Interview given by Rui de Oliveira to professor Marisa Mokarzel
When did your interest for children’s book start, specially for children’s books illustrations?
Consciously, it started when I was at the university. In my graduating project, in Hungary, there was a part dedicated to illustrated books for children and young people. One of those books is Guita. Actually, Guita was a graduation project. From the professional point of view, my interest came out at that moment. From the philosophical point of view it is due to my passion for literature, I love books. The book for me is a way of being what I am not, of being someone else, of being many persons. Even when I am illustrating I try to be different persons. Machado de Assis, Lima Barreto, João do Rio, all those writers transport me to other personalities, other worlds. My necessity to look for a new way of illustrating may come from my necessity of reading those writers and to incorporate myself to the way they write. It is the observation of the word that allows me to understand the image. If you observe the meaning of the word you will understand the meaning of the image. I am talking about the relation word-image.
We have talked that it is not always true that the illustrator is a good graphic designer. Do you think you can make a good graphic project, taking into consideration your education?
Yes, because I have worked a lot with design on TV. I have mainly worked with design on TV and it gave me a great experience to make graphic projects. In the narrative image you are telling a story while in design you are not, you are arranging the spaces to tell a story. It is different. Design is, let’s say, the space, the choice of a place. What is going to happen there is something else. Of course it is all linked. That is why I think that when you make a design you must know what is going to happen in that space. The designer is very concerned about his space and forgets that the illustrator space is another. The space of the designer is conceptual; the illustrator’s space is narrative. These are different concepts. I say that because I have made books where the design was already ready, they had assigned the place where I was supposed to illustrate.
When I see an illustration I think that one of your specificities is the narrative. But inside this narrative I see two questions: one is aesthetic and the other is related to the meaning. The designer is not concerned with what is written. Is he only concerned with the aesthetic?
The book is an aesthetic object; it has this kind of possibility and quality. But it is not only that. When I receive a book to illustrate that has been drawn by this kind of designer who values only the aesthetic, I feel he looks like an architect who projects a building independent from the people. He projects a beautiful building but nobody lives inside. I have already illustrated a book that has a very important scene and the designer left a very little space for it. But why did he do so? Based on what? What kind of conception did he have? It was only spatial and compositional. Many illustrators like to work like that. Some say:” it is even better as we already know the space, it is faster”. I become impatient when I see a large space for a book passage without any importance and vice-versa.
What are the illustrators that have contributed to your education? With whom do you identify yourself better and which ones have been a reference to your work?
The British illustration from the XIX century, without any doubt. Not only the illustration but also engraving and water colour. The British engraving has influenced me, it has an aristocratic aspect that I like, even though I am the son of a worker. I like this elegance, this aristocratic refinement. The British have a refinement, a style that comes from the engraving history. I like Hogarth and other British engravers. The illustrators, I like many of them. I also admire the British painting itself.
Mainly the Pre-Raphaelites? Which ones?
I like all the British painting even what is not pre-Raphaelite. I like very much the Victorian period even though the aristocracy and the conservativeness. I am aware that the industrial revolution was fabricated with Brazilian gold that came through Portugal. I am ware of that. But I like to observe and study the British painting.
I see some influence of Walter Crane in your work: line, composition, and the use of different elements.
I like Walter Crane. He has associated two things that I find very interesting: he is a neo-classic with some pre-Raphaelite influence. His drawing is “neoclassical pre-Raphaelite”. He does a planning for a Greek profile. His planning approaches the pre-raphaelians even to the art nouveau that the English used to call New Style. There are also other illustrators that I like very much, the German illustration for instance. I am always studying those illustrators, always looking at them. They are my pals. We do not drink together but we work together.
Thus, you have the British illustration from the XIX century as a referential. So, you don’t have a referential in the Brazilian illustration.
No. There is a book called “O Brasil pela Imagem” (Brazil through image). I believe that I have started my career with this book that was published during Getulio’s government, Estado Novo. My father was a nationalist and he bought us that book, which was illustrated by Alvaro Marins, whose fictitious name was Seth. He worked from 1937 to 1945 illustrating this book, which I find, in terms of illustration, similar to “Rebellion in the Backlands” (Os Sertões) by Euclides da Cunha. He starts showing the land aspects, he paints the caatinga, the jungle and the plain. Afterwards he talks about the landowners, he illustrates the Brazilian Indians. It is a fantastic work, all made in pen-and-ink drawing. This book is a demonstration of love for Brazil. I was a boy and every time I saw the book drawings I used to have myself transported to its characters. My passion for illustration started with that book, that illustration. He made an iconographic work that is unique up to now. Even the Brazilian painter Portinari, who intended to portray the Brazilian saga, did not do such a painting work.
