Happy Halloween

I am quite proud of the fact that I had very little fears as a kid and could face most things and situations with great courage. In fact I seemed to attract all sorts of potentially dangerous situations and came in contact with things and living things that I should have most probably avoided. The root of this fearlessness of course, was founded on the lack of awareness of potential dangers combined with a strong desire to prove myself useful to others, as well as a secret satisfaction in coming very close to danger, but avoiding it in the last minute. With this attitude, I was the one kid everyone came to when there was trouble, so that I had to handle living snakes, climb up very high trees to rescue stuck cats, go deep down abandoned building foundations to retrieve balls, try to trap rats without killing them, remove dead bodies of electrocuted cats, enter abandoned old houses at night looking for clues, talking to total strangers about random things and so on and so forth.

I had my fair share of accidents and scars from behaving like this, but all that these achieved was to give my sense of fearlessness a boost, as none of them were very serious and after a small accident more kids seemed to approach me with brand new missions and I felt really useful, as if I had some unique power. Once, when I was seven years old, I got stuck in the ancient elevator of our block of flats by myself after a power cut. I was in there in the dark, between two floors, for more than two hours before the firemen came to get me out, but all the while I was in conversation with a friend of mine who was talking to me from the other side of the elevator door. I genuinely do not remember feeling scared then, and that incident was the cherry on my pie of reputation as a fearless child. It followed me all the way to high school, until one day, when I was on an island with two friends of mine staying in a rented room, it left me for ever.

One evening, when we came back to our room from a whole day out, we laid on our beds exhausted but happy. The windows were open as the heat was still excruciating, the lights were on and the curtains drawn. Suddenly I remember one of my friends shouting "cockroach!cockroach!". I have to say here, that the Greek islands have a specific kind of blond-reddish colour cockroach which can reach a very large size and can occasionally fly. They are a very common sight there, attracted by the wet and humid conditions of the islands and are more like a "creature" rather than a "pest", mainly living outdoors but often venturing indoors through drains or through open windows and doors. There is very little one can do to avoid them completely and they can be found occasionally even in the most hygienically clean houses. The cockroach in our room was behaving typically of the species and walking along the line where the ceiling met the wall. They seem to like walking along edges and corners rather than in exposed areas. My friends both looked at me with the expectation that I would get up and catch it or something and throw it out of the open window. They both stayed there with heads turned to me for what felt like ages. The cockroach walked all the way to the window edge and stopped there, but I still had not moved from my spot.

I think I had handled spiders before in the presence of these friends so they were still standing around as if in a frozen frame waiting for me to move. When it became apparent that I was not moving anywhere, one of my friends tried to shake the curtain in an attempt to lead the cockroach out of the open window. The cockroach (which I think must have some sort of high sensory intelligence) started to fly around the room, with a huge spread of papery winds that made an unforgettably high pitched sound. At that point my friends screamed and ducked on the floor, the cockroach eventually sat on the curtain and somebody must have come in the room and got it out somehow. Meanwhile, I was still sat on the bed, my blood completely frozen, my heart racing and then stopping and then racing and then stopping again. The sweat had almost frozen on my skin, then the heat came and hit me hard and the sweat started burning and my whole body was burning and it felt like there was no air and no one ever asked me to do anything remotely courageous again.

This thing with the cockroaches was totally my Grandmother's fault. In her naivety she used to tell me all sort of age inappropriate things and tales, so that occasionally I got them all mixed up in my head. As a kid I remember her finding cockroaches in our house and catching them with her hand, crushing them or killing them with the sole of a shoe. After she had done either of these things as if they were the most natural thing in the world, then she would sit me down and say: "Let me tell you now about the story of the lady with the long black hair who used to go to the hairdressers". Apparently this lady who had long thick black hair (just like my grandmother had) used to save all the little money she had to go to the hairdressers to have her hair styled this particular way: all rolled up into a bun on the back of her head. This required a certain amount of rolls and sprays and so on and was a long and expensive hairstyle and the lady could only afford to do it once a month. (I am not sure what decade my Grandmother was referring to, but it always seemed to me at the time that she was talking about someone she knew in Crete, between the wars. I am more likely to believe now that this was all an urban legend.) 

Anyway, the lady tried her best to keep this hairdo going for the whole month, so that she did not take the bun apart from her head, did not wash or comb her hair. When a strange smell started to come out from her little house, the neighbours went in to see what was wrong. They found her seemingly asleep on her bed, dressed in her night gown and the hair arranged in the bun on top of her head. But then the bun and the hair seemed to move and to the neighbours' horror the whole thing came apart in their hands, detaching from her head when they tried to touch it. The cockroaches had used it as a nest, they had burrowed in there and all the way under the poor lady's scalp. They were feeding on the lady's brains and newly hatched cockroaches were emerging all the time. My grandmother would shake her head in a moment's mourning and then she would go along her business, washing the dishes and doing her chores. Meanwhile I stood there, completely petrified for the first time in my life of a living creature, not really wanting to see one like that again, really feeling like cutting my hair short (and doing it for years afterwards) and not really wanting to sleep again. If I ever come across a cockroach now that I have a child, I would like to believe that I will be able to remove it from the vicinity somehow without betraying my fear. Or that I will be able to remove myself and the child from the situation and hope that the cockroach won't be there when we return. Or that someone else will remove it for us. I really do not want to think about it that much.

