that directness. It hits you all in one go – pop! – and then works at you slowly if it’s a good illustration, revealing further layers, like a map of experience rather than a storyline. But more than that, I think the attraction to illustration is that it can show very precisely things that are hard or too laborious to explain in words. In a book like The Arrival for instance, it’s very hard to describe the strange details of a new city if you had to write about them, and that would also take away some of that strangeness, it would diminish it, so I dropped all words completely.
I’m basically very interested in the experience of seeing something for the first time and not knowing at all what it is. I’m fascinated by first contact stories between civilisations, by how toddlers or any other young animals engage with new sights, sounds and experiences, and how they must do so without language. I also like to see what a reader will make of things, such as in the ‘Dog’ story in Tales from the Inner City, when you remove much of the narrative and just show the same landscape changing over aeons. It’s probably what also attracts me to children’s literature as a genre that I find myself in, that it’s all about elemental experiences, pretty raw, undescribed experiences that have yet to be processed and named. Sometimes they can’t be named, but you can still draw and paint them very precisely. Anything from migrant stories to the inner worlds of animals.
Was there a particular story that you enjoyed and, conversely one that you found more challenging than others? Why was this?
I think I enjoyed the story about the moonfish the most, and it’s the image that features on the cover. Perhaps because it drew on a lot of childhood memories of night fishing, of catching and cleaning fish – there’s a long description there about gutting a huge fish on a kitchen table, which is based on many summers of doing just that. Interestingly, the shortest stories were often the most challenging to write, which is often the case with picture books, every word is like a chess move, but the one I struggled with the most is also one that ended up being pretty simple and unassuming, about pigeons. Which is really about money.
I’ve long been fascinated by the subject of money as a kind of mass-delusion, thing of fictional value that works only if we all imagine the same thing at the same time. I heard a podcast once about stone coins on the Pacific Island of Yap as an excellent illustration of this; these carved coins became so big, you couldn’t easily carry them around; they would just sit by the road and everyone knew (and agreed) who owned what. One time such a big coin fell from a canoe to the bottom of the sea, irretrievably. But everyone knew it was there, and continued to trade it! It’s such a perfect example of the economy we find ourselves in today, trading objects of value that don’t really exist, and it cuts to the core of what’s wrong with our relationship to nature. It’s become almost entirely abstracted. And also susceptible to sudden collapse: all it takes is for people to stop believing in the fictional value of something like the stock market. Which, as you can imagine, is alarmingly easy, because it isn’t real.
I wanted to compress this tale of Yap economics into a story, and tried so many times to do so, but it always felt forced. In the end I settled on another idea that had been haunting me for years, of a building in the air that nobody can enter, except pigeons. Everybody believes it is the most valuable real estate in the world, but it’s actually quite decrepit and filled floor to ceiling with bird poo. It’s my version of the giant coin at the bottom of the sea; also a subtle comment on the high-end art market, but that’s another story!
Anyway, the most interesting thing about that sunken Yap coin is that it probably now supports all manner of coral and fish, so has actually acquired material value in the real world, that is, the world of nature. In the same way that pigeons and pigeon poo is actually valuable for an ecosystem – it’s the real treasure, the central irony of that story. Anyway, it’s interesting the way stories twist and turn, and resist all efforts to lecture on a theme, to engineer a message. At the end of the day they must be poetic, open to interpretation, and fun. Just like pigeons in a floating building. But hey, I just got my chance to prattle about the stone coins of Yap, so I’m happy now!
You’ve obviously been awarded numerous accolades including the prestigious Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award, how important are awards to the sector at large and what have they meant to you as a creator?
They are, among other things, hugely consoling. I don’t know about other writers and artists, but I’m in a state of constant doubt about the quality, or at least the accessibility of my paintings and stories, especially when they are experimental. When you win an award, it’s like someone tapping you on the shoulder as saying, you’re not crazy, we like this too! Of course, if you’re lucky you receive such praise from friends, peers and readers, and those encouraging compliments are each like a small award after a work is published. But the more formal awards signal that your work has entered a bigger cultural conversation, that it touches a pool of other notable works, the chain of thoughts that make a society what it is, and that’s extremely gratifying, massively encouraging. As I mentioned in my Kate Greenaway acceptance speech, it’s the feeling of not being alone, and not just for the creator, but readers and fans of a work also, especially young ones.
