Shaun Tan in Dublin

Following on from Friday’s post about the CBI Conference we thought we would put a spotlight on one of the speakers. Shaun Tan’s picture books are a welcome addition to the many books for children that sit comfortably on my book shelf despite the lack of children in my house. The visual style and tone linger long after the books has been closed. The surreal, subtle fantasy and humour fuse to create a vividly realised world. If you can get a ticket it would be wise to go along to hear him speak about his books and process.

Q&A after the jump…

What books influenced you the most as a child?

This is somewhat difficult to answer because the things that most influence my work are probably also the ones I most take for granted. Something as simple as the availability of paint and pencils may be more important than any books (my Dad was an architect and my Mum liked to paint giant Disney pictures on our bedroom walls). Generally I had a very happy childhood filled with many pictures and stories.

One story Mum read which really sticks in my memory is Animal Farm, by George Orwell, which she must have thought was a children’s book. None of us recognised the satire about Soviet politics, but we all thought it was a great story, and the fact that it did not have a happy ending was something I found surprising ,disturbing and, I recall, quite satisfying! I still think a lot about Animal Farm as a reference point for both my writing and illustration now – it’s a book that’s simple, absurd and truthful.  One of my first picture books, The Rabbits, has a slight Orwellian feel about it in retrospect, probably a result of that very early influence.

In terms of illustrated books, there was a book of horror poems called The Headless Horseman Rides Tonight, written by Jack Prelutsky and illustrated in creepy but also amusing pen and ink drawings by Arnold Lobel. I can still recall the images quite vividly, and borrowed that book many times from the library.

There was also Chris Van Allsburg’s The Mysteries of Harris Burdick which I still admire as an adult as an ideal picture book experiment – a whole series of fragmentary sentences and singular strange drawings that are never fully explained. I also liked Fungus the Bogeyman by Raymond Briggs, but only discovered a lot of his other books (and been quite influenced by them) as an adult.

Visually, I was probably more influenced by movies and TV; the first Star Wars films for their designs much more than the story, and certain fantasy films like The Dark Crystal (which I was obsessed with when I was about 10). I also watched a lot of Dr Who, Star Trek and such shows, but never became a big follower of these. I was much more interested in The Twilight Zone, again because it was ‘real world’ fantasy with a short fable-like structure I think. One reason I do picture books today is that I remain interested mostly in very short philosophical stories: picture books are perfect for this.

How would you define illustration?

The word ‘illustration’ is one I don’t actually like a lot; it suggests something derivative, a visual elaboration of an idea governed by text. In ‘fine arts’ discourse you often find the term used in a derogatory sense, almost in opposition to serious drawing or painting; something is ‘mere illustration’. That is, somewhat slavish or incapable of self-contained meaning; it can only be descriptive.

Yet in working in this area I find that the most interesting relationships between words and pictures are not actually very descriptive at all, but rather about the interesting relationship that can exist between two independent means of expression. In all of my recent work, the text and illustrations could operate as narratives in isolation, but happen to react in similar ways, opening new meanings from each other’s context.

I have to say that illustrations are for me the main ‘texts’ in my books, and although writing is often the starting point, it rather acts as a kind of scaffolding or binding that stitches everything together. More recently I have been thinking a lot about visual narrative where there is no accompanying text. I’m intrigued by the ability of the reader to superimpose their own thoughts and feelings onto visual experience, without the possible distraction of words.

How do you create a picture book?

Most of the few picture books I have done have each taken about a year to complete (although The Arrival took 4-5 years). Much of that time isn’t necessarily productive in any visible way – true of many creative projects I think. It involves a lot of thinking while doing other stuff (eg. washing dishes) and playing with many ideas that may or may not work, making loads of scribbly notes and doodles in sketchbooks.

With a blank piece of paper in front of me, my imagination is not especially fired up. I could start drawing, but everything would end up looking the same – and most likely stuff  I’ve done before. So I actively look to absorb foreign ideas and influences, which is one key lesson learned from years of illustrating different SF stories. Good ideas don’t just turn up, you have to go looking for them.

Research – reading, looking at pictures, playing with different media – provides freedom from the creative paralysis that comes with infinite possibility. I need specific points of reference to develop ideas, and also a kind of resistance to my own stylistic ‘default settings’ so that I think outside the usual circles, and actually learn something new.

Painting and drawing for me is not about creation but about transformation. It’s not so much about expressing preconceived themes or a mastered delivery of statements but rather a process of slightly absent-minded discovery, of seeing where certain lines of thinking take you if you keep following them. I know I’m on the right track when there is a sense of unfamiliarity about what I’m doing, that I’m actually being surprised by the way mixed drawings and words make their own novel sense, and I can coax them into surrendering whatever meaning is there through repeated drawings.

The 19^th Children’s Books Ireland annual conference takes place in The National Gallery over the weekend of May 16th & 17th May, for booking information go to www.childrensbooks.ie

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 10th, 2009 at 2:37 pm and is filed under Books, Events, Interviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.