Reading: Brecht Evens interview

Brecht Evens on Crafting Horror and Storybook Beauty in Panther

https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2016/04/brecht-evens-on-crafting-horrific-storybook-beauty.html

Paste: You can almost see a process of growing up over the course of your three books, in terms of their narrative subtlety and the ideas they address. How do you think you’ve changed since you began drawing/painting The Wrong Place?

Brecht Evens: I’m glad to hear you see progress, I suppose that is what every artist wants to hear. Basically I’m gathering more skills, while trying to hold on to old stuff that still works. I think my characters are getting more complex, too. I know my books are still instantly recognizable to someone who read The Wrong Place, and I think this is mainly because I haven’t dramatically changed my way of drawing the characters. The trick with a character having a signal color to his body and his speech still works for me. I’m not out to make dramatic changes just for the hell of it; it has to have a purpose. My next book (The City of Belgium) has a setup very similar to The Wrong Place: three characters running around in a city at night. So I’m playing with giving those books a shared universe, with “extras” from The Wrong Place showing up in the new book. Even the protagonists from The Making Of and Panther have a discreet cameo appearance.

Paste: I liked seeing you mention David Hockney as an influence. Could you talk a little more about that?

Evens: There’s something almost didactic about his work. It’s like he’s building a catalog of methods for other painters to use, saying, for example: “let’s try two hundred ways of drawing water” or “I notice you’ve been having trouble with rural landscapes, let me see if I can rustle up five hundred good ones.”

Paste: What other fine art influences do you have?

Evens: I feel like I shop around a lot. I’m going to list Elvis Studio (for the massive cityscapes), Ever Meulen (for the optical games), Georg Grosz (for the messy spaces), Giotto (for the decors), Charles Burchfield (for the watercolors alive with light, sound, vibration and movement), a touch of Bruegel, Persian miniatures and other medieval drawings, Picasso, Miro, Kuniyoshi, Saul Steinberg, outsider artists like Wölfli and Henry Darger, my former student Nina Van Denbempt and my fellow alumni Lotte Van de Walle and Brecht Vandenbroucke. There’s also a lot of artists I like that I can’t emulate yet, whose work has no useful elements I can chip off.

Paste: I love seeing you mention Charles Burchfield. In my actual day job, I work at a museum, and we have one that goes out on display somewhat regularly: one of the crazy nature ones, not one of the sedate gray ones. Also: we do not have any of Hockney’s landscapes, but they’re just the best. He makes me care about landscapes in a way I never thought I could.

Evens: What does a Burchfield look like, physically? Is it much different from images in a catalogue?

Paste: It’s kind of bigger than you’d expect, and messier. You know he went back and added extra paper around the edges because he wanted to make the works bigger (which is also why they have these large date ranges; he was repurposing old work). So you can see some of that, as well as the underlying pencil sketches.

Evens: I think my drawings are also bigger and messier than you’d expect. So there are pencil sketches beneath? That’s a surprise… Do you know about the medication he took?

Paste: I hadn’t heard that about Burchfield, but it’s not surprising. I do know about the nutty weather diaries. Tell me more!

Evens: Alright. So, I’m not into Burchfield’s realistic work. The periods I like are a summer he seems to have had as a 17-year-old, and his late period, from his 50s on I think (I’m making an effort not to Google this). He then even picked up some of his adolescent watercolors and expanded on them, adding pieces of paper as you’ve seen. Some of these early watercolors, and all of the late ones, have something psychotic about them. Sound, touch, all the other senses come into play, heightened, translated into inventive marks with a brush. He makes mosquitos and electric wires buzz, birds fly by too fast to see, the sunlight causes mirages, and the sun itself becomes a black dot, as would appear when you look at it for too long. This psychotic vision, or just a clear and more complete vision if you like, has been linked to effects caused by his heart medicine. I don’t know how that explains the adolescent watercolors…maybe teenagers tend to get a bit manic-psychotic in summer. Now I’m thinking of Newton… Anyway, the idea of this very rural, doughy-looking quiet type, standing in a marsh with his rubber boots, doing magnificent and visionary watercolors because of his heart pills, makes me happy.