At a more material level, awards have been critical throughout my career in developing a readership, and being able to support myself as an artist. That’s especially true when I started out. It’s very hard for young writers and illustrators to be noticed enough to cover their rent, especially if they are creating unusual work. I remember winning a Children’s Book Council of Australia award for The Rabbits in my early twenties, a very odd book that drew mixed reactions (and even some hate mail) and feeling immensely relieved that it would at least rescue that work from obscurity. It meant that I could also perhaps earn a little more, both royalties and publishing trust, to allow me to continue making picture books, because my income as a freelancer was pretty dire at the time. I still feel indebted to those judges, because it wasn’t an easy decision and they copped a bit of grief for it, albeit for superficial political reasons. Australia can be a pretty racist country and that book was quite frank about its history, a long and under-acknowledged civil war between original landowners and new settlers.
The Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award was also a significant moment for me, receiving international recognition from a well-read jury, and comparable to the Kate Greenaway in that regard. It involved a fair amount of cultural exchange with Swedish institutions and other book creators, from which I learned a great deal, particularly how children’s literature can acquire mainstream respect in a nation that does not isolate it as a genre, that celebrates the direct connection with adult imagination and maturity. Every award is an opportunity for a bigger conversation, of seeing the links between one book or set of paintings those of others. In practical terms they also draw together a lot of creators, so I’ve gotten to know many of my peers, especially internationally, through the attention of awards committees, and been introduced to a wider world of writing, illustration and animation.
Kate Greenaway is awarded for outstanding illustration, what qualities do you think make illustration outstanding and how important is it for children and young people?
Gosh, that’s that big question! I guess the word outstanding, broken down, means work that stands out, maybe stands apart a little bit. It’s very hard to put one’s finger on what that is, either in the noise of a book fair or the silence of one’s own desk, but you know it when you see it. It just grabs your attention and demands a second look, then and third, a fourth. Other work may not strike you immediately, but will reward sustained attention, will keep on paying dividends. I think that’s basically the measure of good illustration, if you can keep returning to it again and again, seeing different things, sustaining a certain fire of joy or disturbance, something you could hang on your wall forever and be perfectly happy to see it every morning. But there are no set rules for what that is, it doesn’t even have to be well drawn. To be honest, I’m still trying to figure that out – what makes an outstanding illustration.
How important it is for children and young people? Probably best to ask them individually. But to hazard a guess, I would say simple inspiration. Certainly the feedback I get from most young people involves them wanting to let me know that I’ve inspired them to draw and write. I really appreciate that, because it reminds me of the way I was inspired by other artists and writers as a young person. Just that feeling of mind-opening excitement when certain images reveal a whole new way of looking at the world. I think that’s probably the greatest contribution of illustrated books, especially where the reader is aware that they are created by individuals, people not so different from themselves. It inspires further creativity. Each good book is saying ‘look at what you can do with little more than words and drawings’. It’s an invitation to be an artist, the artist that I believe everybody is, regardless of whether they practice a craft. Just using imagination to test your experience of the world, to see things from other points of view, that makes you an artist.
The mission statement for the awards is to ‘inspire and empower the next generation to create a better world through books and reading.’ To what extent do you feel stories and art are able to act as agents of change?
Good question. I think that basically stories are the way that humans think about complex issues. We are an animal that thinks through story. That probably goes back a very long way, where stories, as a chain of events involving various places, characters and emotions, allowed successive generation to remember very big and complex things. Indigenous Australians are particularly good at this, and have been for thousands of years, understanding an intricate and vast geography through songlines and dreaming stories, connecting narrative directly with the land.
