Re-cap of this year’s achievements, and impact on my career.

This year has been a very successful start in the picturebook industry for me. My first published book has been reviewed and listed as one of the best books in 2017 in numerous creditable media sources including The Guardian and The London Standard. The book has been nominated for the Kate Greenaway Illustration Award, the most prestigious award for picturebook illustration alongside the books of Oliver Jeffers, Jon Klassen, Laura Carlin and Quentin Blake.  The book has also been shortlisted for another leading award for new talent in the industry that has yet to be officially announced. The book has sold in 10 territories out of a possible 33 so far including, USA, China, France, and Germany, putting the publishers I currently work with in touch with territories they have never worked with before.

I’m hoping that the success of this book, the illustration award lists and media coverage will help convince publishers, creative directors and editors in my abilities as an illustrator and in turn will allow me some room to make more experimental work. I want to position myself in the industry not only as someone who makes beautiful work, or sells work, but as someone that innovates and leads. I want to continue to learn and improve and I want to see evidence of this work in the books I publish, particularly in the books I author myself. I have two contracts left to illustrate over the coming year. After that I intend to publish only books I have authored myself from then on. Going forward I intend to take as much creative control over my work as is possible.

Cataloging in poetry and examples of cataloging in illustration and art

Cataloguing is a technique used in poetry that uses word repition to create a sense of praise, or sometimes to create a sense of magic or prophetic voice. Walt Whitman uses lists all the time in his poetry and its one of the things that actually defines his poetic style. In his poem ‘Song of Myself’ he uses it several times. The first list in the poem is a list of the things he loves, the next is a list of different events that add up to a vision of the chaos of the world. There is a list of jobs, roles and vocations, of all the people that exist in society; example bellow;

The carpenter dresses his plank, the tongue of his foreplane whistles its wild ascending lisp,
The married and unmarried children ride home to their Thanksgiving dinner,
The pilot seizes the king-pin, he heaves down with a strong arm,
The mate stands braced in the whale-boat, lance and harpoon are ready,
The duck-shooter walks by silent and cautious stretches,
The deacons are ordained with crossed hands at the altar,
The spinning-girl retreats and advances to the hum of the big wheel,
The farmer stops by the bars as he walks on a First-day loaf and looks at the oats and rye,
The lunatic is carried at last to the asylum a confirmed case.... [etc.] 

The next is a list of things the speaker hears, then places he visits and then finally there is a list that he uses to show that he identifies with every religion he can think of. A catalogue is not a pattern, it is a list of symbols that share some common thread. Cataloguing is frequently used in literature as well. Melville’s ‘Moby Dick’, Charles Dicken’s ‘David Copperfield’, James Joyce ‘Ulysses’ and Vladimir Nabakov Lolita, usually in Melville it’s lists about whaling, and in the others its usually a list of names.But lists are something that is used by artists and illustrators as well and it’s something I’d like to experiment with and incorporate into story. Here are some of the ways cataloging is being used by Matisse, Laura Carlin, and Brian Wildsmith.

Matisse

Laura Carlin

Brian Wildsmith

Reader response theory - Louise Rosenblatt, Roland Barthes, Wolfgang Iser

This week I have been researching literary theory, I am interested in how we read words and interpret story and what this means when we come to create something that is ultimately for someone else. Who is this audience? What is their role? How can we fulfil that? How can a work create expectations? Or meet expectations? What are the expectations?

I came across Reader Response theory when I was looking for discourse on the role of the audience in literary works and I think its constructive to think about making work with this in mind. 

Reader-Response is a literary theory, that says that the reader is just as important as the author in the making of literary meaning in literary works. Reader-Response theorists think that readers are active participants who create a work of literature in the process of reading it. Contrasting theories and schools of thought focus attention primarily on the author or the content and form of the work. 

The meaning of a text, according to Response Theorists, exists somewhere between the words on the page and the readers mind. The interpretation each reader has will be similar, but each will be slight different. Reader response theory isn't just about understanding a text better; its also about understanding yourself better. Some of the main contributions of this theory came from Louise Rosenblatt, Stanley Fish, Wolfgang Iser and Roland Barthes, you can read Barthes 'Death of the Author' in full here. 

The literary work exists in a live circuit set up between reader and text; the reader infuses intellectual and emotional meanings into the pattern of verbal symbols and these symbols channel his thoughts and feelings. Out of this process emerges a more or less organized imaginative experience.

(Rosenblatt, 1978)

‘At the heart of the reading experience is the gap in the text which has to be filled by the reader. It is the gaps, the fundamental asymmetry between the text and reader, that give rise to communication in the reading process’ (Iser, 1978).

Cormac McCarthy - The Keluke Problem, Where did language come from

Fiction writer and Pulitzer Prize winner Cormac McCarthy wrote his first essay this year on the subject of language, and in his essay he suggests that the unconscious mind could (as in has the ability to) communicate with us in language (using words) but due to a lack of trust in the relatively new start-up that is conscious language, the unconscious prefers to use a more familiar communication. It uses the primeval system of images. The reason for this, he suggests, is simply that the brain is more used to functioning pictorially and prefers avoiding verbal instructions pretty much altogether. The full essay can be read here. 
For me, an interesting thing this essay brings up; is there something illustration can get at that words cannot? How does that gap between text and the brain work? Or a better question, how is it different from the gap between image and the brain?
 

The fact that the unconscious prefers avoiding verbal instructions pretty much altogether—even where they would appear to be quite useful—suggests rather strongly that it doesn’t much like language and even that it doesn’t trust it. And why is that? How about for the good and sufficient reason that it has been getting along quite well without it for a couple of million years?

(Cormac McCarthy, 2017)