Paste: I can see all those influences you mentioned in your work (of the ones I know), mostly insofar as you are not afraid to use color. Is that something that’s always been natural for you? What do your drawings from when you were a child look like?

Evens: Mostly black and white, never very painterly. I sucked at using color for a long time, until I hit my stride in The Wrong Place.

Paste: So how did you learn how to use color? You went to illustration school, right? Any of that there? Or was it independently?

Evens: I got on the right track when I started doing a small color sketch before doing the actual drawing. If you do this, unavoidably you’ll apply proportionally big swaths of dominant color. The sketches looked good, so I just did the same thing on the large sheet of paper, working the details out afterward. Later on, I didn’t need the color sketches anymore, just went straight for that big brush. And after that I just got better and braver at it, through habit, without really needing the big brush.

大块大块的色块

Paste: Are you particular about what kinds of watercolor you use? Brushes? What’s your set-up for working?

Evens: Actually I hardly use real watercolor, but a “liquid watercolor” called Ecoline. It’s more like a color ink. Then there’s a lot of gouache, color markers, black ink and some crayons. Real watercolor comes in little blocks, placed close together in a box, that you have to rub with water to make it…it seems like too much hassle. But watercolor’s perfect when I feel like really bungling a drawing.

Paste: How do you get into the mindset of a child who’s lost a parent, whether through death or other means?

Evens: Did you feel I got into the mindset?

Paste: Hmm. I don’t know. I’m not a child who’s lost a parent. But it feels like you did. This book is a little bit funny, but also it is terrifying. I read it right before bed and then I couldn’t get to sleep because it unsettled me. Did you set out to do that? Why? What made you want to write a horror story? Am I on the wrong track that her dad is the bad guy here?

Evens: I think me answering those questions won’t make the book any better. But it interests me that people go Cluedo with this book, looking for—and finding—clues in the backgrounds. Which might make them look harder at the drawings. The game I tried to play in Panther is swinging a pendulum between desirable fun and absolute horror, tic, toc.

Paste: There’s something of a fairytale about Panther. What reading did you do to prepare for it? I feel like Stephen King’s It might be relevant here, but I could be on the wrong track.

Evens: I didn’t need to do research for this book, but it is influenced by, and a reaction to, all kinds of children’s stories. Mostly the modern ones, where monsters are funny. And yes, if Stephen King’s It and Bill Watterson’s Hobbes had a lovechild you might get Panther.

Paste: What scares you?

Evens: Venereal disease and lung cancer. Just keeping the answers sexy here.

Paste: Let’s talk about dreams. They seem to be another important thematic thread in your work. A lot of it takes place in an expanded reality, a space that’s dreamlike as far as the possibilities of what could happen. What makes you interested in them? Do you have particularly vivid dreams yourself?

Evens: I like when you say “expanded reality.” That’s what I aim for. I do think I use visuals that might be dreamlike, or psychedelic, but I don’t think I use dream logic. I have vivid dreams but I hardly ever write them down or draw them, even though people like Fellini made magnificent sport out of doing that. Felllini’s notes and drawings have been collected in an awesome book, but it’s not so much his dreams themselves that interest me. It’s the gritty, random page layouts and the speedy, practical use of lines and color—someone getting something very complex on the page in a hurry. My own dreams are interesting to me, but haven’t you ever gotten bored or distracted listening to someone else telling you the details of some long dream? I recently wrote a piece of dialogue where someone does that.

Paste: Did you have any imaginary friends when you were a child?

Evens: No. Only imaginary worlds.

Paste: Tell me about these imaginary worlds.

Evens: Practically all I did was try to make imaginary worlds come to life, which meant: visible to other people, in comics, designs for buildings, fantasy world maps, board and card games, cassette tapes. So not much time to lose on say, sports. I only specialized in comics when I got to high school. But the goal stays the same, as you said: expanded reality (...man!). No teaching, no explaining, no argument, just a portable world, bound together, with maybe a dust jacket around it or even some leather.

Paste: Do you ever worry your books are too beautiful?