In other contexts, I believe stories have a similar function, they lay down ‘dreaming tracks’ in the mind, provide examples of possible outcomes to possible problems. When faced with a difficult situation, we may well be reminded of an anecdote, a book, a film or any story that suggests a way forward, and the principles to follow – particularly ideas about truth, integrity and empathy. That last one is the most important. Stories are basically about empathy, of imagining what it would be like to be someone else. And then recognising that there is no single story – contrary to fundamentalist thinking – but thousands, well, billions. Lots of different ways that things can go, including ways you cannot yet conceive of. Isn’t that why we read? To see something play out that we could not have imagined alone, to be curious about that, to want to think about it carefully. That’s a very good thing to be interested in. That open-mindedness will help you adapt to whatever life throws at you. And it’s going to throw a lot, the good, the bad, the incomprehensible, the downright depressing. How can you take that all in and still move forward?
You’ve spoken in the past about unease with the term ‘illustration’ it does feel to subjugate the art and misunderstands the dialectic of the relationship between narrative, language and art, are there better or more apt terms?
Of course, the definitions of words broaden out in time, so it doesn’t really matter – and certainly a century or so of children’s book illustration has helped with that a great deal. Anyone who appreciates it well knows that it is not about literal ‘illustration’. That said, the term is still misleading for a mainstream that does not study it closely, and it leads to economic, educational and institutional divisions which tend to favour other art forms over book illustration.
When I was an art student, it was actually considered a derogatory term. But I would then be confused by those celebrated painters who, to my eye, where creating close equivalents to book illustration… When I visited the Sistine Chapel for instance, it looked a lot like commercial illustration to me, albeit for an unusual client. Actually the majority of painters throughout history are illustrators, especially if you look beyond western modernism. When I look at Ancient Egyptian friezes, cave paintings, medieval tapestries, Aztec codices, Hindu temples, I see illustrated, figurative stories, very close to picture books and comics. Images that show things happening, with implied beginnings, middles and endings. So I tend to think in terms of narrative painting and drawing. Some art is about singular impressions, either abstract or figurative, and others are about specific things happening, they are narrative images, or ‘illustration’. I have similar thoughts about science fiction and fantasy, that it seems to me more of an historical mainstream than a modern subgenre. So much of human visual culture is basically fantasy illustration.
In any case, I think a lot of those straightjackets of language and definition are dissolving as more and more artists, writers, musicians and filmmakers cross over, or work in different fields simultaneously. Also, it’s nice to see that the boundaries between children’s and adult literature are often transgressed, and that my own books have come to be regarded as either-or. I think we spend too much time talking about differences between groups of readers and creators, when really those differences are often just statements of convenience. We are not too different from each other when it comes to appreciating good art.
You’ve experimented significantly with ideas of media and form from your graphic novel, ’The Arrival’ through to the ‘The Singing Bones’ with its use of sculpture? How do you decide the form and media to use for different projects and how easy is it to garner the support of publishers?
I’ve been pretty lucky to have those opportunities, and to work with very adventurous editors and publishers. Occasionally it’s taken a bit of convincing when the medium doesn’t sound intuitively practical – sculpture for instance – but in each case I would do a few experiments to prove a point, a few complete pages of The Arrival or a few sculptures inspired by Grimm’s fairy tales. Largely to check for myself if they work, particularly because it’s a big commitment to make a book, and I have to fully believe in a style and technique before taking that on. I know when it works when it feels logical or intuitively right, when it does not feel like I’m forcing anything.
The analogy that comes to mind is a puppet; you start by pulling the strings, building and controlling, and if it then begins moving by itself you can cut those manipulative strings. The style and medium is working, movement and feeling flows through it naturally. Good editors can see that too, that is what they are skilled in understanding, sometimes even more so than an artist. Often those experiments don’t work, it feels like you are endlessly pulling strings, masking some falseness, and you start again with something else. The Arrival was very much like that, the final pencilled form is very different from an original, cartoony version, and before that a simplified sculptural version. It was very difficult, and I almost gave up on it, but glad that I kept experimenting until I found a relatively simple solution, albeit a very long one!
‘The Arrival’ was chosen as one of the books on the ‘Diverse Voices’ list(incidentally, I Chaired the selection panel for this!) to showcase the 50 best diverse children’s books published in the last 50 years. It has profound messages around displacement. The idea of displacement feels central to much of your work, to what extent has this been motivated by personal experiences and feelings?
