A working partnership with DeLoss McGraw

The poet W.D. Snodgrass talks of his working relationship with painter DeLoss McGraw.
He touches on how both artist and writer occasionally misunderstood each other and their individual ideas and interned responses which in itself is interesting but also explains that the artists work is based on a lifetime of experiences and knowledge that he draws upon draw upon unconsciously, much as we as culturally/historically aware readers do when we 'read' an image.

 DeLoss McGraw

Dahl & Blake

Roald Dahl & Quentin Blake

Its is not often that you hear Roald Dahls name used without the mention of his close friend and illustrator Quentin Blake, such is the iconicness of their relationship and of their visual 'brand'.

What is interesting in this pairing is the complete trust and intuitiveness with which both artist and writer viewed each others work.
"While working on the BFG in 1982, Dahl even altered his own written description of the friendly giant so it fitted with some of the drawings Blake had already made. In the storyteller: The Life of Roald Dahl, Donald Sturrock says that Blake was able to almost intuit what Dahl's characters would look like. "Quentin began to realise just how precisely Roald imagined his stories," he writes, "Initially, Dahl had described his character wearing a black hat, apron and large black boots. But when Roald saw Quentin's drawing, he knew at once that the giant needed to look softer and more loveable."

That Dahl changed his narrative after seeing Blake's illustrations in key in discussing how a relationship like this works and that unlike many re-illustrated volumes, illustration had an equal position to the writing:  "Dahl was adamant that his text be full of illustrations, "What was so nice about Roald was that he actually wanted the pictures," Blake recalls on his website. "He didn't like it if there weren't enough."
While this is unfortunately very unique of authors (and more frequent in children's literature) it shows that the narrative and illustrations were intended to be read together, in a single discourse.

Blake on illustrating:
"Blake's job was to convey their many unappealing traits in pictures. (the Twits)
Early on in the story, Dahl describes Mr Twit's beard as being lodged with bits of decaying food. Conveying this in a single portrait image was difficult  so Blake drew a 'magnifying glass' as an in-set illustration, which zoomed in on the hairs and the morsels of sardines, cornflakes and gorgonzola contained within.  It was he says, a question of "how do you enlarge the text slightly, without contradicting it?" Blake added further visual elements too which, while not taken directly from Dahl's text, were pitched as if they were."
An example of extending the narrative, mainly through disgust. Blake could have chosen to draw a portrait of the man purely as a representation of what is written, instead he gives us this close up which acts to heighten our dislike of a foul man through its stomach turning imagery. (Which kids love!)

Quentin Blake on Illustrating The Twits.

Like the collaborations between Thompson and Steadman a brand has been created with the style, typography and interactions between text and image. Both artists are synonymous with each others work.


Blake on his process and collaboration

Thompson & Steadman

I'd like to look at the process an artist undertakes when they set out to illustrate a piece of writing, at how decisions are made and how not only the audience but the author responds to them. Thus I want to look at illustrator/writer relationships

Hunter S Thompson & Ralph Steadman

Creative review issue: 

Mark Sinclair

A famous and iconic collaboration the pair heavily influence (some say invented) Gonzo Journalism, a style that attempts to be non-objective and is usually written in first person and published without editing so it reads as the author wrote it. Both Illustrator and author are now inseparable from the style.

Steadman on illustrating the article: "The concept was by Hunter, but the pictures, drawn by me, argumented the crazy dimension he had hoped he could single-handedly create in his fat notebook."
Writing in the New York Times a few months after Thompson's suicide in 2005, Rich Cohen cited Steadman's art as successfully depicting the murk which Thompson had dug up just beneath the surface of manufactured America "The drawings are the plastic torn away and the people seen are monsters." Without Steadman's pictures - Thompson's monsters made flesh- Fear and Loathing would be a wildly different beast."

Obviously the images here majorly changed the way the text was read, the reading experience would be wholly different were it not for the combination, as stated: this is what makes the text successful. The drawings do not illustrate as if to describe but as a second layer, a realisation of what Thompson was trying to say, of the view he had on the world and society. On a baser level the illustrations also reflect the drug fused haze the narrative is written in.

“The pictures weren’t about the story; they were a reflection of the story, what was in Hunter’s mind,” -Steadman

Make Real Through Fictional Presentation

Looking at an example of an illustration which accompanied a Victorian newspaper article about homelessness it is interesting to note that at the time photography was a used and functional medium and yet an illustrated presentation was preferred to sit alongside the text.
 "Yet this should not surprise us in an age when many find the dramatisation of recent events in  fictionalised on television or film accounts -of the holocaust say, or of the hostage crisis in the Middle East- more acceptably 'real' than factual and scholarly accounts." - Stuart Sillers, Visualisation in popular fiction.

In these cases what is happening is the use of a single dialogue of the text and illustration to 'make real through fictional presentation' a truth of contemporary reality that is otherwise difficult to grasp in human terms.

