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- Volume 4, Issue 1, 2017
Journal of Illustration - Volume 4, Issue 1, 2017
Volume 4, Issue 1, 2017
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Illustrating The Vacuum: Carnivalesque drawing and the delimitation of communities
By Duncan RossAbstractThe Vacuum was a free newspaper published in Belfast, Northern Ireland between 2003 and 2014. This article makes reference to illustrations produced by the author and his fellow contributors in order to explore a range of ideas connected to emergent public art practices. The time frame of The Vacuum’s circulation provides the article with critical frameworks drawn from contemporaneous discourse on social engagement and participation. The concepts of ‘dialogical aesthetics’, a ‘carnivalesque’ mode of humour and a ‘paradigm of the page’ are developed in relation to The Vacuum as a whole, to the illustrations that formed one of its defining features and to the author’s experience of community and public art commissions.
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Illustration narratives between the East and the West: An individual artist’s perspective
More LessAbstractThis article is a personal account of my experience of how illustrations are perceived in different countries, as I have observed them during my art education in India and Germany. I will try to illuminate the reasons for such varied perceptions and how the atmosphere of art academies shapes these differences. This will be followed by an examination of the consequences when certain notions of what constitutes art cross national borders in the global world. Finally, I will try to establish how academic notions of art have very little resonance with common people’s perception within their own countries and elsewhere, and why illustrations that are looked down upon in academic circles are a more accessible medium for the masses.
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Illustrating migration in a crossover picturebook: A Long Way
Authors: İpek Onmuş and Ilgim Veryeri AlacaAbstractThe article presents the development of the crossover picturebook, A Long Way, an illustration project dwelling on the theme of children’s migration through depicting children in intermediary places such as roads and migration routes. Based on illustration, the work is an artistic contemplation of current issues related to migration in the Middle East and Europe, contextualized in connection with Anatolia’s transitionary status in different eras. This article explores how illustration has been practised as a visual enquiry into contemporary and social issues by its student illustrator, supported by her instructor.
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Inclusive illustration: The importance of educating impoverished and incarcerated communities
More LessAbstractThis study examines the effects of providing illustration education and public art opportunities to underprivileged and under-represented communities, particularly those transitioning from incarceration. Nine individuals from the Cuyahoga Correctional Facility in Cleveland, Ohio, met in a classroom twice a week over the course of two months at the North Star Reintegration and Resource Centre in Cleveland to learn about illustration and collaboratively produce a large-scale mural in the East Cleveland neighbourhood. Illustration education throughout the twentieth century has primarily focused on and been accessible to those capable of affording education. While art and art therapy prove to be valuable, therapeutic and rehabilitative tools for those transitioning from incarceration, illustration training and education provide occupational trade skills in a focused area of interest for many underprivileged individuals. This research examines the impact of poverty on education and highlights the need for the field of illustration to diversify and become more inclusive.
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A History of Everyday Things in England: Illustrators of mid-twentieth-century social history books
More LessAbstractThe illustrated books considered in this article present histories of everyday life and align with the genre of history writing that had existed at least since the nineteenth century, of women documenting the domestic sphere, challenging the hegemonic and dominant narratives of history and presenting ‘Englishness’ instead within the practices and objects of the everyday. The use of illustrations to evoke empathy, describe the detail of ordinary lives and offer graphic interpretations of data shows an engagement with the pedagogical possibilities of visual literacy in schoolbooks, allied to developments in the state school system at the time. The books demonstrate a variety of approaches towards the function of illustration in textbooks for children. These approaches include presenting ‘picturesque’ narratives, promoting imaginative empathy through the use of contempareneous visual source material, and encouraging critical thinking through pattern recognition in the assessment of information graphics. The article considers the visual mode in each book and maps its production onto social, political and ideological contexts of mid-twentieth-century England, offering feminist perspectives on the notion of history writing, scholarship and pedagogy.
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Invisible pictures
By D. B. DowdAbstractIn September 2016 the special collections library that preserves historical American illustration at Washington University in St. Louis, USA, was named after D. B. Dowd. A longtime professor in the university’s Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts, Dowd is a tireless advocate for the preservation and study of popular print culture and was instrumental in the establishment of this library in 2007. The D. B. Dowd Modern Graphic History Library (DMGHL) is a repository of printed and original illustration and of several prominent illustrators’ estates, including those of the legendary Al Parker and Robert Weaver. The DMGHL is also a study centre open to students, scholars and the public, and a leader in illustration studies and research. The Journal of Illustration is pleased to print verbatim Dowd’s speech given on the occasion of the naming. – ed.
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Book Review
By Jaleen GroveAbstractDrawing Blood, Molly Crabapple (2015) New York: HarperCollins, 352 pp., ISBN-10: 0062323644, h/bk, $29.99
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