p e n c h a n t

In book illustration, as in writing, you don’t include everything you’ve produced. Much of the process of creation involves exploring ideas, such as points of view, details, style. Though it may be a great idea or well done, like a beautiful metaphor, if it doesn’t quite fit, out it goes. You don’t wear a coat that doesn’t complement the trousers (OK, there are exceptions).

These are a few visual ideas I created for the book, Mermaid Tales from Around the World (Mary Pope Osborne / Scholastic Press). The first is a cover concept. The other two helped me immerse myself (pardon the pun) in the subject. Nothing’s wrong with them, but they were more of a “day in the life” approach rather than illustrating any of the stories. Perhaps I should have found a way to include them somewhere in the front or back matter.

To view a finished color piece from the book see the Trunk Sale.

When doing live research, which goes beyond electronic or print research, sometimes the subject is as near as your neighborhood pet shop. One advantage of doing live research is that you observe things a picture won’t tell you: the subject has its own unique language. Even at that, these sketches are like third generation copies—you know, when you copy something on a copy machine, and then copy the copy, then copy the copied copy…. The farther you go from the original, the more removed you are from its nature, its truth. In this case, the live rats were the original, the second is myself and my limited ability to capture what I see, or try to see, the third is the sketch, after it’s been processed through my head and hands and pen. It’s important to try, at least, to capture the essence of the subject. It’s important for the artist or writer to experience as much as possible a subject in its live form. Seeing a Van Gogh reproduction in a book is nothing like seeing the actual painting in a museum; you must see the original to get a better grasp of its reality. Seeing the original is like meeting the person, whereas seeing its copy is like seeing the person’s corpse in a casket.

Though we are far removed from the sunflowers that Van Gogh likely picked himself, we get a glimpse of what he saw and felt. He smelled them, touched them, perhaps tasted them, found a vase for them. They meant so much he counted them: “Vase with Five Sunflowers”, “Vase with Fourteen Sunflowers”, “Three Sunflowers in a Vase”.

And so, once a work of art has been made, though it is not the subject in actuality, it has a reality of its own. A nature, a language of its own.

But that language would be different, diminished, had the artist not experienced the real.