Describe your Illustration style in 10 words or less.
Loose, emotive and painterly.
What items are an essential part of your creative space?
For starters....space!
I am messy when I work, so I will say for starters, a broom and a big bin. I love music and my little portable speaker is essential.
In my workroom, I love to have picture books, books on painting techniques, novels and books with covers that I particularly like. I just enjoy having book piles, it makes the space mine.
I worked on a bunk aboard a yacht for years, with my gear precariously all around me as I produced cartoons for boating magazines. The only incident that occurred in this less than ideal scenario was an accidental tattoo. I was using a nib and Indian ink for a drawing, and had left these items lying on the bunk to go get a cup of tea. When I returned to the cabin to resume my work, I shuffled back onto the bunk, and kneeled on the ink encrusted nib, which pierced my left knee and hung there comically until I pulled it out. A week later, after a few bandaid changes, there was a permanent dot under my skin. I have considered taking up that nib to turn the dot into something interesting, but I am a coward.
Do you have a favourite artistic medium?
I love ink, and have the tattoo to prove it. However watercolour was my first love, and is still my favourite medium, despite my many forays into other art materials.
Name three artists whose work inspires you.
From a very, very long list of artists I admire, I will pick three off the top of my head.
1) Alexander Calder, whose mobiles and sculptures really delight me,
2) Clarice Beckett for the muted and gentle world she painted, and
3) Joanna Concejo whose illustrations are deeply moving.
Which artistic period would you most like to visit and why?
I am fascinated by the subjective, emotive power of colour. As a child, I saw a hydraulic hose split under pressure, causing fluorescent pink hydraulic oil to spray up against a rainy sky. The shock of that brilliant colour against a grey backdrop is one of my strongest memories of colour and its impact, but to answer the question ...
How artists through the ages have used colour is intriguing, but there is so much more to this subject. A few years ago, I read Spike Bucklow’s book, ‘The Alchemy of Paint’; Art Science and Secrets from the Middle Ages, and I became engrossed in the descriptions of paint making. I really enjoy the nitty gritty of how pigments were produced, from plants, earth from regions like Sienna in Italy, and that Tyrean Purple from the exudations of the Murex Snail, to name a few examples.
Colour was not easy to come by before the modern era. We are awash with colour now, and there are colours now which simply did not exist then.
So I would like to visit the Middle Ages to spy on the dangerous, smelly and explosive practice of making colour, and then peer over the shoulders of the Limbourg Brothers or some other painters of that era to see how they used the pigments so laboriously made.
Who or what inspired you to become an illustrator?
My grandmother sent me picture books from behind the Iron Curtain, after my parents and I immigrated to Australia from West Germany. Those books arrived as battered parcels wrapped in brown paper, with a dozen stamps which all featured the likeness of Karl Marx. I was only very small at the time, but the books in these parcels had a lasting impact on me, and were a connection to my grandmother on the other side of the world.
The illustrations in these picture books were by Russian and Eastern Bloc artists, and were mainly in watercolour. At the time, I merely loved the images and these pictures contained some great enchantment for me. Later, I understood that it was my introduction to one of the wonderful aspects of picture books, that the images tell a story in the voice of the illustrator. It was the illustrator’s voice in the books which spoke most loudly to me, because here was the world through the lens of feeling; visible emotion, the inner world of an artist. I was transfixed and it is fair to say that my Omi’s gift of picture books shaped my life in many important ways. Not least of which was the desire to be an artist of books, myself.
I am very grateful to Anna Magerl, and I like to think I got to know her first by the contents of those battered parcels. Those picture books gave me some sense of her, her love of nature, and it helped me connect to her when I finally went to meet my grandmother for the first time when the Berlin Wall fell.
Can you share a photo of your creative space or part of the area where you work most often? Talk us through it.
This is where I have worked on many books, and this room holds a lot of memories. At my desk, I read aloud the words of Hasel and Rose. I am abashed to say it took ten years to write my first picture book, but I recall looking out of this window and somehow hearing a little click in my head as if to signal that the words now fitted together and the story was done. It is a quiet and practical space to work in, with a number of resident geckoes, who go about their work in a quiet and practical way also.
The workroom has a desk for illustration work, on the right, an easel for oil painting, and an etching press in the middle of the room. Out of shot is the aforementioned piles of boxes, a bureau to store watercolour paper, and a bookshelf. The floor is simply concrete, as I cannot be trusted with anything nicer.
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What is your favourite part of illustration process?
I really do enjoy the initial energy of roughing out ideas. Everything seems possible then ... it’s not. I imagine I will do an amazing job, and be very confident ... in truth I will succumb to self doubt about five minutes into the project. I will promise myself to get up and stretch regularly and not develop a hump ... I develop a hump.
But aside from what I just wrote, I love starting things.
What advice would you give to an aspiring illustrator?
If the goal is to have a unique style, to communicate in a unique way, then I do have advice.
Out of necessity, I worked in many styles for many kinds of clients to make a living.
My work was as diverse as cartooning for many publications including Mad Magazine, illustrations for features in the Courier Mail and Sunday Mail, for the covers of novels and occasional work in the advertising industry. I airbrushed renderings of yachts for ship builders, to name just a few things.
But I wanted to paint and to illustrate picture books, so I worked at creating characters and the world they might inhabit in visual diaries. Those diaries, now over seventy of them, are the record of my effort to grow some kind of unique voice, outside of the commercial work I was doing, my ‘day job’.
These diaries have been a compass and I still refer to them if I feel uncertain. Not because the drawings are so great, they are not, but these drawings in my diaries are definitely mine, for no other purpose than to express myself just as I was at the time.
My advice is to have an artist’s journal, or many of them! Draw often and value those lowly, late night scribblings, when you are exploring without agendas.
In those drawings are some valuable clues as to what you value, what your unique voice is.
Lastly, stretch often, and beware of nibs.
