D-
The title only! And this to place it in England and Austria.
T- Did you search specifically for a story
that could be told without words?
D- Yes. I suppose … in fact very
much in the choosing of the subject of a library, a place of words,
to draw the story I planned without any words, and set it in a place
filled with words that I am replacing with lines. The two fold nature
of a library, moving between a concrete presence and a perpetual invisibility
is greatly fascinating, as it is unable to resolve itself into one or
the other. It contains at once a sense of enormous constriction (as
knowledge has been rigorously formatted) as well as unbridled liberation
(afforded by delving into the world of any one of the numerous books).
To get this sense in the book I felt was only achievable in a wordless
form that allows that twofold awareness to grow in the readers mind.
This story was quite hard to do, because drawing multiple perspectives
involving numerous books and shelves is quite far removed from my usual
way of drawing, which is a lot simpler. So in this case the subject
matter determined the style and method of drawing.
T– The pen that you would normally
use is a pilot 1.4, or rather its what you used for the last two books?
But for this one you chose something else but I thought you had said
that the pilot was your ultimate pen, the finest line?
T – So the dip pen, you are using now is more fluid?
D- Often a pen is just, you draw here then here on the page…(indicates separate areas of a piece of paper) so its Just the fact that if you have the right nib the ink seems to just flow out, it makes drawing almost more of a pleasure. It’s not like you lose control its just that it glides over the paper as opposed to just scratching at it’s various itches.
T- The rendering and shading of the forms, how did that develop did you look at other artists or in a more general way at pen & ink technique?
D- I liked the idea of crosshatching, which is just a dense way of creating solidity, it’s one of the few things you can do on paper that’s almost sculptural.
T- Though in fact your lines don’t actually cross?
D- No, doing so would feel like I’m just appropriating someone else’s method - it was nice to find a way to render texture that fit but that was not quite like everything else. All the lines flow in a certain direction around the things I am drawing, so you get a directional force there too. One day I will be in a school and saying ‘ Today we are going to do hatching do not ever cross your lines.’
D- I guess its just a lovely mix of being economical, all it takes is my time and effort, but you still get something quite lovely at the end of it. I think with proper commercial printers you don’t get the same thing, unless you do litho printing to your exact specifications on a huge run, you almost always end up getting something which is not quite what you wanted, not quite as good.
T- So a publisher comes to you and says, we want to publish this book, what happens there, if its exactly the same as this book you are making here, then that’s fine but what if that’s unlikely to be the case is that a problem?
D- Well I think this is probably the last one I will do like this in a miniature run with complete control. Ultimately you will end up sending work to other people in one form or another in order for them to give you work and so I felt it was good to take that form into my own hands as an initiative and just approach them in that way with books that are as I would want them. So it is not an abstract desire but a realized one and they, the publishers, can see the point that we are moving away from.
T- This is the third book you have screen-printed?
D-Yes. The first two are a hundred each and to be honest it is now just a case of getting to the end of this process.
T- I can't wait to see it bound & finished
M- Come back at around five o'clock.
David-Very few (laughs) It’s really tiny, it’s nine sides.
T-Eighteen pages?
D- No nine sides in total.
T- With a run of?
D- Fifty…but the aim for now is that by this evening I have one really beautiful hand made book. A Bi-Lingual edition, ‘The Library’ ‘Das Bibliothek’
T- A wordless graphic novel that is Bi-lingual?
D- The title only! And this to place it in England and Austria.