You know, that’s a really good question, one I’ve been asked a lot and still struggle a bit to answer. The truth is that I’m not especially displaced, very much a homebody, fairly resistant to change and displacement when I think about it. My life has been relatively comfortable, from a middle-class suburban childhood in Perth to a busy but otherwise peaceful family life in Melbourne, the only migration being between two states of very little cultural difference. That said, I’ve always been surrounded by people who know a great deal about displacement, my parents being quite separated from their extended families either by distance or conflict, and my wife is from Finland. Unless you are Indigenous in Australia, you are an immigrant or the descendants of immigrants. We are a nation overflowing with tales of displacement, both willing and forced; convicts, settlers, runaways and refugees. We celebrate and struggle with this; for all its harmony, the stain of racist injustice runs deep.
In fact, if I do have any personal feelings of displacement, it probably has something to do with certain currents of racism I felt during my childhood, as a half-Asian kid in a suburb of mostly British heritage. There was a bit of a wave of anti-Asian feeling in the 80’s, akin to a recent resurgence sparked by the covid-19 epidemic. I grew up knowing it was always under the surface of backyard barbecues, just waiting for permission to emerge. I think that left quite an impression on me, of feeling a bit different to my peers, if only by the way that I was regarded. I only really noticed my Asian-ness and size (I was unusually short) if I looked in a mirror, or a bully called it out.
It did help me to feel strong empathy with those other kids who were a bit different or socially displaced, I naturally gravitated to them as friends. Ethnic kids, nerds, disabled kids, gay kids, kids from odd backgrounds. But the more I thought about it, the more I realised everyone feels displaced in one way or another, a bit anxious about their relationship to a place, even to themselves. It was perhaps just more openly obvious for some, more fully realised. In some ways the outsiders had a head start in thinking about individuality, of not being able to coast along so sheepishly with the mainstream. I suspect a lot of them became quite creative or entrepreneurial people, if they survived all the slings and arrows. I certainly know that all my friends who are artists and writers now often talk about feeling at odds with their home, marginalised in one way or another, of being forced to find their own ideology in a sense. Perhaps I’m the same.
How many countries is your work published in and do you feel illustration provides a universal language – have there been changes made to editions in other territories?
Certainly, the beauty of illustration is its ability to bypass differences of languages, especially if you are showing work, say at an international book fair. I’m not sure how writers manage that, it must be trickier to court an audience as immediately, even if you have a brilliant manuscript. Certain The Arrival was a breakthrough book for me internationally, perhaps because you didn’t need to translate a thing, and a foreign publisher could decide quite immediately if they were interested or not. Not only does it lack words, it lacks cultural specificity, being set in a fictional country. I think since that work came out in 2006, I’ve been published in about 20 languages and many more territories, with growing interest in my older books which, thank goodness, have stood the test of time. Perhaps because their surrealism is pretty universal and enduring when it comes to interpretation. It helps that I consciously avoid things like mobile phones and koalas!
Of course, it’s hard to know what changes may have been made, especially to text. My Dad, who is Chinese, has noted clear stylistic differences between mainland Chinese and Taiwanese translations, so that’s interesting, and we all know translation is no simple thing, it’s essentially rewriting. But generally speaking there have not been big variations on the illustrations – again, perhaps because of the lack of cultural specificity in landscapes and characters. Some illustrations have been flipped, such as for Arabic editions (where the whole book is reversed) or to resolve a matter of a steering wheel being on the wrong side of a vehicle. That can look strange to me because I realise I have a right-eye bias (many artists do), all my pictures lean slightly to the right! But I’m pleased to say that many colloquialisms have remained, and translators have asked me about things like imaginary slang and made an effort to come up with equivalents. I’ve been most impressed by those publishers who have seamlessly replaced English words embedded in illustrations, or handwritten in different styles, with perfect native equivalents. They’ve been very patient and respectful, which speaks of a love for what they do, and I’m sure their respective readers appreciate it. I also try to help them with cover designs too, for instance, reworking the foreign titles for Tales from the Inner City personally, using my own library of hand-made elements. I really love the foreign editions, they are among my favourites, because they look unfamiliar to me. In a perfect world, The Arrival would not even have a legible title, and the editions in languages that I’m totally unfamiliar with – Polish, Korean, Turkish – best capture the feeling I was chasing, for me at least.
