When I’m illustrating poetry I like to recite the Hippocratic Oath and change it slightly that my goal as an illustrator is to do no harm to the poem. So I try to keep — well one way I can do that is literally keeping the art away from the poem. So the poem can sit on white space, be sitting beautifully on the page and the illustration will give it a lot of room.
Occasionally I’ve had the poem sit on a field of a color, a blue or a red and the illustration surrounds it but I always do try to let the beauty of the words and the lines even visually sit unobstructed on a very, very pure background, whether it’s white or color.
And then my illustrations are generally in terms of poetry I try to make them kind of just a little reaction to the poem or comment on not so much illustrating what’s in the poem, although there’s a little bit of that but maybe an aspect of the poem and maybe so that there’s a little bit of rubbing between the poem and the illustration so that there’s a little some fracture or something rather than simply my picturing the images of that poem.
When I’ve illustrated poetry for instance, Nikki Giovanni’s Genie in the Jar at first I was daunted at the notion that I would imagine the images that she, Nikki Giovanni, has written and should conjure whatever images they need to in the reader or the hero. And I would be giving something for the eyeballs.
And that at first I thought how could I do that, how can I have the audacity to do that but ultimately you do have to grab the audacity and just do it and let it be. So those are thoughts that race through my mind as I’m working on it. In that case because it was a book about race to some degree and music — this was a book that was dedicated to Nina Simone who suffered racist, suffered from racist views and structures all of her life.
And I knew that back story so what I decided to do was paint everything, do everything on — rather than on white paper, on brown paper and let anything that was white be an imposition on the basic status quo which would be brown in this case. So that was what drove that book.
And that seemed to work, Nikki liked that I’m happy to say. And so that worked for me there. With music I try to find the structures within the music itself to give me a clue as to the structure of the — what I’m doing. So it might be rhythmic structure, can become visual rhythms across a page and rhythms can also mean repetitions, they can mean — time can be easily translated into space.
So if, you know, if something is long in time, it can be long across the page, that kind of thing. And then colors can be, you know you can have opinions about colors whether something in B Flat is bluish or purplish or A Major, A Major to me seems almost orange.
Musicians definitely have feelings about keys and all — or almost flavors about keys themselves. E Flat, A Flat, definitely does have a different feeling from A Sharp or A Major so what, what we feel about those keys can be analogous to what we feel about colors themselves, red, blue, orange, all those things. It can work pretty, pretty easily once I work myself into I think.