  

Book Leaves

A couple of weeks ago I decided to write and illustrate a children's book. This is something I have been thinking about for a long time, something that has always lingered in my mind as a possibility. But the idea had never taken any shape as such, because I never really thought about it seriously for long enough. But two weeks ago I started thinking that I should really work on something that was "real". This was the exact word that my mind used, so then I had to question why writing and illustrating a children's book was more real than, for example, writing this blog or making some work at home. The work I make at home and on this blog has an immediate affect on my close environment and is beneficial to me as a result of that and of course as a process in its own right. So I came to the conclusion that the use of the world real in this case was highly associated with addressing a wider relevant audience and also potentially translating this new way of communicating to an audience (in this case the children's book) into cash.

Once this became clear in my mind I started thinking about the story of the book. Looking back at this, I am a bit puzzled as to why I should start thinking of making up a story rather than thinking of the visual side of the book first, namely its illustrations. I consider myself a visual person, so that came as a surprise, but that is how it happened and the story was more or less completed within a weekend and I was happy with it. Then the most bizarre thing happened as I was completely unable to proceed with the illustrations and I got caught up in a strange place and felt like someone who is holding a pencil in their hands for the first time. I have a large collection of illustrated books for children so I am familiar with a lot of different styles of illustrating, from different countries and different decades. But it only now became apparent that illustrating a book for children was a whole different discipline of its own, one that in spite of my love for illustrated books remained a strange land to me.  

So I flicked through the pages of numerous children's books and made a short, very basic, list of the kinds of illustrations that stood out to me and grouped them into 5 categories. Firstly, there were the books with illustrations which filled the whole page. In these books the pages are full with drawings of great detail, there are hardly any spaces where you can see the blank page behind. These illustrations are busy, detailed and quite traditional. Although they are not overall my favourite, I have noticed that children love observing them and finding all the small things depicted in the pages. Such illustrations feature in classic books like Each Peach Pear Plum and The Gruffalo. Secondly there are the illustrations done seemingly effortlessly, as if on the spot, illustrations with great movement and expression, typically using black waterproof ink and then watercolours on top. The background in these illustrations is typically left blank and they include Quentin Blake's illustrations and Polly Dunbar's in the Tilly and Friends series. Thirdly there are the retro illustrations, more stylised, bold and brightly coloured, reminiscent of 50's design. They are the ones I am mostly drawn to and I have seen some new illustrators working in this way, such as Alison Murray and Bob Staake. On the fourth category there are illustrators who have worked with or included many of what I consider indirect marks (for more on this look here). These illustrations have been made with collage, stamps, different mark making tools and screen prints. Famous illustrators working this way include Eric Carle and Leo Lionni. Finally, in the fifth category I included books with illustrations which incorporated in their design the use of flaps, holes and textured materials. Exceptional books of this style include the French books illustrated by Ramadier & Bourgeau and the books by Petr Horacek.

What this very basic categorisation of illustrations made me realise is, that whichever style one chose to go with, or invent a new one for that matter, they would have to stick with it throughout the book. They would have to be consistent. There would have to be a continuation through the book, so that a young reader or observer can follow the plot and the characters from page to page. That realisation hit me a bit and it occurred to me that this would be the most challenging thing for me to master if I were to indeed illustrated the story myself. The other thing that I noticed, flicking through the book leaves, was that I was not very keen (with a few exceptions) on the illustrations done of human characters. My story has several characters in it and the main character is a small boy who appears in every illustration. Getting that boy drawn so that it is memorable and distinct and also being able to draw it again and again so that it is recognisable as the same boy in different poses, would all be key factors.

So I spent the next week or so trying to draw and design this little boy, again and again. Caught in a bit of a trap by keeping in my mind all the illustrations of children that I had seen and mainly disliked and worse the ones that I had liked. As the days went by and the boy was still nowhere near completed I started to have irrational thoughts. I started to think as I was falling asleep, that there will be ages before I ever manage to draw this boy, if I ever manage it, and that it was inevitable that in the meantime someone would actually come up with the same idea as I had and write the same story. The almost identical book would be published with great success and all because I had left it so long to draw this boy. Then I would wake up laughing at myself for giving this story of mine so much credit; but nevertheless instead of going back to sleep I would start sketching the little boy all over again. As more days went by with no boy, I started seeing clues all around me that directed back to my story. Just like when you are thinking of a song and then you turn on the radio and there it is playing on. So I thought I should leave the boy alone and start working on the enjoyable to me bits of the book, the background and the environments surrounding the characters.

So, as the first illustration includes fallen autumn leaves, we had some fun collecting a lot of them with Aretousa and trying out different ways of making marks with them. After two weeks only the first illustration is done, with more than ten to go, but I did manage to make the boy after I had done the background. I made it to kind of fit the background as I was unable to make him any other way. The words leaf and leaves in Greek (filo and fila) start with the letter Φ (fi), so this was a perfect opportunity to make one more letter for Aretousa. The word φύλλο (filo as in filo pastry-very thinly rolled pastry, as thin as a leaf or a book page) is also used for book pages in Greek so that you would say a book has so and so many leaves. I am taking this as a good sign since I am trying to make a book of my own, although I have to say that the only thing that felt "real" this week was actually making the letter Φ.