An Interview with Gavin Bishop
by Doreen Darnell

The following interview appeared in Talespinner,
Issue number 8, September 1999 (pp23-29)

I had the pleasure of meeting artist/author Gavin Bishop twice this year: once when he gave a talk about his work to the Friends of the Robert McDougall Art Gallery, and then again at his studio in Christchurch where he showed me publisher's proofs of two new picture books.

The House that Jack Built, published by Scholastic in August, is a wonderfully sophisticated picture book that will be appreciated by New Zealanders young and old. It is based on the old nursery rhyme but cleverly tells a tale of early European settlement in this country.

By contrast,Stay Awake Bear is a charming children's picture book tailored to the mass American market. It is expected to have wide appeal and will be available early next year.

First, I spoke to Gavin about his work in general, then he told me more about the two new books. Here is what he said.

Which comes first - story or pictures?

I've found through experience that you can get yourself into a lot of difficulties if you don't have a pretty definite shape to the story before you get started on the illustrations. I might have a few ideas for some of the pictures, but I spend a lot of time on the story and once that's in a pretty finished state, then I can start playing around with the design of the book, and the illustrations. But if you get to a stage where you are still changing and working on the story, you can create a lot of extra work for yourself.

I'm fortunate at the moment to have an agent in Washington who is not only my agent but also an editor. She is an experienced children's editor and has worked with the publishing houses in New York for years and years and then has gone out on her own and now represents mainly writers of children's books. I think I might be her only illustrator come-writer. She is particularly useful to me because she takes a good hard look at my stories and says whether or not they've got any potential to be developed and if she feels comfortable with marketing them. The book that I've just finished and is being published by Orchard next year is calledStay Awake Bear. She and I worked on the text for that book for probably about six months, She encouraged me to tweak it a bit more, just shape it a bit more.

The story was accepted without any sample art. She sent in a copy of Little Rabbit and the Sea to show the woman that she was dealing with at Orchard, what the illustrations might look like. And it was on the strength of the illustrations of that book and the story that I'd just finished that they accepted the book, and it wasn't until later that I started doing some sample art and I produced a dummy

You trained in fine arts so I imagine your picture book style must be quite different from what you were doing, so how did you get there?

I probably got there by going back to things that I liked drawing when I was a kid. When I went to art school I had to suspend that interest in drawing things - objects - animals, people, all those sorts of things, because it wasn't fashionable to draw anything in particular at art school because we had to paint abstract paintings - in fact, to paint anything that looked as though it had any sort of subject matter was called illustrative. And we were told very firmly to get rid of that from our work, so it wasn't until some years after leaving art school that I found the courage to leave the abstract painting behind me and start painting images again. The basics are all much the same. It's just that I now allow myself to draw images.

You seem to like animals a lot and also you're very clever at making them stand up and look like people as well.

Well, you can take great liberties with animals, I think, and they still look OK. You can push an animal shape much further than you can push a human shape. People can get offended very easily about the way you treat other people. If you make someone fat, then you receive a lot of criticism; if you make them old and decrepit and so on, there's more criticism waiting for you there. But with an animal I think you can do all sorts of things. I try to push them as far as I can without getting into real cartooning. That's one of the things I don't want to do - become a cartoonist - and the other fear that I have is that I might draw an animal in a particularly glib way so that it looks Disney-like. I want to desperately try to avoid that Disney, Hanna-Barbera, Flintstone - that tradition of cartoon that we get on TV with smooth clean round lines and recipes for hands and faces. You could just about get your compass out and with three or four compass lines whip up a Mickey Mouse. And I want to try and avoid that. I want to try to keep a light, loose freely drawn line.

The wonderful thing about animals is that when you actually look at, say their heads, well a lot of animals - if you look at a goat, a cow, dog, giraffe, those sorts of things, the formation of the skull and the eyes and the positioning of the eyes is always far more extreme than you ever remember. I find that anyway. I look at a cow and I think, Gosh it's such an interesting creature. Its bones stick out in odd places, especially that big pelvis and those big hip bones. So there are lots of wonderful starting points when you come to draw an animal, and I like the way their great big eyes sit on the sides of their heads. Everything's sort of exaggerated.

Your books are wonderfully grounded in New Zealand and I know that you'd find it difficult to sell them overseas if they are, so is there a dichotomy for you?

