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Picture This: Are We Old Enough for Picturebooks?
In the latest of a new Books for Keeps series putting picturebook illustration in the spotlight, Nicolette Jones argues that good picturebooks are for everyone.
When my elder daughter was 15, I was opening book parcels and read a picturebook I particularly liked. I handed it to her, saying ‘Isn’t this great?’ Then I added: ‘Though I suppose you aren’t the target audience’. She gave me a Hard Stare. ‘Since when,’ she said, ‘do you get too old for picturebooks?’
I was delighted that my opinion had been taken so decisively on board. Why are good picturebooks for everyone? Because they are made by adults, who have often spent a lifetime looking at art and making it. Because they need to have a double audience, if pre-readers are to enjoy them: both the child who looks and listens, and the adult who reads aloud – and if the adult does not take pleasure in repeated reading, enthusiasm for books will never be passed on. And because it is peculiar to say that we grow out of pictures. If that were true, art galleries, the cinema and all other visual media would have had it long ago.
But while I believe that even books that are enjoyed by the very young can equally be enjoyed by the less young, it is also true that some picturebooks are obviously aimed at a sophisticated audience. The work, say, of Armin Greder (Swiss Australian author-illustrator of, for example, The Island, Diamonds, The Inheritance …) or German author-illustrator Wolf Erlbruch’s Death, Duck and the Tulip fall into this category. Partly because of the darkness of their subjects: prejudice, exploitation, loss, anger. Some of the images I have Tweeted for #NewIllustrationoftheDay also invite adult appreciation. I have chosen three of these to consider here.
The first is from Bird is Dead (Greystone Kids), illustrated by Herma Starreveld, written by Tiny Fisscher and translated by Laura Watkinson. It is a picturebook about death that reproduces, with exceptional candour and a vein of black humour, the kinds of things people say when somebody dies. They cry, they squabble, they speak well and ill of the deceased (Bird, in this book). They put him in a hole in the ground and criticise each other’s orations. And in the picture I chose they then process to consume tea and worms, or cake.
The birds (stand-in humans) in this wordless spread are haphazardly constructed from collage, ink and paint. They are all different – not birds of a feather – suggesting individuality rather than commonality (because grief leaves us all alone?). The Cubist-influenced collage seems to depict clothes rather than plumage (one bird wears boots) and it, and the birds’ expressions, also hint at busy interior thoughts – each processing, in silence, their own response in their own way? And as the colours of these imaginary birds are beautiful against the grey background, they seem vivid with life. By comparison, on other pages the corpse is slightly muted. Meanwhile the dark cloud and blasted trees could be a metaphor for the territory of loss. And if we are inclined to go for such interpretation, the ray of light through the cloud, and the lantern carried by one of the birds may represent hope and solace.
There is no doubt that this image is unexpected, and odd to the point of surreality. So, usually, is our experience of a death. This unsentimental picturebook may well be a useful way in to honest conversations with children, and is marketed as such for age 4-8. Its openness to analysis, despite having few words of text, means it might interest older students of Art, English, Ethics, Philosophy, Sociology … Or anyone inclined to have fun with collage. Its visual quirkiness and originality made me pause and pore over it, since, unusually, it did not remind me of any other picturebook I had seen.
Also startling is a dreamlike image by Australian Matt Ottley from his book The Tree of Ecstasy and Unbearable Sadness (One Tentacle Publishing). The book sets out to depict, from the author-illustrator’s own experience, the internal landscape of bipolarity and psychosis. I chose this surreal picture not only for the éclat of its subject but for the skill of its execution. The golden-tusked mammoths blowing bubbles, the fantastically behatted and costumed musician guards blowing giant horns, the excreting rhinoceros, the venerated tyrant appearing through a distant curtain, and the flights of birds in a cathedralesque interior, are conjured with tromp l’oeil craftsmanship, elegance and a love of light.
The large format book marries both beauty and the grotesque as the narrator finds himself entangled and then consumed by a tree (pencil drawings), haunted by nightmare faces and vital organs (in shocking colour), banished by a nightmarish sovereign but also floating free over breathtaking scenery. The subject of all the images in this book is beyond words – it can only be depicted visually. We can analyse the technique, and the relationship of parts, as in a poem, but what it tells us cannot be summarised, though we may bring outside knowledge of psychology to it and reduce it to highs and lows, fears and visions and hopes. There is, for instance, in the particular image I chose no narrative to illustrate. There is only the illustration.