Can you tell us a little about the animation you created for ‘The Lost thing’ how easy was it to revisit a former project and to adapt and reimagine this for a different medium? As a creator, what are the challenges and indeed opportunities in creating stories across a range of media and as readers do you feel there are benefits to us encountering and responding to stories across different forms?
The interesting thing about creating any story is that you quickly become aware that there are a thousand-plus ways to tell it, to show it, to design it. Creativity is less about inventing things – we all invent things at a rate of knots, even in our sleep – it’s probably more about making choices, millions of little decisions. How a character looks, how to describe a room, whether to switch that character and room out for something else completely. So when you do finish a story like The Lost Thing, there’s always a little twinge of regret, as in ‘oh, this is the only version of the story I’ve ended up with’. And given the economy of picture books, being short and concise, you end up necessarily leaving out a lot of good ideas. Far more than you leave in.
Revisiting that particular book as a film adaptation was not too difficult, particularly as I always saw the book itself as a kind of little film or theatrical show. You see it in the way images are framed and lit, the use of fairly consistent ‘sets’ and objects, what you’d call ‘assets’ in animation. That said, I knew very little about film or animation when invited to be closely involved in an adaptation by a London-based animation company, Passion Pictures, around 2001, aside from what I’d seen on the special features of Pixar DVDs or read about in art books. It was a steep learning curve, and in many ways The Lost Thing as a film was a kind of educational project where my colleagues were as much mentors as co-creators, I owe them a lot, especially my producer Sophie Byrne, with whom I continue to work closely on other projects.
Of course, there were many stylistic difficulties, even with a book so suited to animation. I won’t bore you with the details, but it had a lot to do with painterly edges, which are a bit more diffuse than hard-edged digital graphics, and the flat, cartoonlike design of my characters. Some aspects of the creature itself simply did not work in 3D, to correct scale, but the interesting thing about film is how much you can ‘cheat’ and nobody notices. It’s like a magic trick of endless distractions. The key principles remain the same across all media – to create images that are affecting, convincing, that sustain a flow of thought and feeling. How you do that is a matter of ongoing experimentation and a bucketload of patience. A certain objectivity too, of stepping back as an outsider, to melt back into the audience in a sense. To disappear as a creator.
Is there a benefit to encountering stories in different forms, across different media? Yes, I think so. Particularly for developing artists and storytellers, it’s important to see how mutable these things are. That the art of telling a story is about honouring the core themes and feelings, not so much the style, to not fetishize the form of things too much, or get too caught up in ideas of absolute rightness, perfect voice or whatever. Like all life, it’s an evolutionary process. I certainly enjoy seeing different remakes of films, or adaptations from books to comics to film and back again, and then thinking why one version worked better than another, I’ve learnt a lot from that. Especially the bad versions, they are actually very educational! While working on The Singing Bones, I became aware of Grimm’s fairy tales as a great example of evolving repetitions, and it’s interesting what Philip Pullman says in his introduction to Grimm Tales from Young and Old, his own retelling of classic tales, that these are stories should be retold with variations. That is their history, their mode of evolution and survival, even before the Grimm Brothers got to them. This is how stories carry on.
You’ve published some of your notebooks in ‘the bird King and Other Sketches’ these offer a fascinating insight into your creative process and show the coalescing of thoughts and ideas, seeing these feels very intimate, was it difficult to publish them and make them available for public consumption?