Evens: Not that they’re too beautiful, since beauty contains all kinds of drawing, from rough cave drawings to dazzling van Eyck. Sometimes I do worry that by now I master my drawing materials too much, especially the color inks, and that this might make the drawings too affected. It means I often have to provoke surprises and accidents, where before I would stumble into them and have to creatively crawl my way out. I know this answer sounds like the “I’m too much of a perfectionist” answer in a job interview, but then again it was a softball question…

Paste: I think that was a good answer as far as beauty and such is concerned. Maybe what I was getting at more is: how do you marry horrifying or anguished content and the way it’s presented visually. Do you think it’s possible that your readers get distracted by how darn pretty the pages are and miss some of the darkness they contain?

Evens: They might. But then maybe the darkness catches up with them later.

Reading: Curator's blog: Soviet children's books

From：http://www.houseofillustration.org.uk/news/latest-news/curators-blog-soviet-childrens-books/

Curator's blog: Soviet children's books

The October Revolution of 1917 radically changed every aspect of Russian life and culture. Within one year the vast country had been transformed from a Tsarist autocracy into a communist state run by Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov (Lenin) and his Bolshevik party. Lenin promised to liberate Russian workers from the ruling classes, and to establish equality in a modern society based on industrial efficiency.

As part of this grand experiment, humanity itself had to change; the 'new Soviet man' would be a tool in the service of a progressive, classless and atheistic civilisation - "a superman", Leon Trotsky avowed. In this emerging order, children acquired a new status as the first Soviet generation and as builders of an egalitarian future. As forces for education and mass communication, children’s books too had a new significance.

Politicians and educational theorists relegated pre-revolutionary books to the past with the belief that the kings and queens of fairy tales and remote imaginary worlds were irrelevant to the Soviet child. They called for a new form of children's book that would give practical instruction, instil socialist values and present a politically-endorsed vision of the future.

A state-published poster designed by sisters Galina and Olga Chichagova illustrates this break from the past with a split composition. Framed in black on the left are icons of Russian folklore and fiction, captioned, "Out with the mysticism and fantasy of children’s books!!" On the right, busy Soviet children are presided over by Lenin with the demand, "Give a new child's book!! Work, battle, technology, nature – the new reality of childhood".

In the fifteen years that followed the Revolution, Soviet children's books became a mass media phenomenon. Almost 10,000 titles were published in several editions of up to 200,000. However, their separation from pre-revolutionary ideas and commitment to political agendas was not as decisive as the Chichagovas' poster suggests.

From 1917 to the early 1930s, there was an open forum on what Soviet children's books should be: celebrated pre-revolutionary illustrators, leading avant-garde artists and politically motivated creators experimented with approaches to illustration, design and layout with the belief that the book was the most important cultural form in modern Russia. The result was a period of innovation unmatched in the history of picture books.

Even before the Revolution, illustrators and authors were reforming the Russian picture book. During the 19th century, most children's literature in Russia had been imported from Western Europe for the nurseries of wealthy families. By the early 20th century, however, increased literacy among the middle classes and improved printing equipment encouraged Russian publishers to create books for their own markets.

The most advanced pre-revolutionary books were designed and illustrated by artists of the Mir iskusstva (World of Art) movement, who sought to integrate art into every aspect of daily life. Alongside their work in dance, theatre and painting, many of their high-profile members worked on children’s books, including Alexandre Benois, Ivan Bilibin and Dmitry Mitrokhin.

Bilibin’s illustrations for Aleksandr Pushkin's The Tale of Tsar Saltan embody the achievements of the group. His images are deliberately positioned within the text and have dynamic changing viewpoints. Bilibin's use of decorative line and colour reflects the movement's wider interest in Russian folk traditions and in Western and Japanese decorative arts. The Mir iskusstva had high production values, and their volumes were often in hardback with full colour pages and sometimes printed with metallic inks. These books, while ground-breaking, remained the preserve of the few.

Mir iskusstva were not the only ones reacting against poor quality children's publishing in the early 20th century. Writer Kornei Chukovsky had long lamented the unimaginative and conservative children's literature available in Russia. He drafted Crocodile while travelling on a train with his young son, composing a verse that accompanied the rhythm of their swaying carriage. The poem about a cigar-smoking crocodile rampaging through Petrograd was published with boisterous illustrations by Nikolai Remizov in 1917; it became an instant success and the foundation of modern Russian children's poetry.

