The Outsider.

For this project I have been asked to illustrate 3 key moments, and an idea for the binding of the novel The Outsider by Albert Camus. I had never read this book before and I enjoyed it very much, in fact; I loved it. This makes it very hard to illustrate because it’s unlikely I will ever feel I have done it justice. However, I shall try...

The novel is written in the first person, and I am sticking with this point of view in my illustrations. The protagonist, Meursault, should be hard to identify with, which seems like a good reason for me not to draw him in my illustrations, but I actually did not find him difficult to identify with. Even when he commits the crime of murder and does not show remorse, I still find him simply endearing. He is childlike in his petulance on many occasions, and speaks very matter-of-factly about things most people, unthinkingly, romanticise when they talk about them: like death, sex and love. In this way he can be seen as insensitive, even heartless, in fact he is not. He feels emotions, he just analyses his own feelings from a distance; his logic can, most often, not be faulted. We really are inside his head in this novel, with no filter on the selfish or inappropriate thoughts we often chide ourselves for having. With a first person illustration, we see the world through his eyes, as the author intended and as the Folio Society’s brief insinuates: Getting inside the outsider.

Throughout the book, heat and the sun are recurring themes; in a strange and confusing sequence of events the sun’s heat causes Meursault to shoot a man. For this reason I would like the sun to be present, as an ominous force, in each of my illustrations. I would also like to use a lot of patterns, especial wavy lines, to create the feelings of confusion and nausea Meursault often feels under the Algerian sun. My illustrations should include little, if any, human presence, as Meursault often seems to find it hard to deeply connect with others, and because he spends much of his time in the book alone. I would like them to be composed of inanimate objects which, somehow, convey a great sense of foreboding and pressure... A big Ask indeed!

I explained all this in my first Crit. and my tutor seemed happy with my ideas, especially once I had explained my interpretation of the book. He suggested that I look at:

William Scott:

This image is called Blue Still Life...I found his simplistic, abstracting technique of representing the kitchen equipment very useful. I hope to do something similar to create a feeling of alienation in my illustrations.

Mary Fedden:

This painting is called Near Sienna.

I found this painting interesting for the depiction of the still life in the foreground, with the contextualising background behind it. This is the approach I am attempting with my fried eggs illustration.

David Hockney’s swimming pools:

This piece is called Schwimmbad Mitternacht.

Water and swimming are also reoccurring themes and I wanted to use even more wavy lines to represent this. Here is a link to more of Hockney’s swimming pools:
http://swimsallyswim.blogspot.com/2008/08/art-david-hockney.html

I experimented with sponge textures and paint to create marks with a hot or watery feel (example below)...

I also experimented with stencils which had a much more pleasing, graphic effect. I remembered the work i did for The Poetry Project and that some of my work looked like lino cuts, so i thought I’d try the real thing.

For inspiration in print department I looked at the artists:

Edward Bawden. The way he uses a limited colour palette is very inspiring, in such images as these coloured prints:

I also particularly love his used of pattern texture to convey the weather in his lino-cut, Snowstorm at Brighton (1957):

Jon McNaught has somehow created screen prints which appear both serene and fraught with meaning. This is the ultimate aim I have given myself for this project. I also noted that he uses dark colours wisely, in moderation and hardly ever uses a true black. This is his Jet-streams series:

He also uses patterns to convey weather, water and plant life in a satisfying, graphic way.

This print is from a series called Broadcast:

This print is from a series called Pebble Island:

I had to do a lot of preparation before i began to make my prints. I had never created a lino-cut before and I had to get my head around the colour separation. Here are some photographs from my time in the workshop:

My sketches reflect this colour-separation working-out process:

On the left is my initial drawing for my print and on the right is the finished product.

I also spent a very long time choosing my colour palette, of just 3: which I wanted to convey heat and intensity while still remaining pleasing to the eye. I also felt the need to avoid black, as Jon McNaught does, so that the image did not become completely overwhelming or at all clichéd.

I was very pleased with the outcome, especially for a first attempt. Unfortunately, learning this new skill and the process itself took a lot longer than I had expected and, therefore, missed the Folio Society deadline. However I feel I have learned a great deal about my working process during this project. I hope to create more prints during my FMP and so improve my technique and technical skill.