ORIGINALITY AND CREATIVITY
An essay written for a Conference in 2002, addressing questions of creativity, style,
influence, research and process, mostly focusing on The Rabbits, published a couple of year
prior.
Original thought is like original sin: both happened before you were born to people
you could not possibly have met.
– Fran Liebowitz
Books! Bottled chatter! Things that some other simian has formerly said.
– Clarence Day
Paul Klee once described an artist as being like a tree, drawing the minerals of
experience from its roots – things observed, read, told and felt – and slowly processing
them into new leaves. The palaeontologist Stephen Jay Gould notes that the greatest
discoveries are to be found not in a freshly hewn cliff of shale, but in old museum
collections, by rethinking the relationships between the objects that have already been
archived in our knowledge.
The principle that ‘originality’ is more about a kind of transformation of existing ideas
than the invention of entirely new ones is one that I can relate to as an artist and author.
I’m wary of using words like ‘inspiration’ or ‘creativity’ without at least trying to
demystify them first. They can easily convey a false impression that ideas or feelings
appear spontaneously and of their own accord; “creation” in particular is a term that
originally entered our language with divine connotations. My own experience is that
inspiration is has more to do with careful research and looking for a challenge; and that
creativity is about playing with what I find, testing one proposition against another and
seeing how things combine and react.
SHAUN TAN
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My picture books have in the past been recognised as ‘highly imaginative’, ‘original’ and
even ‘magical’. There is, however, nothing mysterious about the way they are produced.
Each work contains many thousands of ingredients, experiments, discoveries and
transforming decisions executed over several months, compressed into a very small
space, 32 pages of words and pictures. Everything can be explained in terms of process,
influences, developmental elaboration and reduction. What is original is not the ideas
themselves, but the way they are put together. The fact that we recognise anything at all
would seem to indicate that this is the case – a truly original idea would probably be so
unfamiliar as to be unreadable, an impenetrably alien artefact.
Often the most interesting stories are ones which tell us things that we already know but
haven’t yet articulated in our minds. Or more precisely, they encourage us to look at
familiar things in different ways, as if to remind us of their true meaning; the way we
live, the things we encounter, way we think and so on. Looking at my own work as an
illustrator, I can discuss how this has a lot to do with combining various ideas from
different sources to produce unexpected results, very much like rubbing different stones
together for sparks, and gradually working these into flames.
The Rabbits is a good example, and perhaps my most widely circulated and discussed
book. On one hand it is a story we should all be familiar with as an historical narrative,
the European invasion of Australia and subsequent injustices perpetrated against the
indigenous population. More universally, it’s the story of colonisation everywhere, about
power, ignorance and environmental destruction. It is also an animal fable, a dark and
serious one, a storytelling strategy we can also recognise. One might think of Richard
Adams’ Watership Down or George Orwell’s Animal Farm as precedents, for instance, but
already there is an unexpected combining of elements we haven’t seen before, quite
strange and ‘original.’
When I received John Marsden’s text for this book, via my publisher, I experienced a
sensation that usually accompanies the beginning of a new project: not knowing what to
do! By itself, the half-page fax of text generated no ideas visually – none that were
appropriately interesting at least (the image of Beatrix Potter bunnies with redcoats,
muskets and British flags was not going to work – that’s one thing I did know). I
eventually realised that what I had to do was extend the metaphorical logic of the text
even further, and introduce more unexpected ideas to build a parallel story of my own.
Not an illustration of the text, but something to react with it symbiotically.
The research involved was very broad, an omnivorous study of everything from tree
kangaroos at Perth Zoo, which I spent a day sketching, to old Victorian photographs of
public works being constructed, colonial drawings in the State gallery, books about
antique furniture, industrial architecture, Surrealism. I also reviewed some of my old
science fiction drawings languishing in my folio, including a couple which happened to
deal with 18th century figures in strange antipodean deserts, and ended up working
several ideas from these into The Rabbits.
Stylistically, the book borrows both consciously and unconsciously from many sources:
Ancient Egyptian friezes, unusual films such as Brazil and Yellow Submarine, the work of
other illustrators such as Ralph Steadman, Milton Glaser, Gerald Scarfe and some
Australian landscape painters; Arthur Streeton, Fred Williams and Brett Whiteley. The list
goes on; ultimately I am influenced by anything that seems interesting to me, whether
it’s a painting in a gallery or the pattern of plumbing on the wall behind my local
supermarket. My own personal style of drawing, painting and thinking visually emerges
from all of these, not to mention innumerable other experiences.
As well as visual sources, many ideas for the illustrations emerged from reading history.
