Telling stories

Here’s another blog about compositions that tell a story. In the last blog, which featured some textile designs by Marthe Armitage, I wrote about scale and arranging elements to tell a story. Today, I’m going to show some further examples.

I rediscovered the work of Maurice Sendak a couple of weeks ago. I knew his work very well without knowing his name because his were some of my favourite picture books as a child. However, “Dear Mili” is a book I hadn’t seen or heard of before. What’s very interesting to about this illustrator is that he often adapted his style according to the book he was working on, in this way he was constantly reinventing his style. I find this to be such an honest and humble way of working.

I really enjoy this particular picture from this book; the oversized flowers and foliage creating a space for various characters and scenes to be seen in the same space. There’s a huge clump of flowers in the centre of the picture that seem say “this is impossible”. The picture is telling us it’s impossible and that’s why it works. That’s how we know that many scenes from a story, many moments in time are being shown together. I don’t know what I want to take from this but somehow it speaks to me about what I want to make.

‘Children’ by Paula Rego

Here, Paula Rego’s painting ‘Children’ does something similar. There’s an impossibility that helps it become a narrative or not… I don’t know a lot about this painting (I’ll be honest) I don’t know if it is a narrative or a collection of memories/possibilities.

I first saw this painting many years ago and it had a quality that made me stop and wonder about it. I have been wondering about it for years and years. Not about the story it may be telling but just the way it was composed, I suppose. The powerful lines of the trees and branches jaggedly breaking up the space. Leaving a structure to add characters to and tell a story.