Creature by Shaun Tan

Author:Shaun Tan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Levine Querido

73. NEVER GIVE YOUR KEYS TO A STRANGER

2012, pencil on paper, 30 x 20 cm

• Another drawing for Rules of Summer. Each drawing was meant to suggest an entire self-contained chapter, left to the reader’s imagination to elaborate. This scene was based on a memory of my older brother locking me out of our childhood home so as to watch TV in peace with the family cat on his lap, clearly visible through the impenetrable glass door. (Needless to say the tables were later turned, all in good fun.) Here the idea of exclusion has a more complex dimension, with unclear responsibility and a sinister edge, which I think is true of many childhood experiences. The absence of any parental figures, or indeed any other human characters besides these two boys, throughout this series of images emphasizes the private universe that exists between close friends or siblings. It’s a circumstance that can be tremendously fun, but also bewildering and isolating when things go wrong.

74-75. ENEMIES

2021, pastel on paper, 70 x 50 cm

• I’ve been interested in the early nineteenth-century “Black Paintings” of Spanish artist Francisco Goya ever since seeing Saturn Devouring His Son (1819-23)—surely one of the most horrific visions ever put to paint—a print of which some troubled or inspired teacher decided should permanently adorn the wall of our high school art room. Well, it certainly left an impression, not least that art could be many things besides beautiful. This pastel drawing is inspired by my own sketchbook reiterations of another of Goya’s “Black Paintings,” Fight with Cudgels (1820-23), in which gigantic men appear to beat each other endlessly with clubs, trapped knee-deep in a desolate landscape, the intended meaning of which is uncertain and allows multiple readings. My own more frivolous version could also be about any number of possible things, including feelings of anger and entrapment, of out-scaled enmity and drama, the familiar fixtures of suburban childhood and adolescence. The landscape here is the one in which I grew up, peppered with a low sprawl of clay-tile roofs, trimmed lawns, and stasis. As kids we’d ride our bikes around quiet streets and watch the smoke of distant bushfires assume monumental forms across the expansive horizon—a silent warning, a metaphor for some other hidden trouble brewing much closer to home.

76. SECRET

2020, pencil on paper, 20 x 20 cm

• The beauty of illustration is its silence, the ability to provide a vessel for words without necessarily revealing anything of their content. This extends not only to the actions of characters, but the nature of whatever universe is presented on the page. It’s all a space to be colored in by whatever thoughts are whispering at the front or back of our minds.

77. TENDER MORSELS (detail)

2009, acrylic and oil on paper, 46 x 68 cm

• A cover illustration for the visceral and moving novel by Margo Lanagan, Tender Morsels, reminiscent of the Grimm fairy tale “Snow-White and Rose-Red.” The style of this painting is influenced by the work of Arthur

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