Book Illustration & Indian Painting

Posting the two most recent books of research. A third might be added to this, but it is enormous, so it might have to wait until a later post.


Picture This: The Artist As Illustrator, edited by Sylvia Blackenmeyer, with images from the Central St. Martin's illustration collection. The artists featured here were educated in the field of fine art, and applied their skills and creativity to the embellishment of text, or to tell stories using stand-alone single or sequential images (ie political comic strips).


Indian Painting 1500-1820 by Mohinder Singh Randhawa and John Kenneth Galbraith, 1969. This book taught me a lot about Indian history and how it affected image-making in the country. Previously I had only looked at religious imagery, but a lot of the plates in this book were of royalty, though the earlier in time you go the more rulers and deities overlap into the same sort of figures esteemed enough to be depicted by the greatest artists of the time. Do to the light, flora, fauna, history, culture and religious values the stylisation of medieval Indian art is very different to that of the western world at the time. The imagery, symbolism and style are recognisable and beautiful. What is also noticable is the attitudes towards sex; things are a lot naughtier in Indian art than its rather repressed Christian counterparts in the west.

From the first of the aformentioned books, I remembered works by an illustrator who featured a lot in my early childhood: Patrick Benson. He illustrated Roald Dahl's The Minpins (which greatly disturbed me), Owl Babies and The Sea-Thing Child. All of these books I treasured as a toddler, and it is a lovely experience re-reading them.

In the next post I will be focussing more on Benson's work, along with other childrens' illustrators and hopefully the completed uploads from the book of Indian art I am reading.