You work with figuration. The illustration is basically figurative, there are some abstract illustrations but this is not common. You have studied painting at the Museum of Modern Art of Rio de Janeiro, where you have been in contact with the New Figuration and the Abstractionism. Have your illustration been influenced by these two tendencies?
Oh, yes. I believe that the correct way to study illustration is to study its opposite. What would be its opposite? It would be Abstraction. If you study abstractionism you will understand figure better. If you study Malevitch you will notice that he is an excellent illustration professor: when he makes a white square over a white background, when he creates “here and now” and separates painting from reference. He says “painting is painting”. At this point you start to understand what is the opposite of illustration. I find abstract art very important. It is the most important moment of art in the XX century. Its informality, the non-objective art, this is the most important moment of man’s visual intelligence. The opposite fundaments to illustration are in the abstract art.
What is the relation between music and your creative process?
Today I was listening to Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. It is interesting to notice that Vivaldi wrote verses, describing what he wanted to say in melody, he got a written text. Referring to winter he says: “music starts with footsteps, next arrives teeth shivering”. I would say that here we have the right way to study illustration because we have a total abstraction in music but at the same time we have a referential with the reality. I believe that music is a process to study illustration when we have a composer such as Vivaldi who is very narrative. The association of music and illustration is a very interesting study that can be made having “The Four Seasons “ as the starting point. I don’t know if you are familiar with Arcimboldo’s “Four Seasons”. Vivaldi succeeds better than Arcimboldo because when the latter paints the winter he makes a man’s face as if it were a tree trunk full of wrinkles. This is perhaps the great difficulty of illustration: it is very simultaneous. The illustrator is supposed to work a little like Vivaldi. He should leave a few things a bit unclear. The abstraction appeal is the illustrator’s most important talent, as his art is extremely concrete, figurative and tangible. That is why the illustrator needs to be more Vivaldi than Arcimboldo.
What plastic elements from the decorative arts do you use as a referential to your illustrations?
There is something that is very important in my work: the ex-libris. What does it mean? It is the figurative representation of the way one sees literature. For example, I have a book about the ex-libris and I always have to look at it. It is an extraordinary illustration work because it represents the way the person sees your books and literature, and it is usually very decorative.
I think that there is some prejudice related to the decorative art.
There should not be a prejudice related to decorativism because it is possible to study art history by the line.
The illustrator has to create a punctuation. The writer puts a period but the punctuation of the text can be a circumference in the illustration. For me the vignette is the mark, it represents the graphical interval, the literary style of the book. In a certain way, it is the complement of the illustration. The vignette is not an illustration but an appendix, something that has moved, the illustration’s little satellite. Sometimes you say something in the illustration and complements in the vignette. I like to do this kind of thing.
The plastic artist also has a searching period. It happens when he is changing himself. Can you notice this type of search in the work of an artist, something that is not a period of definitions but a moment that will come out in a better period?
When the painter finds his language he develops that visual universe up to the last consequences. The illustrator does not have this kind of ease. Each book is like a gymkhana, the illustrator has to look for a way of illustrating. Everything is a little Sisyphus who is condemned to lug a large stone towards the mountaintop. Once at the summit, the stone rolls mercilessly back down and the process begins anew.
What about the technique? You generally use water paint. I would like to know how do you see the art and craft techniques and the new graphical computational techniques? How do you see those new practices?
I am not used to put arts and craft to virtual image. It is something that I still have to try to do. It is not the case of playing Bach on the harpsichord. Today you play Bach on the piano. When Bach composed his music there was no piano at that time. I think that the computer is also a democratic instrument as it turns the book production process cheaper.
You essentially work with ecoline and watercolour.
I like to work with traditional techniques. It is a pleasure for me, the same pleasure of a child drawing with colour pencils. The illustrator must have this pleasure when he illustrates for children. He has to use a technique he likes and the technique must be compatible with the book he is illustrating. In the book “O Touro da Língua de Ouro” I wanted to illustrate as if it were a popular tapestry and so I used acrylic paint. I wanted the texture to be apparent to recall those paintings made by the Black Jamaicans. The technique has those two sides: identification and adequacy, personal identification and text adequacy.
