In addition to theatre and film adaptations of my picture books, I have also been involved in a number of other projects as a freelance visual artist. All of these have been challenging and problematic in their own special way, involving different questions of scale, audience and logistics. My approach has always been to ‘learn by doing’, so I’m always happy to try new things.
The Tea Party
The Hundred Year Picnic
Art Award for Young Artists
Sydney band Lo-tel’s ‘The Lost Thing’
Philbert and Oscar, a children’s art trail
The Tea Party
The largest recent project was a mural produced for the children’s section of a library in the inner-city suburb of Subiaco. The building had undergone some renovations, and as part of this I was invited as a local artist to paint one of the bare walls with an appealing design - no small feat given that the area was some 24 square metres, all of it above bookshelves.
The solution was to paint eight separate canvases that could be locked together as a single composition. My concept was that long T-shaped area would depict a flowing landscape with whimsical creatures strolling, swimming, flying and rowing through it, some having conversations and reading books, others breathing fire and stormy oceans, with many drinking cups of tea made by towering teapots. Hence the title ‘The Tea Party’ which nods towards Lewis Carroll, as well as being an alternative or ‘extended’ version of the strange world that is briefly glimpsed in my picture book The Lost Thing.
The entire project ended up taking about three months, painted using acrylic and oils with some collage of printed materials, fabric, coloured paper and gold leaf. My biggest problem was trying to paint something so big in parts that could only be placed together, two at a time, in my backyard. I relied heavily on detailed colour sketches to ensure continuity, and also spent a week or so working on a large ladder once the work was installed in the library, joining everything up as a fluid composition.
Many of the details in the final work were not visible from ground level, and for a while a pair of binoculars where installed in the library for anyone who wanted to see everything! (Until they got broken by overzealous children!)
Working on the mural in the library, after the unfinished panels had been installed.
The Hundred Year Picnic
This first mural proved to be very successful for library visitors, which led to the commissioning of a second, smaller painting facing the ‘adult’ part of the library - still being about 16sqm though. For this image, I wanted to do something quite different, and drew upon my interest in reinterpreting old photographs to produce large-scale portraits and landscapes.
I visited the nearby local museum, which houses a vast collection of old photographs, mostly drawn from private family albums donated to the museum. I thumbed through some two thousand images of streets, houses and people before finding a small photograph that seemed to capture the mood I was looking for; a family having a picnic somewhere, probably around 1920 or 1930, when Subiaco was a relatively undeveloped suburb.
I was attracted by a certain sense of candidness here, missing from many formal photographs of that period, where the individuals expressed something of themselves in the absence of a directed composition; one man holding a puppy, another playing an accordion, children playing distractedly, a woman shielding her eyes from the intense sunlight. It was all quite casual and unpretentious; they were perhaps a family of working class people having a Sunday outing. There was a strong feeling of early community, where people probably had to depend on each other in close-knit groups to endure hardship, and also a feeling of optimism and lightness as well.
Rather than simply scale up and reproduce this image I wanted to abstract it in some way, particularly using colour to evoke a certain meditative mood. I imagined that each character was showing a different reaction to their environment, as if they were each living in different personal universes that happened to intersect - some are green, some pink, some white, and seem to be fading in and out of the background like fragments of memory.
Subiaco Library (Evelyn H. Parker Library) is located on the corner of Bagot and Rokeby Rd, Subiaco, Perth.
The ‘Shaun Tan Art Award for Young Artists’
This is a Perth-based annual award (I hate words like ‘competition’ or ‘contest’) for school age children and teenagers, from kindergarten to year 12 which began in 2003, and attracted some 900 entries. I am involved as one of four judges who spend a lot of time discussing the submissions and awarding modest prizes, and selecting works for an exhibition at Subiaco Library, which organises and runs the award. It is the brainchild of a friend, the entrepreneurial librarian Susan Marie (also responsible for commissioning the murals).
The same Library also runs the ‘Tim Winton Young Writer’s Award’ which has been around for over ten years. The main idea behind both awards is not so much a ‘search for the best’ as an opportunity for young people to have a target outlet for their creative work. As a school-age student, I used to enter many art competitions and awards, with varying degrees of success – what was most valuable was the motivation to do certain projects (and get them finished), and to have that work seen by others, as art is meant to be.
‘The hundred year picnic’ acrylic, oils, collage on canvas, approx. 4m x 4m.
Lo-Tel’s ‘The Lost Thing’ (2003)
This was an interesting collaboration between myself and the Sydney-based rock band Lo-Tel. The lead singer, Luke Hannigan, noticed my picture book The Lost Thing in a bookstore and enjoyed the story so much that he asked me to adapt both the text and artwork as an accompaniment to their forthcoming album.
Although the subjects of Lo-tel’s lyrics and my own book were superficially very different, they shared a common sub-text and narrative approach, relating to feelings of individual alienation and disempowerment.
I spent some time trying to compress the story of the Lost Thing into a form that would be readable as a CD-sized booklet, with less pages. The result is an interesting and, I think, thought-provoking fusion of pictures, text and music - both works stand in isolation as independent voices, yet relate by underscoring similar themes. I personally found it pleasing to have my work used in a manner that resists the inaccurate classification of ‘children’s literature’, as I see The Lost Thing as being very much a fable about the problems of adulthood.
The album received very favourable reviews, which included positive comments on this interesting pairing of artistic styles and forms, particularly as both music and illustrated story were both complete and autonomous works being brought together.
CD cover and album promotional image.
Philbert and Oscar
I was commissioned by the Children’s Book Council of Australia and the Art Gallery of Western Australia to develop written text and artwork for a children’s ‘Art Trail’. The idea was to introduce children to various artistic concepts by having drawn characters beside particular works of art in the gallery collection, and making comments as spectators.
This was a concept that I had been playing with some years before – of using illustrated characters to talk about art - but which I had subsequently abandoned for various reasons. Working with the State Gallery I was able to mine my old sketchbooks for a duo of imaginary art critics – a small old man with wings and a pointy hat, and his feline sidekick, named Philbert and Oscar respectively.
Philbert did most talking, commenting on colour, pattern, abstraction, realism, style and so on, while Oscar’s thought bubbles supplied additional references, such as definitions of words and quotes from famous artists. I wanted to keep the writing fairly simple and understandable for children, but also to be engaging for adult visitors, and this formula seemed to work well for that purpose, particularly where humour was involved.
Philbert and Oscar take a closer look at some Art.