all the time. What converted me was the realisation that,
at some point, you need to be able to find your ideas,
not just scribble them down.
You worked briefly as a concept artist on Pixar’s Wall-E.
What did you learn from that experience?
Perhaps not as much as I would have liked, as I worked
at some distance (some 15,000km), but it was still
illuminating. I was a small component at the beginning of
the project, looking at landscape concepts. Needless to
say, those are not in the final film, like the vast majority of
concept art, but I think all of these ideas helped stimulate
the Pixar art and story crew to present alternatives and
oblique takes, which is one reason I gather that they
contact outside artists to generate impressions.
Each of your books has a distinctive atmosphere. Do you
plan those changes or do they develop as you work?
I suppose I plan them, but not hugely intentionally, or with
any self-conscious thought about style. As the painter
Frank Auerbach put it in one interview, “style is not
something you adopt, it’s what you do in a crisis”.
I totally agree. Real actions emerge when you react fairly
unselfconsciously to things, just with total focus on the
subject or concept at hand.
In your website’s advice for new illustrators, your first tip is
“challenge yourself”. When was the last time you did that?
Good question! I don’t challenge myself nearly enough.
I recently completed a project that I set for myself, of
making about 100 paintings of scenes within a short walk
of a studio space in a non-descript industrial area:
carparks, power lines, dropped milk cartons and so on.
The purpose was to force myself to look at – and find some
beauty in – scenes that I’d otherwise ignore.What is the biggest challenge for illustrators today?
Probably the same challenges that have always existed:
making a living without losing artistic integrity. As for
contemporary challenges, the sheer mass of visual social
media can be both a source of great inspiration and
distraction. It can lead to a fast and shallow understanding
of what a visual image is – as something that ought to be
eye-catching and popular – and this can really stagnate
one’s artistic development. It’s important not to drown in
digital influence, to remain critical, and just treat creative
work as a very simple form of personal meditation or
diary-keeping, to really focus on subjects without worrying
about audience reception, style, culture or “success”.
I think this may be the path to real originality and insight.
http://www.shauntan.netABOVEShaun
Tan,Morning
Religion, 2015