At the moment I seem to have been able to split my work into two separate areas. I can produce work like The House that Jack Built, which will probably go no further than these shores, but in a way doing a book like that is a kind of indulgence. It's a self indulgence. I've been able to just explore any ideas that I've come across that I've found interesting and I must give tremendous thanks to the people at Scholastic who've stepped back and let me go for it. They've shown tremendous faith in me and my work. They've had a few suggestions for the finale. They came up with the idea of "That was the house that Jack built" to finish the book off. Just to tidy it all up at the end. But as far as the rest of the book goes they've just let me go for it. They've made no comment about what sort of colour I should use, or content some of the pages should have and all that sort of thing.

However, the American books that I do I get an enormous amount of feedback about practically every page in the book, when I'm working with American editors. They have huge input into whatever I do. And so Stay Awake Bear, I think, is a very American book. I've had to go with the flow with them, really, and it's because I need them more than they need me. From a financial point of view, it can make being a writer and illustrator possible, because the print runs are much bigger and the potential income from those books is much greater.

At the moment there's a tremendous interest in New Zealand's past. There's a demand from primary schools for more and more books that deal with New Zealand's bicultural nature. I enjoy working in that area and I enjoy working with that sort of material, but as I said, it doesn't travel very well. I'm going to send a copy of the book to my agent in Washington and she's going to see what she can do about selling it, but I don't have any great hopes. It may not make much sense to them.

The House that Jack Built

I've never actually spent as much time telling the story through the pictures as I have here.

Frances Chan was the editor for the book. She's just watched every stage of the development and made sure things have fallen into line really. We've discussed all sorts of things like the size of the text and the size of the final artwork and the reduction of it to the finished size - all those sorts of things, but as I said, I've had a pretty free hand.

I read an enormous amount as background to this book - lots and lots of books. I've been interested in reading about early New Zealand for many many years. I read somewhere that when explorers and early travellers like James Cook, went back to England, people were so fired up by stories of the South Pacific and of the people that they met here and the wonderful plants that Banks took back, all those sorts of things, people were so fired up by the exotic quality of these stories, that there were stage productions - plays about Cook's adventures, about his experiences. In one production I read about, there were even volcanoes and live waterfalls on stage, so I thought it would be rather fun to just allude to that on the cover - to show someone pinning up a poster which might suggest there was going to be a production looking at the adventures of Jack Bull, the main character of the story.

The book is unusual in that the story starts on the front cover and continues by using the end papers right through to the end of the book. And again I must thank Scholastic for letting me do that, because it certainly makes the book much more expensive to produce if you're going to put full colour prints on the end papers.

We see Jack on the endpapers going through London to the docks where a ship is waiting to take him across to this new country that he's heard about. These early drawings are based on Hogarth and so the Gin Lane woman is actually a Hogarth character that I've redrawn. Some of the buildings are from Hogarth etchings or engravings. I wanted to keep the colour right down so that I could use the colour symbolically when I needed to. I've kept the whole thing to just a kind of sepia tone so that when I needed to use red or blue, it was there. It hadn't already been used in the pictures.

The red door is the thing that actually links the story. I just made it red because it stood out better. The idea of travelling all the way to New Zealand taking a door is ridiculous, I know, but a few decades later, people were travelling from Britain to New Zealand, carrying all sorts of things with them - furniture, and things like that. And I thought it's a nice idea, also it's a threshold to a new world, a new life, new beginnings, opening the door into a new land or whatever. It has all those sorts of connotations. Of course the other piece of red is the roll of red flannel that Jack is taking with him to trade.

The title page shows early European attempts to write Maori and I just lifted those directly from Ann Salmond's books, where she had some old illustrations from the 18th century and some of the earliest attempts to write down the words phonetically. This is how they came out. The maps are the same. It wasn't until later that people like Williams and others started to standardise the way Maori was written.

The picture borders show artifacts or strange and unusual things that Cook and others took back, along with shrunken heads and plants, seeds and sometimes people. They took a lot of Maori people back with them as well. This is a kind of compressed journey. You'll see that it's 8 o'clock in the morning in London and it's exactly eight o'clock at night in New Zealand, so it's at the other side of the world. These are like little drawings and etchings that earlier people had drawn to take back views of the country: the harbours that you should make for with safe anchorage and a list of goods to trade - things like red flannel, some malt, which is going to feature in the text and the door for Jack's house and things like that.

When Jack arrives and builds his first house, there's just a little bit of land around him that he's landed on and come in contact with. It's become his little domain, but the rest of the country is still well and truly in the domain of the tangata whenua, the original people. It still has references to the way the Maori would have seen it.

