May 9, 2016

THE PIER FALLS - Mark Haddon

Mark shared a glimpse of his process for the illustrations in The Pier Falls.

The detail is extraordinary. These illustrations must take you a long
time. How do you set about your illustrations? Do you sketch quick layout first?

The illustrations come from a longstanding habit of mine of making ‘joiners’,
those photo collages david hockney pioneered and made for a long period
in which he stitched together many pictures to create a panoramic home-made fish-eye lens effect. Above (top photo) is one of my two sons during our visit
to the british columbia museum of anthropology.

The illustrations in the pier falls are very careful copies - sometimes tracings - of composite photographs made of up to sixty different images, and half the work was getting that photographic image exactly right so that it seemed both graphically loose and structurally believable at the same time. that took almost as much time as the drawing, not least because i threw away many possible designs (i have a lot of composite photos of weirs…).

Did you have an illustration in mind whilst you were writing or did they
come after?

One of the illustrations - the skip in a side street  - predates the book
and i think it was this image which suggested the idea to me. Some of the photographic sources also predate the book but they seemed to fit the book’s theme even when the link isn’t obvious. There’s a drawing, for an example, of a concrete blast wall which only readers with an obsessive interest in cold war military history will be able to identify as a blast wall from the now-abandoned thor missile launch site at what was once raf harrington (bottom photo). My father was in the royal engineers and surveyed the site before its construction and suffered severe moral queasiness about it. I love the bleakness of the image, the unspoken backstory and the sheer gorgeousness of old concrete.

This is one of the reasons why i don’t think of the pictures as illustrations per se. They don’t illustrate the stories in the collection. And though there are obvious links it should be impossible for a reader to map each story onto a specific pictures. How about ‘complementary artwork’? If anyone can think of a less clumsy way of saying that then they should let me know.

Read on for more of Mark’s discussion on his illustrations in tomorrow’s CMYK post. The Pier Falls was published by Jonathan Cape on Thursday 5th May

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