| A line from the illustrator: the case for ink
I won my first juried art award at the age of seven in my native hometown of Upper Brookville on Long Island's north shore. The blue-ribbon work was an 11 by 14-inch watercolor titled, by the jurors, "The Artist in his Studio," a self-portrait showing me in my public school art room. Back then, (1958!), the graphic arts and particularly the craft of illustration differed physically from their general practice today. A portrait of any 2-D artist in his studio then would have been rendered with what we now call "traditional media," i.e., the direct-to-hand tools of chalk, pen, pencil, brush, and chisel or stylus with their partners the easel, palette, paints, inks, paper, parchment, linen, wood panel or metal plate. Not even acrylics had gone mainstream and computers were not ready and were in any case unreachable. Illustrators of my generation, even the most avant-garde, remained firmly attached to the materials, if not always the manner, of the preceding ten millenia. How then, in this moment of Pixar and CAD-CAM was Scott's To The Outskirts Of Habitable Creation to be depicted in a suitable way by a contemporary artist, and on a reasonable budget?
A survey by the two of us of relevant surviving and available visual references from the places and period in question predictably resulted in a collection of woodcuts, pencil or ink drawings, etchings, lithograhs, and a few paintings. That the number of such period renderings amount to a bare handful was also predictable and relates exactly to one of Scott's guiding motives in bringing this story to light: the entire experience of the British convict system was for generations kept strictly hushed. Consider now the "look" of To The Outskirts Of Habitable Creation. We began with a desire for well executed, un-naive hand renderings from actual locations. We wanted a definite period feel. And, in the practical sense of enticing the reader into the narrative, we wanted an attractive presentation, but obviously nothing prettified—a serious, authentic, and engaging look, then. Pen and ink was a similarly practical choice of graphic tools over woodcut, etc. Arguably the only modern elements in my end of this project were the clothes on my back and the jet aircraft and minibus which got me to our various extant dungeons and work yards. To these I brought a pen not only faithful to the period but easier to carry than, say, a litho stone. Moreover, pen and ink, used freshly, will convey an immediacy and immersiveness that the slower rubbed or incised methods of lithography, etching, and woodcutting cannot readily convey. Compared with pencil or wash, on the other hand, linework in ink has a more suitably "monumental" or "serious" quality. So for this book pen and ink it is. To what extent I've done it right and brought the readers truthfully into the action, I beg them to judge along with what we must all hope will be a similarly high-minded and enlightened posterity. | |