You also have some works that seem that you have made use of a gouge.
The books I have illustrated in that way I tried to make the illustrations with some gravure content. Gravure is the origin of illustration. When you make a book that looks like a gravure, a litho, a wood engraving, or a metal gravure you give some ancestry to illustration. This is a process of redemption:the illustration has no background, no future nor present. Nowadays, it seems that the illustration was made by different persons or even that part of it was made in Japan, part here and there. The illustration seems to have no history, no author. It could have been made by a group, by a studio.
The illustrator creates, in general, a story for the image book but you have made an image book from a well-known story: The Beauty and the Beast. It was a much more difficult process, wasn’t it?
This can only happen when you have control of someone else’s story. For The Beauty and the Beast, there was a text and I have only made the transport to a visual image of something that already existed in the literary image. As it was a fairy tale, this is another image book gender, much more complex due to its high polysemy and different symbolic meanings. All these things need care as well as a lot of synthesis in order to extract the essential in terms of image, of what is said all over the pages. You must find a visual sentence for what is said along the literary paragraphs. This is very difficult for the illustrator. It was not easy to me to find visual solutions for The Beauty and the Beast. How could I say that the Beauty was getting intimate to the Beauty? The solution I have found was to leave her hair down, as I believe that when women are intimate to a person they leave their hair down. The greatest difficulty for the illustrator, in my opinion, is to have the visual equivalence in the same level of the complexity of the literary equivalent.
I think that this work was a great challenge as we can notice all this complexity. I believe that you have been brave. When the illustrator makes up the story he plays with his own imaginary without much engagement, as he would have with a well-known story that can bring about demands related to the adaptation authenticity.
Bluebeard would be the second book of the series, as I have told you. The other book should be The Little Red Hiding Hood. This would be a great challenge because you always associate The Little Red Hiding Hood to Disney and to the books published in Europe that have a less violent rereading of the story. For Bluebeard I wanted to work with the violent aspect of the children. The children are sometimes mean, and I would like to draw the children’s cruelty. Another thing would be to work with terror, horror and fear that does not have anything to do with those horror films we can see on TV. I still want to make this book and if there is a crazy publisher interested, here is the project. [This interview was made in 1977. In 2002, the publishing house Cia das Letrinhas published this project under the name Chapeuzinho Vermelho e outros contos por imagem (Little Red Hiding Hood and other tales through image), which received the Jabuti Award fori Illustration from the Brazilian Book Chamber (CBL) and the Best Image Book by the Fundação Nacional do Livro Infantil e Juvenil- FNLIJ (Brazilian Section of IBBY].
What do you mean when you say that you want to work with the original version but think that Perrault’s story is glamorous while he was one of the first authors to write those stories originated in the orality?
Perrault is an aristocratic and I did not want to make an aristocratic work, I wanted to make a countryside work linked to the Middle Ages fears, not to the Baroque, absolutism fears. Thus, the fears I would like to explore would be linked to the Middle Ages myths.
You are very concerned with the illustration matters and as it has a solid referential in the Middle Ages, does your project have something to do with it?
Yes and no. Even in the Book of Hours for instance, you notice that when they do the illuminations they already tell a story, there is there an introduction to what is going to be written. I believe that it was during the Middle Ages that the illustration gained, for the first time, a certain autonomy and created a language. The illustrators, at that time – if we can call them illustrators, as they were engravers, used to make engraving on wood – they draw a kind of image that was not the official image. The official image of painting was very different from the image the engravers used to do. The engravers worked with what was hidden and the painters with the official image. The engravers used to draw the beasts, the witches, the Sabbat. This fabulous medieval Imaginary was very often represented by the engravers. Thus, if I were to illustrate Bluebeard and Little Red Hiding Hood I would work with this jungle fear, with this dark fear that persists till nowadays. It has its origins in the famous Night of the Time. I think that Little Red Hiding Hood is the search for independency. The girl who walks in the forest, is on search for the unknown. This is the same as Edipo, who although he had been alerted about the tragedy, he goes up to the end to know about the truth. Little Red Hiding Hood is someone who is searching which is very different from a person who is playing. She is looking for herself. She is not transgressing her mother or father’s authority, she is involved with her process of discovering herself, of personal affirmation. That was the sense I wanted to give to Little Red Hiding Hood.
Extract from her Master dissertation entitled “Once upon a time in the illustration – Language and Plasticity in the graphical universe of Rui de Oliveira”; Fine Arts School, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, 1998.
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