Please tell us about your origins as a visual and verbal storyteller.
Among my father’s books were beautifully illustrated editions of the 19th and the early 20th century adventure books for boys, which I read and re-read compulsively. Aged ten or so, I began writing and illustrating my own adventure stories. Two of these early efforts had survived my emigration from the USSR to the US. One book is a poor imitation of Duma’s Three Musketeers, and the other, of Stevenson’s Treasure Island. The book titles and the characters’ names were changed; I was a shrewd plagiarist. I don’t regret it; stealing from other artists is a way to learn. After I finished high school, I was admitted to the Academy of Theater Arts in St. Petersburg (then Leningrad) where I studied theater design. For five years, I have been taught turning theater plays’ dramatic dialogue into a three-dimensional world populated by real people. I think I must have been taught well because following my graduation, I had designed all kinds of productions in some of the best theaters in Russia. Drama, comedy, musicals, even ballet, I was able to try my hand in many genres. After I came to the US in 1983, I began supporting myself as an editorial illustrator, creating art for magazines and newspapers around the country. In 1985, I was admitted to the graduate film program at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. This time around, I found myself learning how to turn pages of a screenplay into screen images. After the USC, I had worked in film, animation, and advertising. In all those areas, knowing how to tell a complex story in the shortest period of time with a maximum emotional impact is imperative. I had learned brevity, audacity, and conceptual thinking. Simultaneously, I have been painting and exhibiting my paintings in galleries and museums. Eventually, all the above—theater, film, advertising, animation, painting, editorial illustration—brought me back to where I had started as a kid—writing and illustrating books. As I keep learning, I continue stealing from other artists and writers I admire, but these days the stolen goods become entirely my own, filtered through years of working in different artistic disciplines, each contributing to my growth as an author/illustrator.
What do illustrations allow you to do in your work (and collaborations)?
A well designed and executed illustration communicates faster than a well-crafted sentence to a generation raised on the constant stream of images. This is a good thing, but this is not why I illustrate my books. The main goal of telling a story through words and pictures is to create tension, conflict between the two. When we read one thing, but see another, it is always interesting, always engaging. What is true and what is false, the reader wonders and becomes an active participant in storytelling. This method is particularly effective when the text is written in the first person. By encountering the gap between the text and the illustrations the reader begins to suspect the narrator. And what could be more fun than an unreliable narrator? I use such gaps in all my books, but in some of them they become conceptual foundations of my stories. Take for example The Assassination of Brangwain Spurge, created with M.T. Anderson. The discrepancy between the text and the images reveals the ideological bias of our protagonists, which is the core concept of that book. In Spy Runner, the photocollages I created might or might not be fake photographs manufactured by the undercover FBI agents. In Haunting of the Falcon House, the drawings in the book are supposedly done by the protagonist possessed by a ghostly spirit. The same drawings are repeated again and again, and each time they appear, they become altered because the spirit changes them in order to reveal the answer to the unsolved mystery. And finally, in my last book, a memoir, The Genius Under the Table, the illustrations are copies of the drawings that I have made as a child on the underside of my grandmother’s table in order to puzzle out the secrets in my family. In short, I am not interested in decorating my stories with pictures, but I am keenly interested in using pictures in contrast to the text.
What message would you share with young creators?
Forget about being perfect. Forget about pleasing others. Forget about entertaining. Forget about trends. You are not writing or making art for others; you are doing it for yourself. If you are not passionate about writing stories and making art, don’t do it. If you want to be rich, consider other occupations. But if you decide to commit your life to art, make your art matter. Make it necessary. And above all, trust your intuition. Follow your whims. If something feels scary to you, write about it. Make a painting of it. Look and look and look at what scares you and do not look away. To be brave in real life is not a requirement, but to be fearless in your art is a must.
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