I’m delighted to announce that I’ll be teaming up with David Elliot to illustrate his new book ‘Nobody’s Perfect.’ I’m a big fan of David’s so it’s exciting to get to work with him on this project.
It’ll be a while before I can share anything and a little longer still before the book appears on shelves, but work on the pictures is already underway. In place of any sneak previews here’s a documentary-style picture of me about to start on the first page.
It’s already proving to be a lot of fun.
‘But when she looked, there was no wall behind the wallpaper. There was something else.’
This is a picture from ‘The Cabbage-Patch Mother,’ another story in the collection ‘There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill her Neighbour’s Baby’ by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya. The sentence conjured up the image so vividly I had to get it down on paper. Because the tales are translated from the Russian I made the matchbox Russian too.
‘The girl’s mother took out a matchbox she kept in her breast pocket, and out of this matchbox she took half of a hollowed bean, and in that cradle, wiping the sleep from her eyes with her tiny little fists, sat a tiny little girl.’
On a whim I picked up a collection of Russian short stories called ‘There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbour’s Baby’ by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya not long ago and was pleasantly and unexpectedly catapulted into a strange and macabre world. One of the nicest things about reading is stumbling on a new writer or a new story that opens new worlds to you – worlds that are at once unfamiliar and yet seem to give voice to things you always felt existed in the background. The stories in this collection are bizarre and surreal, vividly, horrifically nightmarish and dreamlike in equal measure. Gritty realism collides with a gnarly magic and the vague echoes of established fairy tale tropes are given a startling and twisted new slant. It was one of the few times in recent books where I felt on genuinely new terrain – a feeling that was well served by the short story format where the twists and turns within each tale were mirrored by the sudden changes from story to story and there was no time to settle into any kind of complacency over what was to happen next. Post-apocalyptic stories of survival mixed with ghost stories and Gothic parables and featured a host of characters from monks, circus freaks and magical babies to mysterious strangers, stoic mothers and evil wizards. If you like your fairy tales pitch black, creepily unsettling and deeply affecting you could do a lot worse than seek these out.
Below is a picture I did from the story ‘Hygiene,’ one of the stand-out tales of the collection.
“One time the doorbell rang at the apartment of the R. family, and the little girl ran to answer it. A young man stood before her. In the hallway light he appeared to be ill, with extremely delicate, pink, shiny skin. He said he’d come to warn the family of an immediate danger: there was an epidemic in the town, an illness that killed in three days… The girl’s grandparents listened to the man, as did her father and the girl herself. Her mother was in the bath.
‘I survived the disease,’ the young man said simply, and removed his hat to reveal a bald scalp covered with the thinnest layer of pink skin, like the foam atop boiling milk. ‘I survived,’ he went on, ‘and because if this I’m now immune. I’m going door to door to deliver bread and other supplies to people who need them.Do you need anything?’”
‘I’m sure that wallpaper just moved,’ thought Frank nervously.
The third and final instalment from the Museum of Childhood in Edinburgh. This week – a couple of glum dolls.
This one was so odd, it wasn’t clear what he was supposed to be, and he had this expression of total bewilderment, as if surprised at how he’d turned out – perhaps wondering if he was exactly what had been intended.
There was something really settled and comfortable about this elephant, like it had flopped into place and would not be moving any time soon. The kind of going-nowhere position you only really get to adopt on Sunday afternoons. It was a shame it didn’t look happier though.
A couple more dolls from the museum. This week – scary ones.
This was a nightmare doll – genuinely one of the most frightening baby dolls I think I’ve ever seen. The sketch barely captures it. Something about the huge billowing gown made it look like it was floating demonically, and it’s tiny little head seemed all out of proportion. The idea of putting this in a baby’s cradle sends shivers down my spine.
This one is perhaps not scary as such, more halfway between poignant and unsettling: it was an animal bone wrapped in a cloth. This was a doll stripped of all superfluous elements and reduced to the most basic elements of symbolic association. Somewhere a child without a ‘proper’ doll had turned this into their toy. It seemed a striking example of childhood’s ability to look beyond surface and the superficial trappings of appearance and find a symbolic resonance in the most mundane of objects – using whatever might be to hand. The doll itself seemed at once immensely enigmatic, as well as full of pathos and a with hint of the macabre – for me it was perhaps the most affecting doll of them all.