Without asking, probably, Jack has just chopped down the pungas and made himself a hut. He's already starting to clear the land and establish himself. And of course he's got the cow and the dog and the cat , which are all going to feature in the text. Some Maori have already started to come round to have a look, to see what's going on. The ship's going off and the status quo is established in the rest of the picture. Around the outside is a reference to the Papatuanuku, Ranginui legend, and the land is formed by those deities. Even the bay that Jack has sailed into is really the mouth of Ranginui. I just wanted to show that the whole place is imbued with the spirituality - the Maori way of seeing it. And so the book is not historical, it's a kind of metaphorical statement of what may have gone on.

Jack starts to trade straight away; he has the red flannel, the nails, axes, flour, malt, those sorts of things that he might have brought with him. And on the next page is a ledger. As each thing is introduced I've tried to extend the concept of that thing into the rest of the picture. The cow, is a very strange beast, especially to the Maori, who may never have seen a cow before, and the Maori is way of coming to terms with that is to relate it to what they understand of strange creatures. So in the border we've got a mention of the Taniwha legend. The Taniwha could look like a log floating in water or like an eel, and so I've filled up the beach with driftwood. The driftwood on the beach is a reference to the fact that the Taniwha can look like this, especially if it floats against the stream.

The house starts to grow and the place that Jack has made for himself becomes bigger. The image of Papatuanuku starts to shrink. The eyes of her children have started to diminish as well and the landscape in the background is becomes less stylised and more naturalistic in the way that a European artist of the time would have drawn it.

Around the outside of the picture are some of the trading objects: plough, iron pots, nails, clothing. The Maori loved European clothing and they loved blankets, of course, because woollen blankets were so wonderfully warm and comfortable to wear. They harboured lice, unfortunately, and stayed damp when they got wet, so they caused health problems as well. Tobacco, buttons, cloth - cotton, wool, flannel - all those sorts of things came in, too. These objects are all drawn in a Maori folk art style, which developed on the east coast of the North Island in response to the way Europeans drew things. The Maori tried to draw naturalistically instead of in that very stylised way that they had used before. They started drawing objects that they'd never seen before: top hats and tea pots, lamps and candles, and of course guns. Guns became very very important early on. There is also a bit of whaling happening in the back of a picture of Jack trying to persuade a young Maori woman to milk the cow.

The house keeps growing and potatoes are being produced and there are pigs and a horse. Pigs had been here for a long time actually; Cook let pigs off. Horses became very important to the Maori and so did whale boats which were more adaptable and easier to use than some of their canoes.

In the meantime, Jack has married, he's had a child and the trading post has started to extend. He's built an enclosure for the cow and there's a Maori woman holding a pig, a reference to some early reports. The Maori took on pigs with great relish. They really loved them as well as liked to eat them, and there were reports of Maori women suckling baby pigs because they were regarded as being such a valuable commodity. I didn't think I could show that; I just made a reference to it with the woman holding the pig like a baby.

And here's a whaler who's come off the boat and he's walked through the bush and that's why his clothes are all tattered and torn, - torn by supplejack and things like that. And there's some sealing going on in the background.

The house continues to grow and is becoming sort of a trading depot. Now it's Christmas day. The town's got bigger and bigger. And everybody's going to church. They're all greeting each other. There are some Maori women with top hats and European clothes arriving. But there's no place for the Maori sitting sitting on the steps - they've already been dispossessed. The Papatuanuku presence is diminishing. And in the border are different kinds of European people that have arrived, as seen by Maori artists. Jack's place is now Jackson's and has become much bigger. It's got another storey. This could be generation or so along. Also Jack's Town has become Jackston. It's not meant to be anywhere in particular, just vaguely in the North Island somewhere.

The double page of birds and flowers shows introduced and native species and is based on a tapestry I saw - a kind of embroidery. Then the town gets bigger still. And as people arrive now, they're moving out into the countryside in bullock wagons. Settlers are looking for land to establish farms. There's one of the early coaches, although historically that's incorrect because I don't think those coaches appeared until about 1862, and then it was down in Otago. As I said, it's not a history book.

Things have reached a kind of climax. The land has been taken over to such an extent that there's tremendous anger and unrest, and a couple of boats have already been set fire to. Whakatoa are coming into the harbour to attack the boats and all of these things have built up to create an amazing feeling of anxiety and resentment, that the land is being taken over. I've added a new line of text here. We go on to have a look at the soldier all weary and worn (with an active volcano in the background echoing the eruption of feelings) and the sky has gone back to its original stylised form. The period of building and expansion on on the part of Jack and his fellow Europeans is thwarted for the moment by this conflict.

The endpapers make a comment about that particular incident. On the wall of a meeting house is the figure of Tangaroa the war god with stylised folk art images of Maori and Pakeha on either side. They've been frozen in time on the wall.