Not especially, as I’d been talking about sketchbooks often as part of lectures when visiting schools, conferences and book festivals. I’m really interested in the processes of other artists, I love seeing their sketches and clumsy roughs; and while I don’t like seeing my own all that much, I figure they must hold a similar fascination for others. The interesting thing about The Bird King – republished last year by Walker Books actually with updated material – is that I included many drawings that I don’t actually like, and avoided a lot of ‘good’ ones, mainly because I wanted to present a more honest view of process. One of my rules, for instance, was that none of the drawings was retouched in a second sitting, that they were all pretty quick, because I think that spontaneity captures something sincere and fun about drawing in a sketchbook. I’ve since received a lot of feedback about that little volume from readers of all ages, young children and established artists, as a source of art-making inspiration, perhaps more so than anything else I’ve had published. People are especially interested in the very scrappy notebook pages at the back, which are full of random notes that makes no sense, and quite awkward biro doodles. I think many other artists find it quite reassuring! That the polished, published work is just one side of a very long equation. And every creative’s drawers must be full of this stuff.
Anyway, there’s plenty of things that I’d never publish or show anyone, a ton of stuff, so it’s never a concern to then show a little, there’s always the vault. In fact, I think it’s important that all artists have a kind of hidden room, a place that’s for their own eyes only. It gives you the freedom to be utterly silly, stupid, purposeless and embarrassing, because that’s where good ideas actually come from.
You’ve collaborated with some amazing and highly accomplished writers – John Marsden, Gary Crew – have these influenced your style? It feels like Gary Crew particularly has pushed at notions of what picture books can be and are able to achieve as a form.
Yes, certainly, Gary was an early mentor and I think the fundamentals of his approach, of not showing what you are telling and vice versa, continues to inform my work now. He’s a very versatile writer with a good understanding of visual images, both as a practice and historical context, having lectured on the history of illustrated literature. I was very lucky to make his acquaintance early on. And to benefit from his interest in new illustrators, to risk a few bets on them. John Marsden had a quieter influence, as we did not collaborate, but the problem of illustrating his very strange, very short poem The Rabbits left me to sort out a great deal of artistic problems on my own. I really struggled conceptually with that book at first, and almost didn’t do it, but glad I did, spurred on by memories of Animal Farm and Watership Down which had left a strong impression in my childhood. Marsden’s text pushed my style of thinking further, following on from what Gary had espoused, and encouraged me to hunt for a personal vision. With all those early books, I also owe a big debt to my editor Helen Chamberlin – to whom Tales from the Inner City is dedicated – for letting my imagination run pretty wild and defending my work against more conservative elements in children’s publishing, because it can be a very cautious place. Of course, she was also very good at pointing out when things might be getting too weird and obscure! But I think she has a great ‘wait and see’ approach to early drafts, not judging things too soon, at least not before an artist has a chance to judge it for themselves.
What are the differences between responding to the text of another and creating your own? Do you have a preference?
They both have pros and cons. Generally, I prefer creating my own text, but that’s nothing to do with quality, only the ability to be flexible, to edit quite radically, and also have the freedom to abandon a project without hurting anyone’s feelings That’s kind of important! It also helps me to evolve ideas, working alone on both text and image. I will write one thing, illustrate it differently, rewrite in response to that image, but with new ideas, draw it again and so on; it’s a ping-pong process. You can do this with another writer, and I did so with Gary Crew, and working collaboratively on film projects, but it’s not as nuanced, it requires too much consensus and explanation, which can mitigate the weirdness of an idea. Perhaps it’s harder for me to be entirely original or ambiguous collaboratively, at least at a very co-creative level, although I’ve seen others do that, especially siblings or those with a long partnership history. Perhaps they benefit from not having to explain things to each other.
On the other hand, the beauty of another person’s text is its otherness. It comes from a foreign source, and creativity is all about responding to foreign sources. Of encountering unexpected problems. In the case of The Rabbits for instance, it set up narrative and representational problems that I would never have courted on my own, I would have thought them too hard or too risky. Projects can also move along more quickly in partnership, because a collaborator – if they are the right one – can point out strengths and weaknesses more quickly than you might find on your own. You can also help each other against the inevitable frustrations or creative dismay that comes with any project, you can converse, set deadlines for which each is accountable, all those benefits of team activity. In fact, in an ideal universe I would be collaborating all the time, only that I have such a backlog of personal projects that I need to dig out of my subconscious first.
Which illustrators do you admire and why?