There is also music in the package. The book comes with a DVD of a score and narration, because Ottley is a composer as well as an artist. The reader is invited to listen to this while turning the pages. Music is a good analogy for the images: it creates an atmosphere and a feeling, but does not tell a story. And the appropriate audience is anyone who wants to pay attention. Ottley’s book is only not for children because some of the fantastical pictures, though not the image with the mammoths, are potentially disturbing.
My third image is by Yevgenia Nayberg and is from a personal memoir and tribute to an American artist and salonniere. It is called A Party For Florine: Florine Stettheimer and Me, and is published by Neal Porter Books. Nayberg is a Ukrainian artist now living in the US who saw an exhibition at the Jewish Museum in New York in 2017 of the work of Florine Stettheimer (1871-1944). She was struck by the physical resemblance between herself and the artist. Loving the pictures, she felt a ‘mystical’ connection, researched Stettheimer’s art, life and poetry, and imagined the difference it would have made to her as a shy, creative child to have found this connection with this larger-than-life character when she was younger. The result is part biography of Stettheimer and part reimagining of her own youth.
The pictures throughout Nayberg’s book are vibrant, striking and delightful, but most admirable is the fact that her own style pays homage without imitation. ‘The most exciting challenge,’ she said, in a recent interview with Robert Lee Brewer on writersdigest.com, was ‘inventing a style that resembled Florine’s without losing my own.’ This is so unusual. Picturebooks about artists tend to copy, which is always dissatisfying because however clever the copy it inevitably loses something of the original. Nayberg’s book reproduces some instances of Stettheimer’s work but does not attempt to recreate it.
What Nayberg has learnt from her doppelganger is, she says, that ‘It is up to us to create a world full of colour and full of surprises’. Nayberg’s work has both. The book does not shy away from portraying Florine’s friends, including elegant reimaginings of artist Marcel Duchamp, and poet Carl von Vechten who compared Florine’s work to jazz. The text incorporated into this image by Nayberg says: ‘And just like jazz, it was! Everything Florine painted danced and sang on a canvas: purple socks, yellow books, skinny cats, giant flowers, darkness and light!’ It depicts the elements of this list, while also adding a glance of kinship between Florine and the child, and abstract shapes that suggest the flow of one life into another, as well as turning Stettheimer’s seat into a blaze of glory. It is both decorative and expressive, in harmony with Stettheimer’s pictures and quite distinct. It is indebted to the perspectives and stylisations and patterns of Expressionism, and its intense colour. Something of the charm of Klee and Kandinsky as well as Stettheimer has crept into Nayberg’s illustration.
The protagonist is a child, and certainly Nayberg found a way of making this story resonate for a young audience. If it alludes to people a child may not know it does not matter. They are brought to life with details. And anyway everything and everyone is new to the young.
On the other hand, it would be a mistake to say that this picture, and this book, would not also appeal to adults. This work is asking for a coffee table as well as a classroom. And again students of any age might find it a springboard for learning more about Stettheimer, Duchamp, von Vechten, and how to make a painting zing.
Nayberg also said: ‘Don’t worry about pleasing an unknown child with your story. Write [and presumably illustrate] for the child you once were, or better yet for the child you are.’ Maybe that is why picturebooks are for us all: because we are all still the child.
Nicolette Jones writes about children’s books for the Sunday Times and is the author of The Illustrators: Raymond Briggs (Thames & Hudson); The American Art Tapes: Voices of Twentieth Century Art (Tate Publishing) and Writes of Passage: Words to Read Before You Turn 13 (Nosy Crow).
Books mentioned:
Bird is Dead, Tiny Fisscher, illus Herma Starreveld, trans Laura Watkinson, Greystone Kids, 978-1778401176, £12.99 hbk.
The Tree of Ecstasy and Unbearable Sadness, Matt Ottley, One Tentacle Publishing, 978-0645042030, £25.00hbk. There will be a screening of Matt Ottley’s film of The Tree of Ecstasy and Unbearable Sadness on 12th October as part of the CityLit’s Mental Wealth festival. Find out more.
A Party For Florine: Florine Stettheimer and Me, Yevgenia Nayberg, Neal Porter Books, 978-0823454105, £16.99 hbk