What it's really saying, I suppose, is that the European has become part of the land, and the two have been woven together in this artwork inside the meeting house for evermore. So they now have to go forward and sort things out.

It's really just a comment. I'm just saying this sort of thing happened all over the world. Here was a place where for hundreds of years, life continued with few changes. Then suddenly, bang, a very strong foreign influence comes along and starts to change things for evermore. That's really what this book is about. The conclusion is saying that the instigators of the change have been absorbed into the fabric of the country, have been absorbed into the history of the place and become part of it.

Up to the time that Jack Bull arrived, life was just as it had been for hundreds of years. But, for example, the technology that the European introduced changed things forever. There was no going back. Once you knew about an iron pot, there was no way you were going to return to your gourd. It's really just looking at that. I haven't gone into specific details. I don't think there was any place for that in this book. I wanted to keep it just a kind of a general statement. On the face of it it is still a nursery rhyme.

Michael King has said that during the land wars there were no actual villages burned to the ground, but that's not really the point. The best way to show conflict in the story is to burn the house and leave the door standing. Why quibble about whether something was actually burned down on such and such a date? That doesn't really matter. He also said you don't have the Treaty showing anywhere. That is acknowledged in an afterword, but the pictures are a metaphor for what happened and the final battle is just a symbol of the conflict that was created between two peoples over the land.

I had been wanting to do The House that Jack Builtfor years and years and years and every time I thought of doing it I saw that somebody else had done it. Way back in the early eighties Stobbs did a colonial version. But in Boston about three years ago I sat down one day and I did a storyboard and it came out like this. There are very few changes, except for a few bits towards the end.

Stay Awake Bear

This is a delightful story about Old Bear who doesn't want to go to sleep for the winter so he and his neighbour stay awake together. When it comes to their summer holday, however, guess what they both do!

There's nothing more to this book than meets the eye. The publishers (Orchard) wanted it to have tremendous impact. It's a trade picture book and they're publishing twenty-five thousand copies. They're out there to compete with everybody else and it's got to jump off the stand; it's got to get good reviews and it's got to compete with other similar books - three thousand other books a year - something like that.

One of the things that is new for me is to cut the picture away so that it's white beneath the print. They were not convinced about all the detail I wanted to put in. I wanted the whole thing to be absolutely full like a really, really cozy art deco house inside a tree - really romantic and deliberately art deco with panels on the wall and little decorations. They said "There's so much going on in that house - we can't see Old Bear for it. How about cutting away the background - leaving it white wall with the text on it?" Well, I did it, but it's not something that I would naturally do.

My editor stretched, pushed and pulled the thing a lot. She condensed one part of the story and stretched another. It's good. It's a much better structure. I'm prepared to go with it, because she knows what's out there waiting for the book. It's pointless my fighting her, but it is a variation on the way I work.

The train is an American train. I looked it up in an art deco book. I don't know why I had it in my head - I wanted this whole book to be art deco. But they watered it down a great deal.

The colours are much brighter than I would normally do. My editor thought The Little Rabbit and the Sea had a kind of yellowy cast and she said "I'd really like you to get rid of that yellow cast in your illustrations if you can". So I beefed the colour up and made it richer, brighter.

The book will be coming out early next year. It will be distributed here, but I won't be surprised if it doesn't do very well here. The problem is that it will be distributed in New Zealand as a foreign book. A thousand copies of Little Rabbit and the Sea were made available in New Zealand but it wasn't publicised or reviewed. The same thing happened to The Wedding of Mistress Fox. It just sat in the warehouse and eventually 3,000 copies were remaindered. I'm just hoping that the distributors are better than previous ones.

I haven't actually been teaching at high school since April last year. I had eight months off last year and that has been absolutely tremendous. I've been able to take on any bit of work that's come along. I wouldn't have been able to doThe House that Jack Built if I hadn't been able to do that full time. That was a huge, huge job. I worked on that every day, from about half past eight to about six o clock at night - working on those drawings. I haven't got very much at the moment, but I'm preparing some more stories that I hope will develop into picture books that I'll do later in the year or early next year, and I've also been doing a bit of teaching at the Design and Arts college, which I enjoyed tremendously because its only for about three hours in the morning four days a week and it's not every week. This week I'm free and then I go back for five weeks starting next week. I teach Image and Text and it can be just about anything I like from graphic design to painting where you use images and words - McCahon for example and Hotere.

A lot of publishers and writers still think that the writing and the story is the important part. That's it, that's the book. And the rest of the stuff is just ... well you get an illustrator to do the illustrations for you. I've been offered texts to do and I've turned them down because they are just so huge and weighty. There's practically no room for the illustrator there at all.