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International Co-Editions and the Sense of Place in Picturebooks
Is the tyranny of the co-edition taking away the magic of a 'sense of place' in picturebooks? In this essay, Martin Salisbury discusses the impact of globalised publishing on what picturebook artists may and may not represent
Time was when you knew where you were in picturebooks. Ardizzone's quintessentially English regency seaside architecture, Ludwig Bemelmens's delightful evocations of Paris, Carl Larsson's cool Scandinavian interiors or NC Wyeth's painstakingly authentic Wild West - they were all inspired by the artists' own back yard, made convincing and real by the illustrator's familiarity with the everyday detail of a place. The setting didn't need to be familiar to the reader; the work of these artists was and is widely adored by those for whom this was often a first introduction to the visual detail of a particular location. For me, as a child at school in the UK in the 1950s, pictorial representations of unfamiliar landscapes and architecture made books that much more intriguing. I clearly remember my own fascination with those oddly shaped barns and weird windmills in what must have been American schoolbooks, their sheer strangeness drawing me into the content of the books.
For the artist/illustrator a sense of place can often be the inspiration for a picturebook. With book illustration becoming increasingly the home of figurative, representational or narrative art (as the fine arts veer ever more towards the purely conceptual), it is inevitable that illustrators trained in the study of nature will frequently look to the world around them when creating the backdrop for this particular form of theatre. A characteristic of the 'born illustrator', as Edward Ardizzone (1958) identified in a speech to the Double Crown Club back in the 1950s, is a passionate interest in the minutiae of everyday life and living. Another British illustrator of the period, Lynton Lamb, wrote at length about the importance of observational drawing to the student of illustration, and how everyday observed anecdotal detail plays a vital role in the development of the illustrator's visual vocabulary. Illustration students at art schools and universities today still undergo a specialised training that is based on drawing and design. Lamb's waspish comments on perceptions of the illustrator's...