Gosh, there are so many, often ones I see in passing without necessarily following or knowing much about their work. I admire a lot of graphic novelists, for their sheer good drawing, understanding of subtle language and commitment to that demanding medium, from Raymond Briggs to Daniel Clowes, Chris Ware, Jillian Tamaki and a heap of others. I love artists who, unlike myself, appear to work very spontaneously (knowing that the truth may be otherwise), almost calligraphically, illustrators like Quentin Blake, Ralph Steadman, Kitty Crowther, Sydney Smith, Isabelle Arsenault, Matt James. My own work is pretty layered and architectural, yet aspires to a swiftness of line and confidence of gesture that I see in the work of others. I’ve also been very influenced by familiar book notables such as Maurice Sendak, Arnold Lobel, Lane Smith, but also a lot of cartoonists, such as Gary Larson and Michael Leunig, and film makers and production designers, like Ralph Macquarrie, Syd Mead, Tim Burton, Terry Gilliam, other forms of illustration. Admiration that extends to writers, sculptors, musicians, poets, painters, architects etc. I’m basically drawn to any work that’s quite imaginative, but still very attached to real-world concerns and especially ‘true’. That is, with an honest and authentic voice, with a feeling of urgent, self-sufficient utterance. As in ‘here’s something that must be shown, and this is the only way to really show it’. I think we all get that feeling when we come across a good book.
You have a remarkable ability to articulate your creative process – it is refreshing as discourse concerning illustration often feels to lack critical terminology to effectively discuss with confidence the interplay, imagination and inter-relations that the form relies upon and experiments with.
Thanks – I try! I do come across some brilliant commentary on illustration from time to time, particularly in the comics and graphic novel universe, perhaps because there’s a very dense culture of theory and critique there. My own educational background is actually a bit more academic than practical. I completed an honours degree in Fine Arts theory before decided that wasn’t really my bag, and turned to science fiction illustration in my early twenties. At first I thought that time at uni may have been misspent, as I often had ‘impostor syndrome’ as a student there, just faking an interest in contemporary art criticism until I could actually develop one. But I realise that writing all of those long and often tedious essays about post-modernist paradigm shifts and whatnot were actually pretty good training in trying to articulate difficult ideas, and also communicate clearly (two years of the degree also involved Philosophy, which was also not my bag, but helpful in terms of writing). I’ve since become quite suspicious of academic language, at least the style of it, especially in the fine arts world. Some of the artist statements I read at the high end of the culture are the absolute opposite of clear expression, packed full of nonsensical jargon. I should know – I used to write a heap of it! So I’m really keen to try and express illustrative processes now as clearly and openly as I can, as I myself benefited so much from other artist’s doing so in my early career, when my main access to illustration education, especially pre-internet, came from art books, periodical interviews and monographs.
All artists draw on the culture around them, and constantly learn from others. I’m very keen that anything I’ve figured out is shared again, giving back to that culture, and helping to raise the level of discourse. I agree it could always be better, to keep up with the standard of what’s being produced artistically, and to connect illustration to visual culture more broadly at all levels, to not think of it as separate or unique, or ‘just children’s literature’.
What is next for you?
With two young children, a nap! Well, one can hope. But on the work front, at the moment there are a few things fermenting, or at least getting mixed. For many years, actually about a decade, there have been ongoing creative discussions with film studios about developing The Arrival as a movie, and also Tales from Outer Suburbia as a TV series. That’s a long and temperamental process, very far from certain, but it’s interesting regardless of the outcome. The changes in television format and style precipitated by online streaming, and advancements in animation have meant that such adaptations are possible and even feasible, especially for less conventional narrative. I also have a number of books I’d like to do, but not sure when. One is a comic, a format I’ve not used for a long time, about a girl who does not realise that she is the only human in a world of non-humans, and is then confronted with that realisation unexpectedly. It’s actually a variation on other stories, really, from The Lost Thing to The Arrival, of strangers in strange lands. For some reason I always come back to this central idea, as you mentioned earlier, of displacement. It’s like a question that never ceases to find an answer, and maybe that’s why it remains so fascinating and versatile, both for myself and other readers.