Tag: illustration
Tom Barling Illustrations?
A while back I blogged about Thirteen O'Clock by Enid Blyton, illustrated by Tom Barling. There is remarkably little on the Internet about Tom Barling considering how much work he produced.
Perhaps you are knowledgeable about this English illustrator and can tell us whether the following illustrations are indeed by him? We have good reason to believe that they are.
But it would be great to have that confirmed and to know which project they were for. Please get in touch if you know anything about them, or would like to hazard a guess!
In any case, they're beautifully rendered and deserve to be on the Internet. They remind me a little of Maurice Sendak's work.
The eyes on this girl are quite unusual.
I think I might get nightmares tonight. She reminds me of a Black Eyed Kid of the urban legend:
Black-eyed children (or black-eyed kids) are an urban legend of supposed paranormal creatures that resemble children between the ages of 6 and 16, with pale skin and black eyes, who are reportedly seen hitchhiking or panhandling, or are encountered on doorsteps of residential homes. Tales of black-eyed children have appeared in pop culture since the late 1990s.
Apparently the paranormal stories started around 1996, but these illustrations look a bit older than that to me. What do you think?
But that smile… That pasted on smile…
Is the horse stylised based on cave drawings? I notice the girl's eyes are drawn differently here.
Is this a piece of jewellery, or a ninja weapon that you throw at enemies? What better image to put on a shuriken than a black eyed kid and her pasted on smile?
Synoptic Narrative In Picture Books
A synoptic narrative depicts a single scene in which a character or characters are portrayed multiple times within a frame to convey that multiple actions are taking place.
The sequence of events is unclear.
Synoptic narratives typically provide visual cues that convey the sequence, but still might be difficult to decipher for those unfamiliar with the story.
There are 7 main categories of Narrative art. Narrative art is art which tells a story.
Monoscenic — represents a single scene with no repetition of characters and only one action taking place
Sequential — very much like a continuous narrative with one major difference. The artist makes use of frames. Each frame is a particular scene during a particular moment.
Continuous — Continuous narrative art gives clues, provided by the layout itself, about a sequence. Sequential narrative without the frames.
Synoptic — offers the synopsis of a bigger story. You must already know a story before you can make sense of synoptic narrative.
Simultaneous — has very little visually discernible organisation unless the viewer is acquainted with its purpose. There's an emphasis on repeatable patterns.
Panoptic — depicts multiple scenes and actions without the repetition of characters. Think of the word 'panorama'. 'All-seeing' (pan + optic)
Progressive — a single scene in which characters do not repeat. However, multiple actions are taking place in order to convey a passing of time in the narrative. A progressive narrative is not to be interpreted as a group of simultaneous events but rather a sequence that is dependent on its location. Actions displayed by characters in the narratives compact present and future action into a single image.
Synoptic is the adjectival form of 'synopsis', which should give us a clue about what's going on. Synoptic art = the synopsis of a bigger story.
You can find examples of synoptic art in ancient murals. The viewers of these murals knew the plots of these stories. The art simply triggered their memories of a familiar story. Everyone of the era understood the basic plot of the myths, fables, stories and wars depicted.
This is Mughal painting — a style from South Asia.
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Posted on November 4, 2016 June 24, 2017
Storybook Farms
Farms in children's literature are often a kind of utopia. Often these are animal utopias, and the reader is not supposed to even think of what the animals are really there for. Writing of the book Hepzibah Hen, a Children's Hour favourite from 1926, is described by Margaret Blount as 'the antithesis of Animal Farm', in which
there are a few hints of what a farm is really for, but they seem to relate to a kind of social code — one does not mention the word 'Christmas' to a turkey, or 'Pluck' to a hen.
— Animal Land
Storybook farms require hens. Honestly, hens are the best kind of farm animal. They have the best personalities!
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Posted on September 8, 2016 June 30, 2017
What Happened To Rosemary Fawcett?
Roald Dahl's work wasn't always illustrated by Quentin Blake.
Dirty Beasts, for example, was originally illustrated by a young woman new to the field, Rosemary Fawcett. The edition she illustrated is now out of print. Jeremy Treglown explains the story in his biography of Roald Dahl:
To one British critic, Russell Davies, "the buzz of misanthropy from Roald Dahl grows stronger." Candida Lycett Green [another British children's author] rightly said there was nothing new about this mood: she saw the first poem, in which a pig forestalls its destiny by turning on the farmer and eating him, as a version of the macabre, much earlier story "Pig", in which a boy brought up as a vegetarian ends up in an abattoir. She thought that Dahl's imagination was well illustrated by Rosemary Fawcett: "The nastiness of her pictures is exceptional." This was meant as a compliment, but not everyone saw things this way. There couldn't be a bigger contrast than between Quentin Blake's benignly funny sketches and the giddying, lurid, surrealistic images Rosemary Fawcett produced. Her cover picture sets the tone: a child in bed with a teddy bear, both of them bug-eyed with terror at the sight of something positioned above and behind the viewer's head. It is the perspective that is often most violent in these images–that, and the colors. For "The Tummy Beast," Fawcett threw the greedy child over so that he is somehow flying, upside down, all chubby knees and protruding eyeballs, beneath a gaudy tableful of purple and mauve blacmanges and ice creams. And in "The Porcupine" the reader is made to peer, as if through a keyhole, onto a murky scene, lit by a single lamp, in which a goggling dentist waves his gigantic pointed pincers over the little girl's much spiked rump.
Fawcett does more than justice to Dahl's ferocity, but not to his humor or his underlying traditionalism. Dahl himself hated the drawings. He said he couldn't face giving the book to any of his relations and offered to incinerate all the unsold copies and dance around the bonfire. Many of the British reviews warned that Fawcett's pictures would give children nightmares, and this was the general opinion in the States, where the children's librarians were in full squeamish cry: "Sadistic, predictable and unfunny"; "From stem to stern this is a gross, course [sic] unpleasant book." The edition didn't sell badly in Britain, but although, according to Murray Pollinger, Tom Maschler swore by Fawcett's work, the illustrations were unpopular with Continental publishers. Revolting Rhymes, meanwhile, had sold over 100,000 copies in Britain alone. So Fawcett's Dirty Beasts was eventually allowed to go out of print, and Quentin Blake was brought back in for the new edition.
There's no doubt about it; they wanted a young woman because she was cheap. Blake was already fetching good money and had a good job as an illustration lecturer. Also in those days — even more than today — men were paid more than women for the same work.
I'm sad to find very little about Rosemary Fawcett on the Internet these days, which may mean, sadly, that when her illustrations were completely replaced by those of Quentin Blake, she may have become too dispirited to pursue in the picturebook industry. (I know that's how I would have felt, at least for a while.) I can't find another work illustrated by a Rosemary Fawcett.
Or perhaps she got married and continued an 'illustrious' career under another name? This is something I'd love to know. What happened to the talented Rosemary Fawcett, whose wonderful work was ill-suited to Dahl's creepy rhymes through no fault of her own?