Ima­gine That!

School Journal and Mas­sey mark twelve years of illus­trator tal­ent: Ima­gine That! Stephen Olsen reports back from the open­ing night of the exhibition.

Brad Gor­jas. Pro­fessor Brane­wave. Cap­tain Crinkle. Two ali­ens called Flurb and Blurf and a robot named Squeak…

While not phys­ic­ally present these char­ac­ters from a sci-fi play soon to appear in the pages of the School Journal were undoubtedly in star­ring roles at the open­ing of the Ima­gine That! exhib­i­tion in Wel­ling­ton this week which runs until Sunday 15 August.

This event — sug­ges­ted by designer Elton Gregory and hap­pen­ing in the Tea Gar­dens room of Mas­sey University’s Col­lege of Cre­at­ive Arts — sees the sta­ging of 12 years of out­stand­ing work for the cel­eb­rated journal as a res­ult of a spe­cial liaison between Learn­ing Media and Mas­sey.

Ori­gin­ally hatched in 1999 as some­thing that might only be a one-off rela­tion­ship by Learn­ing Media’s Penny New­man and Massey’s Dr Mike McAuley, the two-way exchange and mar­riage of stu­dent tal­ent with the School Journal’s hun­ger for top illus­tra­tions has never stopped and is now a well-known hot­bed for devel­op­ing and nur­tur­ing illustrators.

Based on the idea of provid­ing stu­dents with a live cli­ent and a live brief and run as a com­pet­i­tion lead­ing to a fully paid gig, McAuley is the first to say that the only real dif­fi­culty from year to year has been choos­ing the winner/s. Stu­dents spoken to by ProDesign equally value the career enhan­cing expos­ure and eye-opening exper­i­ence they gain, as well as the oppor­tun­ity and free­dom to develop their style in ways that can lead on dir­ectly to fur­ther Learn­ing Media projects.

Open­ing night guest speaker Gavin Bishop began by cit­ing Nor­man Bilbrough’s char­ac­ter­isa­tion of pic­ture books as a cun­ning genre, and then, in turn, extolled the vir­tues of what he likes to describe as the “happy medium” — one with an undeservedly under appre­ci­ated status, totally bely­ing its last­ing impact and long­stand­ing artistic and lit­er­ary merits.

For pic­ture book writers — of which he is one as well as a con­sum­mate illus­trator — Bishop’s recom­men­ded role model is to study the nurs­ery rhyme, or for longer fict­ive works the folk story or fairy tale — works that offer up instant imagery, and an often com­plex con­cision of lin­guistic fun. He took his own cue for what it takes to be an illus­trator from a former tutor, the illus­tri­ous Rus­sell Clarke (also once a con­trib­utor to the School Journal) and an edict that it is always best to draw what you know and what your audi­ence knows.

Illus­trat­ors at the top of their game are, after all, seam­stresses and tail­ors, leav­ing no stitch show­ing, bring­ing their own ima­gin­a­tion to the page in ways that allow chil­dren to ‘read’ a story in ways that inspire another level of think­ing, in a duet of writ­ten text and visual presence.

Fur­ther reading:

Te Tai Tam­ar­iki – a char­it­able trust for children’s lit­er­at­ure.
Three of the win­ning stu­dents’ blogs to check out…
• Brid­get Monro
• Vaughn Flanagan
• Rebecca Kereopa

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