'Drawing a good picture is like telling a really good lie – the key is in the incidental detail,' says Shaun Tan. Fortunately, the Australian artist's award-winning picture books are anything but short on detail. Each spread drops the reader into a surreal world of bizarre animals, skew-whiff buildings, dreamlike landscapes and invented languages, the magical realism and conceptual playfulness of Tan's paintings underscoring the simple language of the tales – 'illustrated modern fables' as he calls them. In the stunning, wordless graphic novel The Arrival, sober-looking characters dressed in 1930s-style suits and bowler hats are accompanied on their journeys through a mysterious city by strange creatures reminiscent of Philip Pullman's daemons (only much, much weirder). The Lost Thing is a huge metal contraption from some other world, 'hidden' by the boy who finds it in his parents' otherwise relatively conventional house; next to the words 'nobody understands', the central character in The Red Tree is seen wearing a weighty diving mask, huddled in a glass bottle on a stormy shoreline, in one of the most unnerving insights into depression ever drawn. In SKETCHES FROM A NAMELESS LAND, author Shaun Tan explains the origins of his ideas, using examples from early research and concept sketches through to finished artwork. In tracing this evolution, he sheds light on the silent language of images, the spirit of the migrant experience and the artist's creative journey. Shaun began drawing. Shaun began drawing and painting images for science fiction and horror stories in small-press magazines as a teenager, and has since become best known for illustrated books. 'The detail adds an element of unexpected something,' Tan explains. 'All fiction is false; what makes it convincing is that it runs alongside the truth. The real world has lots of incidental details, so a painting also has to have that element of imperfection and irregularity, those incidental details. I'm constantly testing with the details. I go on a hunch and try it out. I might have a character and have a feeling that he needs to have a hat and so I put it in and it feels right and then I realise that he needs to have a hat because he's trying to hide something.' The result of this careful attention to detail is that Tan's worlds, however fantastical they may appear on first glance, have their own internal logic. It is what he describes as 'groundedness', and he regards it as crucial to the success of the stories. 'By itself, just to draw crazy creatures has limited appeal – if I had to give up one thing it would be the wild imagination. When the work becomes too detached from ordinary life it starts to fall apart. Fantasy needs to have some connection with reality or it becomes of its own interest only, insular. In The Lost Thing, to have creatures flying around is unsatisfactory without the context. It works because it exists in opposition to the world in the rest of the story.' To meet the man behind the wildly surreal pictures brings home that sense of opposites. Compact, neatly dressed and precise in speech, the initial impression is less the artist bubbling over with crazy creativity, than an accountant, albeit a very bright and charming one. Tan speaks thoughtfully, carefully about his work and there's a clue to the origins of this precision when he talks about his upbringing in Perth, western Australia. His father was an architect and Tan recalls spending hours as a child drawing pictures on the back of discarded architectural sketches. 'I learnt some of my style from him,' says Tan, 'including the extreme attention to detail. There's that sense that if you do something it has to be well-crafted and it's more fun that way and you get a better thing at the end.' Yet despite parents with an interest in art and a childhood spent carefully observing and documenting in pictures the world around him – 'I was always head down, looking at objects on the beach, almost fixated on collecting seashells and bumping into something that's unexpected' – it was not a given that Tan would pursue illustration as a career. He flirted with the idea of becoming a scientist – a fascination carried over into The Lost Thing, where the images are framed with collages from physics and maths textbooks. But, at 16, he had his first illustration published in an SF magazine and discovered the thrill of seeing his work in print. 'One of the attractions of working on the books is the idea of people you don't know seeing your work and forming an opinion about it. Seeing your work in print is exciting, especially when you're young. It's that feeling that you have some effect on the world outside of your immediate neighbourhood,' says Tan. A joint degree in English and fine art followed, while he continued to sell illustrations to magazines. But even then he wasn't convinced that he could make a living as an artist. 'I didn't want to starve in a garret. For me, the main thing was to secure a livelihood and then explore artistic interests. I was fairly conservative like that,' says Tan, laughing now at the memory. He decided to give art a year after finishing university and see how it went. He soon found that, by saying yes to everything that he was offered, from commercial illustration and fantasy novel book covers to occasional cartoons, and drawings of microscopes, he could make his way and then start creating his own books. Given his secure, happy childhood and what seems to have been a relatively straightforward path into a successful career, it is perhaps surprising that Tan's work is quite as dark as it is. Although often categorised as a creator of children's 'picture books', the deeper, bleaker issues he tackles belies any such pigeonholing. The Red Tree is a blistering portrait of depression, while The Arrival is a masterful examination of the immigrant experience, and The Rabbits (illustrated by Tan but written by John Marsden) is a powerful allegory of environmental destruction. While The Arrival, thanks to its sheer length and sepia tones if nothing else, falls most easily into 'graphic novel' territory, Tan's other books occupy a kind of hinterland which can make them difficult to market. Ti nspire software free. 'None of my books are for anybody – I don't have any image of a child reading my book when I produce them,' says Tan. 'It's unfortunate sometimes that they are marketed to children. It's good that kids get them, but that can exclude adults. 'One bookseller in Australia took the children's book award sticker off The Red Tree as he felt he could sell more that way, and sold an extra 30-40 copies a month. It's about simple things like font size – people think they can judge the age a book is for by the font size and assume that it's for little kids if it has a big font, but that's silly. I don't worry too much about those things as the creator because I figure that the books will find their own audience and sometimes I like the idea that they can give adults a surprise pleasure.' There is indeed always a 'surprise pleasure' despite the seriousness of the topics Tan takes on. The books are leavened not only in the flashes of humour in Tan's richly imaginative drawings, which he describes as 'conscious dreaming', but the thread of hope and compassion woven through every tale, however initially bleak. 