Play Pen: New Children's Book Illustration ¦ Sometimes I Think, Sometimes I Am

There are thousands of new picture books published each year in this country (good, bad and indifferent), but because publishers here tend to be a little insular, we seldom see any of the work of illustrators from beyond these shores.

So grateful thanks are due to Martin Salisbury, whose new book Play Pen: New Children’s Book Illustration puts the art of illustration in a global context and, to the benefit of art students, librarians and booksellers and many others, shows us what’s going on out there. As an illustrator himself, and a senior lecturer in illustration, Salisbury’s approach is both practical and academic and in his book he brings together and discusses the work and the aspirations of 35 contemporary illustrators from all around the world. He touches on every aspect of illustration, talks about stylistic variety and the extent to which illustrators are keeping up with and making use of new technology, often combining it with traditional techniques. He notes how different cultures seldom agree about what is actually suitable for children – in Scandinavia, he says ‘there is far less of a preoccupation with protecting children from all things dark and worrisome.’

With a remarkable diversity of illustrations – 250 of them – from countries all round the world, Salisbury shows the astonishingly different ways in which artists set about communicating with children.

Almost all young people today, from birth onwards are bombarded with imagery, in advertising, on packaging, in film and tv, and in recent years, as Salisbury says, ‘Illustrating for children has undergone something of a revolution.’ And this book is a timely celebration of that revolution.

Sara Fanelli is part of that revolution: an Italian now living in London, she’s one of the artists who feature in Salisbury’s book. A talk she gave recently about her work attracted a capacity audience at Tate Modern and it’s true, as Salisbury points out, that her graphic work ‘consistently pushes at the boundaries, and she has spawned a plethora of imitators,’ but, with influences that range from artists of the Russian avant garde and the Dadaists, to the African American painter Jean-Michel Basquiat, her distinctive work has a very personal visionary quality, that makes it virtually inimitable. Well known for Dear Diary, Mythological Monsters – and her brilliant Pinocchio, her latest book (not aimed at children, but widely accessible) has the intimate, slightly chaotic feel of a scrap-book, and is packed with drawings, etchings and collages, all inspired by literary quotations – hence its title Sometimes I Think, Sometimes I Am (Paul Valery).

This enchanting book ushers you into the labyrinthine world of Fanelli’s imagination, a place inhabited by birds, angels, sprites, devils and tight-lipped onion-headed marionettes with pointy noses and clackety little boots. Like eccentric street performers, they act out the wit and wisdom of the sayings of assorted luminaries like Robert Louis Stevenson, Napoleon and St Augustine, Nabokov, Virgil et al. The drawings are playful, anarchic, romantic and mysteriously disturbing by turns.

Fanelli has a graphic language all her own, wanton loopy scribbles appear to denote energy, lust and confusion, while elsewhere, arrows move purposefully across the pages like guided missiles, or in clusters, as in the Bayeux tapestry. Who knows what it all means – we all see things differently. Saul Steinberg is one of Fanelli’s heroes and in one of the quotes she illustrates (a drawing of an onion-headed sphinx with an enigmatic smile) Steinberg says ‘The beauty of the sphinx is that you yourself must do the interpreting… interpretation probably does not give us the truth, but the act of interpretation saves us.’

Curiously, although there are about 130 quotes here, only four are by women. Or maybe five – although it’s not credited, the wistful poetry of the final quote suggests it’s from Fanelli herself. Eloquently hand-lettered and wittily arranged on the page, it simply says: My favourite thing on Earth… is the Moon.