I chatted to a next-door neighbour the other day. She hadn’t seen my latest picture book, Rosie the Rhinoceros, until very recently. “Matt,” she said “can I just say that I loved Rosie. You’re becoming more like you!” Hmm, I thought, becoming more like me. I never asked her what she meant but now I can’t help but try to work it out.
Rosie is the first book I’ve illustrated using ink as well as watercolour. It was certainly a risk for me. I’d never used ink in this way before – bold, confident line work – but in my character discovery of Rosie, I had no choice; pencil just didn’t become her. Inspired by the beautifully energetic line of Bill Watterson’s work in Calvin and Hobbes, I studied the art of the comic line intensely. And, as is most often the case, through pure play and exploration, the style of Rosie revealed itself so naturally before me.
But, what I thought I was doing was finding the medium to match the character. Rosie has a confidence & energy in her that the bold flowing line captures perfectly. Yet, here was the next door neighbour saying that the book itself felt more like the me she knew.
But that’s often it, isn’t it? The perception of ourselves very rarely matches the ones we plant in another’s head as we meander our way through life. For example, ever since I was little I’ve always found myself in leadership roles (first in junior sport, then in school, then at work). People say my confidence inspires their confidence. But, inside, I couldn’t feel any further from a ‘confident leader’! Yet, when I look back on my life, the evidence would clearly suggest otherwise.
If I was to portrait myself, I would not consider bold, confident, flowing ink lines in the Rosie style; but I do, deep down, acknowledge some level of authenticity in that work. I bloody enjoyed it, to be honest. The bold lines freed me from the laborious but meditatively intense work of pencil and wash. I had been, in that book, closer than ever to the idea of play I bang on so much about; and yet, I thought it was Rosie, not me, who was to blame.
Sure enough, as if I needed yet more evidence of this authenticity, my new book, Herman Crab written by Peter Helliar, was commissioned off the back of the work I produced in Rosie. “We love the bold character design of Rosie,” formed part of the brief. Herman is a very different character but, again, the freedom in the line produced something different in the work.
With Rosie and Herman, I thought that I was simply evolving – becoming a more logical and conceptually-oriented artist. And, while that may be true, perhaps what’s also happening is that I’m finding those authentic marks that Bruce Whatley talks about; the marks that make me, me. I always thought it would happen more consciously than this. I would somehow logic my way towards something authentic. But, like with most things true, perhaps it’s only when the brain gets out of the way that the heart has room to speak?