Almost every image can, for instance, be footnoted with a reference to Henry Reynold’s
“The Other Side of the Frontier”, my most valuable reference book. Accounts of
Aboriginal impressions of the arrival of European ships, animals, customs and
technologies, the immense cultural rift between visitors and inhabitants, the patterns
of escalating violence: all these proved to be indispensable in the creation of an
equivalent imagined universe populated by strange animals and machines.
I’m often thinking of different things I’ve read, or particular words, while I draw and
paint which best express the particular poetry of colour, line and form I am after. A
passage from David Malouf’s Remembering Babylon, which I happened to have been
reading just before working on The Rabbits, suggested to me one way of illustrating a
particular scene as a bright, lyrical landscape; “…alive and dazzling; some of it even in
the deepest shade throwing off luminous flares… and all of it crackling and creaking and
swelling and bursting with growth.” The illustration itself is vibrant and yellow,
swimming with hidden shapes and organic tensions.
I had also finished my arts degree honours dissertation a couple of years beforehand,
which was all about the way in which industrial cultures typically view the natural world
through some kind of technological apparatus, whether photographs, wildlife
documentaries, telecommunications, theme parks or computer imaging. As a result,
many of the pictures for the Rabbits tend to be about looking at the world through
various artificial framing devices. Lenses, telescopes, maps and paintings feature
strongly, all transforming perceptions of an unfamiliar country to meet particular
cultural expectations. The inability of the rabbits to see the look beyond their own
preconceptions and flawed ideals is a central theme that emerges from these visual
cues.
The illustration used on the cover for The Rabbits is a particularly good example of
developing imagery from reference sources. It is based on a 19th century painting of
Cook’s first landing at Botany Bay, a colou reproduction of which I found in an old
encyclopaedia. The arrangement of figures striding ashore from left to right is mirrored
by the rabbit figures, with similar clothing, flag and gun; two Aborigines on a distant
dune in the original painting have been replaced by two marsupial animals. There are
similar lighting and atmospheric effects at work, although quite exaggerated, and the
use of oils on canvas wit thin yellow glazes emulates the technique used in paintings of
the period.
E. Phillips Fox. (1900) painting of James Cook landing at Botany Bay in 1770, National Gallery of
Victoria
‘They came by water’ from The Rabbits, 1998
It could almost be read as a satirical parody, although this is not really my intention.
Whether the source is recognisable is irrelevant: what does matter is the resonance. It
borrows rather than alludes, evoking a certain 19th Century European way of framing
moments of historical significance, where key figures are actors on the world’s stage,
supernaturally well composed, monumental and mythical. Everything about the source
painting by E. Phillips Fox contains a familiar ideology, all about progress and destiny, the
planting of flags and the arrival of legitimate historical narrative.
These are ideas that we are invited to read in a less recognisable and more challenging
form in my own illustration. The ship leaps forth like a skyscraper or knife, echoed by
scalpel-like shadows and pointed feet, collars and guns, the lighting is more theatrical
than ever. I wanted to introduce a surreal dreamlike quality, ambiguous in terms of mixed
awe and dread, exaggerated but not caricatured or didactic. Most of all, I wanted to
produce an image that was enigmatic and thought-provoking. It’s up to the reader to
draw whatever meaning they wish.
Like The Rabbits, The Lost Thing is quite a strange book, but its success among readers is
due in no small part to a familiar premise, a boy finding a lost animal at his local beach
and taking it home. In itself, very unoriginal, except that this is just a point of
departure, much as the history of colonisation is for The Rabbits. The lost animal is, after
all, not a stray dog, but a huge tentacled creature evolved from drawings of pebble crabs
and old-fashioned cast iron stoves, among other things. Furthermore, the setting of the
story owes more to my visual research of industrial architecture, including a local
derelict power station in East Perth, and the urban landscapes of artists like Edward
Hopper, John Brack and Jeffrey Smart, than your average residential suburb (although it
started off as an average residential suburb).
Many other elements based on various references are combined; ideas from looking at a
1930’s copy of Popular Mechanics, some of my Dad’s old physics and calculus textbooks
which I used as a collage medium in the final illustrations, photographs of cloud
formations and Melbourne trams. I also had a reproduction of the medieval artist
Hieronymous Bosch’s bizarre painting “The Garden of Earthly Delights” stuck on my
kitchen cupboard, next to a photograph of air-intake pipes on a ship by Charles Sheeler,
and American modernist painter. All of these elements came together in the production
of a visual narrative that is at once very simple and accessible, yet complex and
irreducibl enigmatic, even for me – it wouldn’t work if I understood too much about it.
For me, that’s what creativity is – playing with found objects, reconstructing things that
already exist, transforming ideas or storie I already know. It’s not about the colonisation
of new territory, it’s about exploring inwards, examining your existing presumptions,
squinting at the archive of experience from new angles, and hoping for some sort of
revelation. What really matters is whether we as readers continue to think about the
things we have read and seen long after the final page is turned.
