Journal of Illustration - Volume 5, Issue 1, 2018

This article discusses place, memory and drawing. It suggests that ‘place’ can be a key theme for illustrators and artists – a container and metaphor for social, political and historical ideas. Using personal case studies, memory is considered as a storeroom of ideas with a close connection to the imagination. Atmosphere, mood and the role of colour, light and shadow are presented as primary ways of communicating complex ideas through intuition and emotion, in addition to the language of intellect, reason and the conceptual.

Mark Rothko’s Seagram murals in the Tate gallery and his suicide are well-known, but his illustrations are not. As a struggling artist in New York during the 1920s, he was commissioned to produce artwork for The Graphic Bible by Lewis Browne, a task that proved to be problematic on several levels. This essay examines the toll that this experience took on Rothko, and how it may have influenced his later career.

This article seeks to examine the visual tropes of a specific genre of illustrated guidebook, originating in Thomas Pennant’s ‘extra-illustrated’ copy of his work A Tour in Wales published in stages between 1771–1776, and its legacy within twentieth-century depictions of the region. I would like to argue that illustration has contributed to a set of scopic practices and a social imaginary of the Welsh landscape, which are established with Pennant’s work and which endure into the twentieth century with the work of John Piper and the Shell Guides. There is an entanglement of time and space, of real and imaginary landscapes within these images, and I argue they represent a form of imaginative time travel. In addition to positioning the traveller in a particular place, the images also refer to particular spots of historical time. The practice of ‘extra illustration’ (sometimes called ‘Grangerisation’) through which the reader customizes their copy of a book also braids multiple temporalities into the reader/viewer experience of landscape. This is mediated by the nature of these extra illustrations, which are from disparate sources and historical contexts, appearing contiguously within the text. The depiction of the traveller in these images constructs and encourages the performance of a particular kind of touristic persona. The tourist is cast in the role of an eighteenth-century antiquarian – the amateur scholar seeking out archaeological remains, ruined buildings or ‘picturesque’ views, equally interested in collecting folklore as they are in historical fact, and engagingly non-specialist in their interest in a diverse range of subjects and approaches.

The idealized image of the Outer Hebrides includes wind-swept beaches, isolated peat-covered moors and craggy mountain cliff tops abounding with wildlife. These images are reproduced in countless tourist postcards and websites to entice visitors to visit, explore and of course spend their money on the islands. At the same time, these images create a certain ‘expectation’ of the islands that not only promotes a particular ‘way of seeing’ the landscape but perpetuates a dominant narrative of the ‘wild’ wind-swept islands. This visual project challenges these notions of ‘nature’, wilderness and folk heritage by accepting alternative and ‘minor histories’ of the landscapes. In a subversive nod to the travel postcard, this article explores contemporary issues of island life and landscape through unconventional illustrations of island postcards by its residents and the author. These postcards are themed around contemporary Hebridean issues including isolation, community, landscape and family. The project contemplates an innovative approach to illustration, as ethnographer and critical tourist. Therefore, looking at the fragmentary constellation of images made about the islands that challenges the notion of a ‘wild’ romantic island place, and offering insight into how identity, place and heritage are developed within the region.

The article considers John Minton’s (1917–57) illustrations of landscape for the book Time Was Away: A Notebook in Corsica (1948) with an aim to recover their significance in the history of illustration. Certain illustrations are positioned as notable for their ambiguous relationship to the text. I elaborate thinking around text–image relations alongside questions concerning the cross-fertilization of fine art and illustration. In their adoption of modernist principles, Minton’s illustrations are significant in recasting the role of illustration in the artistic context of post-war Britain. In melding formalist effects with realist concerns, the illustrations raise broader matters around realism, fine art and the democratic potential of illustration. I show that in seizing on cinematic techniques, Minton offers an effectively modern response to the traditional paradigm of depth associated with landscape and thereby proffers an alternative to the Modernist paradox that a teleological development of painting is at odds with landscape.

The liminal space – the site of the in-between, transient and ephemeral borderlines. How is this shifting non-place illustrated within art and literature?

With fog.

In this brief examination I shall look at how fog is represented within the creative practices of illustrator Angela Barrett, artist Brooks Shane Salzwedel and photographer Agatha A. Nitecka whilst referencing its occurrence within a cultural context.

Fog responds constantly to its own environment, revealing and concealing features [...]. Fog makes visible things become invisible and invisible things; like wind (and space), become visible.

Published in 1870 during the rapid rise of print media in the United States, Scribner’s Monthly was the first of the American monthlies to fully embrace illustration. In its initiation of improvements in reproduction technology and promotion of its illustrations as ‘fine art’, Scribner’s transformed the acceptance, appreciation and consumption of printed images by the American public. Scribner’s editor Richard Watson Gilder also capitalized on the public’s emerging fascination with the West. Aware of the unique aspects of these wilderness regions and the unprecedented variety of unusual landscapes afforded by places such as Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon, Gilder took advantage of the opportunity to introduce these uncharted regions to his eastern audience. In order to make articles on western discovery and exploration interesting and accessible, Gilder realized the need for dramatic imagery that not only documented these novel territories but also appealed to Scribner’s targeted market, middle and upper class Protestants who held religious and romantic associations with the West. Recognizing his talent as an illustrator and a landscape painter, Gilder hired Thomas Moran, whose initial images of Yellowstone published in 1871 led to a rapid rise in circulation and fueled readers’ interest in the previously unknown lands. While Moran’s subject matter was the ‘Wonders of the West’, he relied heavily on established landscape aesthetics, as dictated by British critic John Ruskin; with their imbued sense of ‘geo-piety’, his panoramic vistas made these mysterious territories and their geysers, hot springs and mudbaths visually acceptable to readers in their adoption of traditional visual metaphors such as rainbows, waterfalls, and other sublime motifs. Through an in depth discussion of the illustrations of Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon, the paper examines the means by which Moran and Gilder offered the American public its first glimpse of the West, constructing indelible images of places associated with geographic destiny, economic opportunity and spiritual resources that became part of the national psyche on the pages of Scribner’s.

This visual essay presents a body of fieldwork exploring geological and industrial tensions existing in the landscape of the Norfolk Broads National Park. The essay is a documentation of the initial stages of the research project, considering the wider role of illustration in a time of global environmental change. Made in 2016, the present tenses have been kept in the text in order to preserve the reflective and developmental importance of this fieldwork. The author has since left the wider research project and is pursing Ph.D. study, using discoveries made in this research as a foundation to explore problematic representations of nature in images that are used to illustrate the current environmental crisis.