living artist research 6: Alexis Deacon, Stian Hole, Taro Miura

1. Alexis Deacon
http://www.alexisdeacon.co.uk/
Deacon's work combines classic children's book traditions with a distinctly present sensibility, his characters lonely aliens & monster families where forest dwelling creatures & fairies would have been. His hazy, never over-worked drawings are executed small-scale in pencil, blown up & rearranged via photocopy, & then put on high-quality paper & watercolored/gouached. He occasionally seals an image to rework it with a layer of linseed oil; a technique I'd like to try.



2. Stian Hole
http://www.literaturfestival.com/participants/authors/2008/stian-hole
Working in digital collage, using found imagery & photoshop, Stian Hole makes work with aims to transcend the time-specific quality of the medium as it ages. Aware as he is of how dated it will someday seem --as it is dependent on technology, always obsoleting itself-- he has the old-fashioned mind of a collector, gathering textures, digital photos, scans, sketches, notes to combine into narrative compositions, with execution a spacial sensitivity & colors that allow the works to read cohesively & step outside of the distraction of the construction to communicate to a reader of any age.



3. Taro Miura
http://www.taromiura.com/
Japanese Taro Miura illustrates for advertising, children's books, magazines and book-covers, drawing influences from modern art, old picture books & ads, citing the japanese phrase that translates "new ideas come from knowledge of the past". For his board book Ton, Miura depicts purely visually the ways humans transport objects of increasing weight, distinctly drawing from Constructivism, rendered in the muscular 20's & 30's flat color with simplified, stencil-like text.

living artist research 5: Shaun Tan, Ragnar Aalbu, Morteza Zahedi

1. Shaun Tan:
http://www.shauntan.net/
"I knew very little about children's books when first asked to illustrate one, and tended to share many people's prejudice that they were exclusively the domain of young children, not an art form that lends itself to much artistic or intellectual sophistication."
Shaun Tan's often enigmatic and open-ended children's stories arise out of imagery culled from his sketchbooks, allowing a sense of meaning to "arise visually" & then be applied text & a malleable storyline. Before deciding on making a career from his art, Shaun Tan considered pursuing biotechnology; a thing that once you know, you can't stop seeing in his work.

2. Ragnar Aalbu:
http://www.ragnaraalbu.com/
Norwegian artist Ragnar Aalbu prefers graphic work focusing on the visual aspects of language. He describes his process for his characteristic style as the evolution from rough sketches, gone over with watercolor and crayon on paper, to a digital drawing, flatly-rendered but textured by scans of things (wallpapers, fabrics, etc.) that he has found.

3. Morteza Zahedi
http://mortezahedi.com/
On the quality & depth of Iranian Illustration: "Maybe this is because before painting, graphic art, & literature, in their current form, came to Iran, we already had a culture of book-making & illustration. The book & the process of bookmaking have historically been very important. The activity of illustrating was seen as a serious profession."
Zahedi's idiosyncratic, energetic style, sensitive to the forms & patterns of organic life, reads less literally than what most would consider illustration. But the way the shapes emanate from the toned paper communicates across language & culture. His treatment of line, colors & forms explodes with life in ways the youngest child could read.

living artist research 4: Renee French, Lisa Evans, Anders Nilsen

1. Renee French

http://www.reneefrench.com/

"French is certainly one of the more acclaimed comics artists of the past decade-plus; it’s fairly rare that a review of whichever anthology she’s currently contributing to doesn’t single her out as one of the highlights of the enterprise, and her pamphlet-format books have garnered a strong following." -Jog the Blog

Edward Gorey-esque Illustrator Renee French uses more feather-thin textures than line to delineate forms, with an admirable sensitivity to the grain of her paper. Her books & graphic novels are filled with imagery that often toes that popular line between body-horror grotesque & baby-shower cuteness.

2. Lisa Evans:
http://firefluff.blogspot.com/
"Journeys & processes, subtle narratives & subplots. I like the merging of fact & fiction & the endless possibilities an image provides."
Wften working in acrylics on gesso & pencil "fluffed up in photoshop," Evans recently finished her first children's book, Orwellian The Flower by John Light and published by Child's Play. She has been focusing on 3-d imaging & design as she works on her current project.

                                     

3. Anders Nilsen
http://www.andersbrekhusnilsen.com/

Acclaimed comics artist-writer Nilsen has a delicacy of line and obsessive quality to his texturing that draws the reader in as if his investment speaks to the viewer's own, no matter how straightforward his concept or joke is. Also, his handwriting looks kind of like mine! He's been nominated for the Ignatz Award and was anthologized in the 2006 Best American Comics. He makes a lot of work, currently an ongoing comic series called Big Questions, for Drawn & Quarterly.

living artist research 3: David Hughes/Sandy Turner, Pieter Gaudesaboos, Sara Fanelli

1. http://www.davidhughesillustration.co.uk/
David Hughes
Highly self-critical and incisive, David Hughes began his long career in TV graphics, and his turning toward children's book illustration may seem unlikely. Somehow his signature spikey-edged draughtsmanship, graphic design sensibility, & precise capture of expression, though occasionally grotesque & alarming, translated well to the current picture-book market. He currently writes & illustrates under the pseudonym Sandy Turner ("the blandest, most gender-neutral name I could think of").




2. http://www.gaudesaboos.be/
Pieter Gaudesaboos:
"... I imagined a child's head as a house with lots & lots of rooms. All the rooms were different & you have to go through all of them in order to understand the child."
After studying graphic design for three years, photo-illustrator Gaudesaboos went to school for photography for two more. He tells his story of the launch of his career as going to publishers with his portfolio, and after being complemented on his work, only being told to "make something" & come back. This is how he wrote his first picture book, & was drawn in by the "overall visual authorial role" that makes him feel himself a storyteller, above an illustrator.





3. Sara Fanelli
http://www.sarafanelli.com/
After being raised in Florence and educated in London (Camberwell and the Royal College of Art), Fanelli worked in editorial, design, advertising, and children's books, despite her feeling that her work within the graphic art world is "at odds with the inherent conservatism of the children's publishing market". She believes this condition is improving, however, with large co-editions being sold by UK publishers to the US & France, where the aesthetic is more progressive. Her collage, digital and hand-drawn combinations has made her a darling of publisher Walker Books, & got her commissioned for a 40-metre hanging for the Tate Britain Gallery.

living artist research 2: Dan Christofferson, Chuck Groenink

1. Dan Christofferson says,
"Like, pelican fly."


In his recent exhibition Terrible Gentle Man, his artist statement describes his goal for that body of work is to distill behavioral stimulus into three categories, a. things that make us happy, b. things that make us sad, and c. things that we can never be certain about, each assigned a series of iconic signifiers. Though I'm a little unconvinced by his conceptual abilities I am attracted to the simplicity, color sensibility & variety in his design work.

 


2. http://cargocollective.com/greenink
Chuck Groenink's handling of color, characteristic but versatile style and children's focus in subject matter was some of what interested myself, the grant allocators at the Fiep Westendorp Foundation, and the editors at the Terrible Yellow Eyes blog in him a few years ago. Now his client list includes Nobrow, Galley Nucleus, Querido Publishers, and others. He also makes felted monsters!