'I think stories that represent the world as hopeless or dark are valid and some of them I really enjoy but the truth is that there is hopefulness in every situation,' says Tan. Of The Red Tree, he says that 'the expression of depression is somehow refreshing. You can deal with things if you acknowledge them – it makes you feel good to acknowledge stuff.' Even in The Rabbits, although the 'text is grim', the images are redemptive, especially as it ends with 'two misunderstood beings trying to communicate with each other across pool of stars, to overcome their cultural blindness and ask questions about what they are doing.' These kinds of attempts to communicate across divides are a key theme in Tan's books. His characters are often outsiders who have trouble articulating their feelings, something Tan says he recognises from when he was growing up and used drawing to help to express himself. The characters find themselves in strange situations but, ultimately, cope by 'using empathy to get through, overcoming apathy.' Tan is reluctant to delve too deeply into the 'meanings' of his fables. Towards the end of The Lost Thing he writes, 'Well, that's it. That's the story. Not especially profound, I know, but I never said it was. And don't ask me what the moral is.' When pressed on the The Red Tree and the sudden chink of light at the end of the story with the appearance of a magical tree, he suggests that Morals or not, what shines through Tan's work is an essential humanity, whether it is arrivals in a new city silently describing their journeys from war zones to a fragile new life, a metal mammoth happy to be found a place where he doesn't quite fit, or a girl who finds a speck of hope, 'bright and vivid, quietly waiting', where previously there was only darkness. • Shaun Tan's latest work, Tales from Outer Suburbia (Templar) is an anthology of 15 very short illustrated stories. Each one is about a strange situation or event that occurs in an otherwise familiar suburban world.
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more photos (5) Shaun Tan quotes Showing 1-23 of 23
“You discover how confounding the world is when you try to draw it. You look at a car, and you try to see its car-ness, and you’re like an immigrant to your own world. You don’t have to travel to encounter weirdness. You wake up to it.”
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“Today is the tomorrow you were promised yesterday.”
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“So you want to hear a story? Well, I used to know a whole lot of pretty interesting ones. Some of them so funny you'd laugh yourself unconscious, others so terrible you'd never want to repeat them. But I can't remember any of those. So I'll just tell you about the time I found that lost thing..”
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“Sometimes the day begins with nothing to look forward to..”
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“The Federal Department of Odds and Ends: sweepus underum carpetae.”
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“Have you ever wondered What happens to all the poems people write? The poems they never let anyone else read? Perhaps they are Too private and personal Perhaps they are just not good enough. Perhaps the prospect of such a heartfelt expression being seen as clumsy shallow silly pretentious saccharine unoriginal sentimental trite boring overwrought obscure stupid pointless or simply embarrassing is enough to give any aspiring poet good reason to hide their work from public view. forever. Naturally many poems are IMMEDIATELY DESTROYED. Burnt shredded flushed away Occasionally they are folded Into little squares And wedged under the corner of An unstable piece of furniture (So actually quite useful) Others are hidden behind a loose brick or drainpipe or sealed into the back of an old alarm clock or put between the pages of AN OBSCURE BOOK that is unlikely to ever be opened. someone might find them one day, BUT PROBABLY NOT The truth is that unread poetry Will almost always be just that. DOOMED to join a vast invisible river of waste that flows out of suburbia. well Almost always. On rare occasions, Some especially insistent pieces of writing will escape into a backyard or a laneway be blown along a roadside embankment and finally come to rest in a shopping center parking lot as so many things do It is here that something quite Remarkable takes place two or more pieces of poetry drift toward each other through a strange force of attraction unknown to science and ever so slowly cling together to form a tiny, shapeless ball. Left undisturbed, this ball gradually becomes larger and rounder as other free verses confessions secrets stray musings wishes and unsent love letters attach themselves one by one. Such a ball creeps through the streets Like a tumbleweed for months even years If it comes out only at night it has a good Chance of surviving traffic and children and through a slow rolling motion AVOIDS SNAILS (its number one predator) At a certain size, it instinctively shelters from bad weather, unnoticed but otherwise roams the streets searching for scraps of forgotten thought and feeling. Given time and luck the poetry ball becomes large HUGE ENORMOUS: A vast accumulation of papery bits That ultimately takes to the air, levitating by The sheer force of so much unspoken emotion. It floats gently above suburban rooftops when everybody is asleep inspiring lonely dogs to bark in the middle of the night. Sadly a big ball of paper no matter how large and buoyant, is still a fragile thing. Sooner or LATER it will be surprised by a sudden gust of wind Beaten by driving rain and REDUCED in a matter of minutes to a billion soggy shreds. One morning everyone will wake up to find a pulpy mess covering front lawns clogging up gutters and plastering car windscreens. Traffic will be delayed children delighted adults baffled unable to figure out where it all came from Stranger still Will be the Discovery that Every lump of Wet paper Contains various faded words pressed into accidental verse. Barely visible but undeniably present To each reader they will whisper something different something joyful something sad truthful absurd hilarious profound and perfect No one will be able to explain the Strange feeling of weightlessness or the private smile that remains Long after the street sweepers have come and gone.” ― ![]()
“It's funny how these days, when every household has its own inter-continental ballistic missile, you hardly even think about them. . . . A lot of us, though, have started painting the missiles different colors, even decorating them with our own designs, like butterflies or stenciled flowers. They take up so much space in the backyard, they might as well look nice, and the government leaflets don't say that you have to use the paint they supply.”