In the text accompanying this illustration, the author uses characters to describe the facts and situations of those people living on the streets. However it would seem that these characters are invented, the author is giving life and story to those he sees that the illustrator has presented. 'The fact that the characters are invented and given fictional life stories makes the scene more real to the reader.' We can sympathise with them, if not identify. That we now know of them 'personally' and not as just someone in the street we know nothing of, makes us care more about them, even though these particular people are not strictly speaking, real.

"We are taken along to the asylum with the central character, and approach it through her eyes as much as through those of the omniscient narrator. There is effectively a dual viewpoint, allowing us to both experience the asylum as does the central character, and also to recoil from it in horror."

Dickens

The most striking point in this quote in which Dickens discusses the actuality of life in the London slums from the preface of Oliver Twist is that "Dickens assumes without question that the 'reality' of urban vice and squalor is that which is presented by Hogarth - a statement of 'truth' of the image which reveals much about the impact of the earlier artist's work upon the writer and also of the larger power of the transmitted vision of the truth rather than the external truth itself at a time when engravings were the major source of reproduced visual data."

People are more willing to take presented visuals as truth when accompanied by the text than they are the reality which they may not be aware of or just unwilling to accept.
 The difference is that there is an involvement occurring between the reader and a text or image, they are being presented something which they can then use to recognise the world with and because they have read the text/image have (secondary) experience with and so take that as truth. Its almost like having a preconceived opinion about someone before meeting and getting to know them.

Homles & The Hat.

Every once in a while an illustration can be presented alongside the text and become iconic even though it is a narrative departure.
 The public view of the character Sherlock Holmes is inseparable not only with his friend, Watson, but also with his hat. The deerstalker. And yet Sir Arthur Conan Doyle never once described Holmes as wearing one throughout his series of novels. 
This depiction comes from the illustrations by Sidney Paget, originally published with the narrative in the Strand Magazine 1880's onwards. (It is of interest to note that as this is a 'countryside garment' the illustrator only showed Holmes wearing it in appropriate rural or travelling scenes and never in urban London.)

It is fascinating to see how such a narrative departure has produced one of the most iconic images of a character in fiction and perhaps without even having an illustration present in the text, changed the way in which we read it. The hat has been absorbed into our shared idiolect.

Sidney Paget

To quote the current BBC adaptaion: "It's not a deerstalker anymore, it's a Sherlock Holmes hat... you're this far from famous"

The Maiden Feeds The Tree Beasts & The Whores' Asylum

This illustration for 'The house in the wood', a Grimm tale is highly stylised, "It is heavy and naturalistic: there is no hint in the style or treatment that this action is the turning point of the story, or that the maiden's actions will have magical results."
The heavy black frame and archaic style of the illustration distances the reader and is enhanced by the placing of the elaborate caption. 

"Even though the main lines are curve...the overall effect is one of formality and restraint, to match the writing. The result of this is to suggest distance and separation  the rhetoric of the image is a constant reminder that it is an aesthetic construct, and no effort is made to engender imaginative involvement in the child reader."


As a contemporary audience we are fully aware of the age of the illustration, which in turn makes us age the text similarly. This changes the reading experience. No doubt the style of the text(thou, thee) would have alerted us to its age as we read it, but having the image present changes the way we perceive it from the start or even before we read it. As to whether this changes our perception of the text for better or for worse is largely subject to personal opinion, but the fact that we even address it is, in itself, a distraction.

It is interesting therefore to look at contemporary novels that use illustration styled from there archaic eras for the covers or even inside of their books. 

'The Whores' Asylum'

A recent example of this I found is a book called 'The Whores' Asylum by Katy Darby', which sounds charming but there you go.
 The novel is set in the 1880's and so is based in the era that 'Sherlock Holmes' would have been detecting in. 

The author writes;  "..the thing is, it was Sidney Paget's wonderful illustrations for the stories when they originally appeared in the Strand Magazine that really brought Holmes, Watson et al to life. And what would be more appropriate for a Victorian novel than an exquisite series of bookplates to accompany the narrative?"

On aproaching her publisher, "I suggested, in a throwaway fashion, that it would be amazing to have some pictures of key scenes scattered through the text – it's a typically 'period' thing, so would be very much in the spirit of the novel."

"All I had to do was go through the story and find some of the most visually dramatic scenes, then sit back and wait for them to be turned into fantastic Pagetesque black-and-white line drawings. I also had to comb the text for physical descriptions of the various characters..."

I find it interesting that here the author is suggesting scenes to be illustrated and I guess a discourse continues between author and illustrator during this process.

"I'm not one of those writers who has a crystal-clear picture of their characters in their head from the outset; I tend to build them up from the inside out....Who did he look like? Himself. What did that mean? I didn't quite know – but I was aching to find out.

