Sarah Lane
Artist Sarah Lane illustrated A Story of Witchery by Jennifer Calkins.
When Jen and I first started talking about the illustrations for Witchery, we were both talking about fairy tales. We discussed Gustav Doré and several other illustrators of traditional fairy tales , including Arts and Crafts-inspired artists such as Arthur Rackham, Kate Greenaway, and Jessie Willcox Smith. After that talk, I drew this: [fig. 1]
But that ended up being quite unsatisfying because, for one thing, Gustav Doré already did that and did it far better, and for another, Witchery is more than a fairy tale, if it even is a fairy tale. A simple, sub-par rehashing of what’s been done before would be entirely inappropriate for a poem that was trying to do so many different things in a way that hasn’t been done before. (However, I apparently held on somewhere in my brain to the formality of the Art and Crafts movement because that would reappear later.)
So when we talked again, I brought up Hieronymous Bosch—specifically, I had been thinking about The Garden of Earthly Delights —because of Witchery’s delighted fascination with the grotesque, and El Greco because of the poem’s religious imagery and its shadows. I grew up in Madrid, Spain, and my mother would take me to El Prado at least once a month during my pre-adolescence, so my brain readily called up the work of those two artists who, despite their not being Spanish, is so heavily featured there.
Jen also shared with me many illustrations and illustrators with whom she felt an affinity. These included Olga Dugin and Andrej Dugina.
At this point I switched from pad and pencil to my computer tablet and electronic pen. I knew that this would give me even more freedom to experiment and would be more forgiving of a lack of technique as I ventured into less-familiar territory. I use a Wacom Intuos 3, one of the best smallish investments I ever made, with Adobe Illustrator.
So I got to work and what I came up with at first was something very free and loose and almost mid-twentieth century Eastern European .
It was completely wrong. Although I needed to feel more free about the illustrations and unconstrained by borders and genres in order to tackle Witchery, I realized that Jen’s work operated within a canvas of restraint and formality and that I needed to embrace those elements of her work. So I took the looseness and poured it into a sixteenth-century mold, much as Bosch had done so well.
This succeeded especially well metaphorically for my first Witchery assignment, which was to create illustrations for the Material volume and would highlight part of the first section of the work. In this section, the heroine, although she is embarking on an adventure, which is something usually associated with openness and freedom, is tunneling (literally) deeper and deeper into a nightmarish claustrophobia. So combining a freedom of style with the restraints of formal borders and elements felt right and made sense. (Please note that I did not come upon any of these ideas consciously. In fact, it is not until right now, as I am writing this, that I have been able to assign any explanation to the process.)
I started with the scene in which the narrator-heroine encounters the odd little physician’s assistant in the gingham dress. I showed Jen what I had done and after, getting the go-ahead, turned out two more of the illustrations for that middle section. [fig. 4]
Jen reviewed them and we made some changes that made a lot of sense to me, although honestly I can’t remember what they were. But they were good ones. And the book and illustrations went to press.
A few months later when I started to work on the rest of the illustrations for the complete volume of Witchery, I took greater advantage of the entire narrow canvas available to me and extended the height of the drawings. This was fortuitous as it turned out later when I sampled in the hip-hop sense from El Greco’s The Adoration of the Shepherds, something that required a sense of loft: [insert fig. 5]
—Sarah Lane, Bainbridge Island, February 2006
[fig. 1]
[fig. 2]
[fig. 3]
[fig. 4] 
[fig. 5]