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“Yes, we all know that there's a good chance the missiles won't work properly when the government people finally come to get them, but over the years we've stopped worrying about that. Deep down, most of us feel it's probably better this way. After all, if there are families in faraway countries with their own backyard missiles, armed and pointed back at us, we would hope that they too have found a much better use for them.”
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“There is an implicit recognition here that important things in life are not always immediately visible, and can't always be named, or even fully understood. Others still are entirely imaginary -- like a red tree growing suddenly in a room -- although this does not make them any less real.”
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“It's as if they take all our questions and offer them straight back: Who are you? Why are you here? What do you want?”
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“Why do I always listen to your insane plans? Why aren't we at home watching TV like everyone else? What possible difference will any of this make?”
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tags: action, activism, antitv, environment, inspirational
“Staring at a blank piece of paper, I can't think of anything original. I feel utterly uninspired and unreceptive. It's the familiar malaise of 'artist's block' and in such circumstances there is only one thing to do: just start drawing.
The artist Paul Klee refers to this simple act as 'taking a line for a walk', an apt description of my own basic practice: allowing the tip of a pencil to wander through the landscape of a sketchbook, motivated by a vague impulse but hoping to find something much more interesting along the way. Strokes, hooks, squiggles and loops can resolve into hills, faces, animals, machines -even abstract feelings- the meanings of which are often secondary to the simple act of making (something young children know intuitively). Images are not preconceived and then drawn, they are conceived as they are drawn. Indeed, drawing is its own form of thinking, in the same way birdsong is 'thought about' within a bird's throat.” ―
“The green painted concrete out in front of the house, which at first seemed like a novel way to save money on lawn-moving, was now just plain depressing. The hot water came reluctantly to the kitchen sink as if from miles away, and even then without conviction, and sometimes a pale brownish color. Many of the windows wouldn't open properly to let flies out. Others wouldn't shut properly to stop them getting in. The newly planted fruit trees died in the sandy soil of a too-bright backyard and were left like grave-markers under the slack laundry lines, a small cemetery of disappointment. It appeared to be impossible to find the right kinds of food, or learn the right way to say even simple things. The children said very little that wasn't a complaint.”
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“And when you died
I took you down to the river. And when I died you waited for me by the shore. So it was that time passed between us.” ―
“And, once again, the bears showed us.
There they were, God help us, the Ledgers of the Earth, written in clouds and glaciers and sediments, tallied in the colours of the sun and the moon as light passed through the millennial sap of every living thing, and we looked upon it all with dread. Ours was not the only fiscal system in the world, it turned out. And worse, our debt was severe beyond reckoning. And worse than worse, all the capital we had accrued throughout history was a collective figment of the human imagination: every asset, stock and dollar. We owned nothing. The bears asked us to relinquish our hold on all that never belonged to us in the first place. Well, this we simply could not do. So we shot the bears.” ―
“He makes me wonder what damage I could do with them, how badly I could hurt someone if I hit them with a story.”
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“Explanation is a luxury we can't afford these days, and reality doesn't care for it, being far too busy following its own unknowable course.”
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“How much do I love our family? This much. When any kind of emergency strikes, good or bad, we snap together like parts in a machine, like a submarine crew at war in the tin-can clutter of our home, none of the usual debate, character assassination, woeful monologues, and turgid hand-wringing. I've learned to love crises for this reason, how they make us pull together and forget our separateness and sadness; this was the second great gift of the moonfish.”
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“That they would publish for adults and which would find currency with children.”
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“Little people can be empowered through art.”
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“Horses know this more than most: The greatest curse of any animal is to be worth money to men.” ― All Quotes | Add A Quote
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