...The above, at any rate, was how my characters appeared to me and therefore in the text – but I didn't set to writing with a gallery of detailed portraits floating before my eyes. I was open to however the artist decided to render the people in my book, because I love having my work illustrated. There's something about seeing your characters afresh through somebody else's eyes that's completely intriguing and revelatory."

That the author herself doesn't have a clear view of the characters in mind is a slight relief. I am not sure I ever have a solid image of a characters face in mind when I read a novel, I tend to characterise them by just that, their character. (This is not helping my argument one bit!)

However I then question her decision to ask for the characters to be illustrated, yes like she sates it is 'intriguing and revelatory' (and its the result I'm routing for), but that is only to her. A reader fresh to the text will not know the characters before the conception of the illustrations but will read them both simultaneously. Does this mean that their perceptions of the characters differ to that which the author 'saw' them as. Or is she happy for this inferation since she herself doesn't have a 'crystal-clear picture' of the character in her head? 

"I was sent roughs of seven key scenes from the book, ranging from a formal ball to a strangulation, via a duel, a naked lady being painted, a prostitute soliciting in a dodgy tavern, and a masked orgy. Lucky Max (illustrator) had to deal with some more of my authorial objections as I pointed out that the tart looked too prosperous, the artist probably shouldn't be wearing a cliché – sorry, beret – and the duellist holding a gun in his left hand is actually seriously injured on that side. However, in my defence, the reason I was so pernickety about the content of the illustrations is that each one is on the facing page to the scene actually described – so the reader having just read about one character's arm getting maimed would definitely be puzzled to see it whole again in the picture opposite."

Here the author makes sure the illustration does not distort the text in performing a major narrative departure and in so distract and thus distance the reader.

In this example of a contemporary novel illustrated in a bygone style it is the authors wish that the readers experience of the book be been highly influenced by the illustrations. She wanted the book to feel like a classic, like a Sherlock Holmes. Therefore this is a case of using illustration to distance for a specific reason, for a specific experience.

Katy Darby's full account of her relationship with the illustrator can be found here on her blog.

Extending and Distancing.

I've looked at how the placement of an illustration within the text may disrupt or enhance the narrative but now I want to look more at the content of the illustration, the view point, style and what the illustrator chooses to or not to depict.
 It is important to remember that while an illustration can extend the narrative as we've seen, it can also distance the reader.

These examples look mainly at early illustrated children's literature but the points they explore can be carried across all illustrated books:

"The world Greenway creates is certainly familiar, with its bright-red houses, blooming boarders, delicate china and floral-smoked girls. This is something that a child can feel part of..." - Stuart Sillers, Visualisation in popular fiction

Here the text suggests that the illustrations in the book described work well because they appeal and relate to a young audience, that they reflects the colour and gaiety of childhood. The child can empathise and relate to the character depicted and therefore enter the narrative more fully. Put themselves in their shoes.

If this is the case for children's literature how do you go about reaching and appealing to an adult audience. Traditionally and historically the main style would be woodcuts or engravings, but what about a contemporary audience. What would you depict that someone browsing the best-seller shelf would a) relate to but more importantly b) show interest to. and not be 'put off by'.

In both these examples viewpoint is key to the success of the illustration and its dual discourse with the narrative.

In the first example the illustrator places us behind the main characters allowing us to 'see what they see'. This gives us a huge sense of involvement and lets us experience the story with them instead of as an outside observer.

In the second it is both the viewpoint and  moment the illustrator has selected. 

"The choice of this moment, shows illustration being used to help the reader's grasp of the dynamic growth of the narrative; and the selection of the viewpoint from which we see something that the traveller cannot makes us accomplices in the crime, stressing out involvement in the story to the degree of giving us knowledge which the key character, the traveller, lacks."

This use of dramatic irony when the audience knows more that the character makes the story hugely engaging and allows the reader to anticipate the reveal of knowledge or the narrative climax which it will lead to. 

  Of course the opposite effect of an illustration is that it doesn't work well and in turn distances the reader from the narrative:

"The children have been organised into a decorative pattern which puts them outside both the real world and the fairy kingdom. As a result we do not enter the world of the book; we are held at a distance outside it."

Many factors may distract and distance the reader from the narrative perhaps even the presence of the image itself. I've looked at how the placement of the illustration within the text can modify our reading experience but there are many content and stylistic features that can do the same by distancing us.
If the image is too realistic, too unrealistic, too decorative, formal, archaic or abstract. If it gives us too much of a literal view of the characters/scene. A whole jumble of factors. Of course each will be specific to the narrative it illustrates, so as illustrators we must study and thoroughly understand the narrative and consider the reaction and response a reader would have when reading the book as a dual discourse.

 I also think that it can be down to personal opinion. For myself if any novel is illustrated it is usually for the better (because I find the artefact alone exciting), even when it does inevitably change my experience.

The ethics of illustrating a novel are addressed here again. Each decision on layout, content and style is crucial to a successful discourse.

Thus illustrate at your peril!