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- Volume 4, Issue 2, 2017
Journal of Illustration - Volume 4, Issue 2, 2017
Volume 4, Issue 2, 2017
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A trial of women
More LessAbstractThe following article is an articulation of practice-based research that seeks to situate the process of ‘illustrative thinking’ (Vormittag 2014) as an inventive social research methodology. The study, an enquiry into a medieval witch trial, asserts the embodied sensory experiences of the illustration researcher as a form of non-representational ethnography (Thrift 2007). Illustration here manifests as ficto-critical (Muecke 2002) image, and writing employs narrative description to offer an interpretation of what remains of a historical happening within everyday collective consciousness (Wright 1985). Notes have been utilized creatively to interweave intersubjective narratives, and accompanying illustrations offer a visual recording of experience. Produced post-encounter, the imagery is informed by primary and secondary research but is also evocative of personal memory and autobiography. This article endeavours to embody a holistic creative outcome, manifesting at once as a creative practice, a critical discourse and a compelling story.
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Creation as a method of enquiry: Reflections on practice-based research in children’s picturebook illustration
By Laura LittleAbstractWhile practice-based research is a relatively new area of research in the United Kingdom, it is growing rapidly. The theoretical frameworks that underpin practice-based research are broad, which can result in anxiety or confusion in students who undertake it. This article explores frameworks for practice-based research and considers some applications of these frameworks to a research project in children’s picturebook illustration. One challenge of practice-based research is a perceived gap between creation and interpretation. Chris Rust’s findings for the AHRC report on practice-based research, for example, highlight tensions between the discourses of the practitioner and the theorist. While there is a significant body of literature on children’s picturebooks, academic work by illustrators and artists that focuses on the processes rather than on the finished picturebook is currently underrepresented. The research described here aims to build on existing literature to offer insights from a picturebook maker’s perspective into the often-undisclosed thought processes underlying his or her work. It demonstrates the possibility for the practitioner to take an interdisciplinary approach to practice-based research in picturebooks and offers an accessible framework to explore and discuss practical work.
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Picturing the perils of greed: Kladderadatsch and the 1873 financial crash
More LessAbstractThis article examines the coverage of the 1873 stock market crash and its aftermath in the Berlin satirical paper Kladderadatsch, whose illustrations were drawn by Wilhelm Scholz. Images and texts together reported on government activities, offered critical commentaries on the state of society, and acted as the voice of the country’s liberal conscience. The illustrations critiqued not only prominent political figures but also the general public who were investors in the stock market and readers of Kladderadatsch. Scholz’s caricatures employed a variety of techniques in which figures were depicted realistically or transformed in different historical, literary or mythological settings. These pictorial strategies allowed him to contextualize the flux of contemporary events and patterns of human behaviour in a historical continuum. At their most successful, the images stimulated discourses on German identity and moral values and visualized the nature of modernity. This material will appeal to readers interested in the history of visual culture, journalism, capitalism and the early Wilhelmine Empire.
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The art of being Indian
More LessAbstractThe arena of children’s publishing in India sees the convergence of at least two ‘traditions’ or streams of illustration art. The first is the product of artists and illustrators who emerge from urban art colleges with an appreciation of naturalistic drawing and realism. Historically, this tradition grew under colonial institutions with the advent of printing technologies and matured alongside the growth of literature for children. Translating itinerant conventions into the Indian subcontinent, illustration for children continues to be significantly inspired by European and American influences. More recently, children’s illustration in India has seen the migration of a number of folk art styles from often rural and ritual settings to the pages of picturebooks. Distinct from the urban illustrator, the creators of these artworks are schooled in a formal aestheticism that remains largely independent of realist conventions. These indigenous styles of representation now occupy a distinct space in the postcolonial field of children’s publishing as more folk artists turn illustrators. As a practitioner with formal art college training, I begin with a brief description of my background as an illustrator and an introduction to children’s publishing in India from this perspective. I then turn to vernacular idioms and trace historical currents that contextualize a transformation of these practices from collective ritual arts to vehicles of individual self-expression. Finally, I explore the emergence of a few practitioners in children’s publishing, and examine books and works of folk art illustration. My article sets out to explore the following questions: how are these image-making practices seen and read by audiences? As bearers of indigenous ways of depicting and seeing their worlds, do folk artists somehow represent a more authentically ‘Indian’ voice? And what of the interaction between these two currents of illustration in India? What dialogues and hybrid practices lie ahead?
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Miffy: A pedagogical avant-garde rabbit; the influence of Karel Appel’s imagery on Dick Bruna’s picturebooks
More LessAbstractThis article considers how Dick Bruna (1927–2017) successfully combined the artistic influences of Matisse (1869–1954), Léger (1881–1955) and the avant-garde Cobra movement with the pedagogic demands for picturebooks, in his illustrations for the Miffy picturebooks. In general, avant-garde art movements only influence picturebooks with great delay and in a significantly weakened form. However, the Miffy picturebooks, constitute a remarkable exception to this rule. The artists that were part of the Cobra movement, Constant (1920–2005) and Karel Appel (1921–2006) in particular, valued the imagery of the child’s drawing. Appel took this further, by explicitly integrating infantile imagery into his work and seeing childhood as an artistic way of life worth striving for. Bruna, for his part, valued the direct simplicity of childish imagery and applied it to his designs for book covers and posters. When Dick Bruna designed the second and definitive version of Miffy, in early 1960, he was referencing Appel’s work and at the same time taking into account the pedagogic demands of picturebooks. The result is a ground-breaking imagery with a significant influence on the evolution of picturebooks, providing Bruna with international renown.
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Book Review
By ChetanAbstractOut of Line: Cartoons, Caricature and Contemporary India, Christel R. Devadawson (2014) Delhi: Orient Blackswan, 278 pp., ISBN: 9788125055136, h/bk, $30
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