In the same year, the Soviet government was established, but was fiercely contested and civil war broke out in Russia. So although children’s books were seen as vital resources by the state, publishers were largely unable to operate and children’s book production slowed almost to a stop from 1917 to 1921. However, small groups of enterprising and pioneering artists defied these circumstances and their efforts set the course for Soviet picture books.

In 1918, artist Vera Ermolaeva founded Segodnia (Today) collective in Petrograd - the first Soviet children's book publisher. Taking their cue from the books of the Russian Futurists, they created works that bridged the gap between the pre-revolutionary experiments of avant-garde artists and Soviet children’s literature. Their publications paid homage to 17th-century formats that were popular with the peasantry, working and middle classes: the 'block book' (small densely illustrated books intended for semi-literate people) and 'lubki' (printed sheets featuring images and stories for display in the home).

Early invention also came through Yiddish literature after the Soviet government lifted a Tsarist ban on Yiddish publishing. Russian artists, including Marc Chagall and El Lissitzky, combined motifs of their Jewish culture with an interest in modernism to create highly original book illustration. A Story About a Rooster, The Little Kid, written by Der Nister, was Chagall's only children’s book; his 'faux naïf' images feature the typical wooden house of shtetl (Jewish village) life.

El Lissitzky’s The Only Kid illustrated the playful song sung at the end of the Passover Seder: a goat is eaten by a cat and chaos ensues. Lissitzky's lithographs feature distorted perspectives of the animals alongside fragmented geometric shapes, framed by arcs of text. The illustrations anticipate his later experiments with abstraction, as well as a broad adoption of abstracted forms in Soviet picture books.

In 1921, in response to crises across Russia, Lenin launched the New Economic Policy. This brought a temporary end to total nationalisation, and private businesses including publishers were permitted to operate. By 1922 there were more than 300 publishing houses in Moscow and Petrograd.

The Soviet government had an active interest in the publishing of children’s literature, as increasing literacy and inspiring the loyalty of children were key to their ambition for a modern collective workforce. Politicians and theorists hotly debated about what kind of reading matter would yield their desired result. However throughout most of the 1920s, these debates remained theoretical.

Picture books for young readers were heavily illustrated; concise text and sequenced images were cohesive and in many cases were almost inseparable, and some books featured no text at all. This graphics-led approach was applauded by Soviet supporters, who recognised the power of the image to disseminate knowledge and encourage literacy among children whose parents were likely to be unschooled.

The synthesis of text and image in early Soviet books was exemplified by the collaboration of writer Samuil Marshak and illustrator Vladimir Lebedev. Lebedev had worked on propaganda posters at ROSTA (the Russian Telegraph Agency) during the Civil War, where he had combined concise text with bold stencilled graphics to communicate with a broad population. The artist brought his understanding of direct visual communication from ROSTA to children’s books such as Circus which featured bright characters built from flat, stylised shapes alongside Marshak’s playful and crisp poetry.

The pair created many popular picture books. Their spirited tales were most often absurd and light-hearted, however their Ice Cream was a cautionary tale about a bourgeois capitalist who eats too much ice cream and suffers terrible consequences. Owing to their success as author and illustrator, both Marshak and Lebedev were employed in editorial and commissioning roles, and they became particularly known for their support of avant-garde and liberal artists and writers at private publishing house Raduga (Rainbow).

Soviet books of the 1920s and early 1930s can be seen as the key to the modern picture book and the form that we recognise today. Though the innovation of the early Soviet period would never be seen again in Russia, the books influenced children’s publishing around the world. In the Netherlands, exhibitions of Soviet books in the 1930s caused a sensation. In France, Russian émigrés Nathalie Parain and Feodor Rojankovsky created an unmistakable aesthetic for the Père Castor albums. Soviet books brought to England by artist Pearl Binder inspired Noel Carrington to create the illustrious Puffin Picture Book series.

Though the period of uninhibited experimentation in Soviet Russian picture books was brief, the vigour and ingenuity of those authors and illustrators who recognised the creative and social potential of the book created a constant and vital legacy.

 - Olivia Ahmad, Curator

The text of this blog is excerpted from the introduction to House of Illustration's catalogue for A New Childhood: Picture Books from Soviet Russia. Read more about the exhibition here, or head over to our webstore to take a look inside the book and order your own copy.