Alexis Deacon

Alexis Deacon

About Author

Alexis Deacon graduated from the University of Brighton where he studied Illustration, with a first class honours degree. Before graduating he was also awarded the Burt Brill and Cardens award for the second best degree show in 2000. He now lives in London.

Interview

THE SELFISH GIANT (ABRIDGED PICTURE BOOK)

SEPTEMBER 2013

PUBLISHED BY HUTCHINSON

 

THE SELFISH GIANT by Oscar Wilde

ABRIDGED AND ILLUSTRATED BY ALEXIS DEACON


Alexis Deacon was asked by his publisher if he wanted to create a retelling of a classic story and he chose The Selfish Giant. The story appealed, he says, because of the giant - which is fun to draw - and also because it was a story he had enjoyed as a child, so he was keen to approach it.

"I had a look at previous versions because it's always worth doing that if you're trying to do something other people have tried," says Deacon. "I thought it would be easy for me to make it different from previous versions because illustrated versions of The Selfish Giant vary a lot and there isn't that much agreement on what are the key moments in the book."

Deacon also felt that he would be one of the first to depict the story from the giant's point of view. He explains, "This is a story where the main character makes a sudden and drastic turn, suddenly he's not selfish, but to make that believable, you have to sow the seed of change a bit earlier and that made me interested in the character of the giant himself."

Deacon abridged the original story himself and was allowed "to take out, but not to put in". One of the hardest decisions was whether to keep the ending the same (where one child - Christ, in Wilde's story - cannot climb a tree) and not to end in a different place. Otherwise he found he could simply take out the descriptive text; since Wilde's original story wasn't written to be illustrated, there is a lot of descriptive text such as what the spirits of winter were like and how the garden looked.

Using a new set of visual clues, Deacon felt he could make a contribution to a long-established and often imagined story. "What I was trying to emphasis through the visual imagery was that it was the giant's garden, so you see all his childhood games there, the puppets that he used to play with, the boat he used to sail, all the things from his childhood that he has hung onto. He is trying to preserve that time, to pickle it, but in reality it's dead and it's become a trap for him. There's no life in it any more; he's no longer a child, but he's keeping everything as it was because he loved it."

Deacon explains, "I wanted the motivation for his selfishness to be discussed because I think one of the most important things to me in storytelling is the notion of empathising with the character, understanding what drives them to make the choices they make.

"The children playing in the garden were terrified by this huge man who shouted at them and I want the reader to think about how frightening that must have been for them, but also to think about what it's like to be the terrifying man?

"If he is selfish, what is it that makes him think that way? So we have to ask why is the garden so important to the giant that he doesn't want to share it?"

At the centre of the book is a pivotal spread where the giant is lying in bed, you see pictures from his earlier life on the wall and the puppets are next to his bed. Deacon says, "For me, the story Oscar Wilde wrote is about death and rebirth and the need to let go - the need for one generation to let go and pass things on to the next generation, to share with them whatever you have earned or created. It's no accident that the seasons are in the story in a big way."

For the giant, trapped in a permanent winter and with no sign of rebirth or spring, it is a kind of "mini death" for him, says Deacon. He has to get to that point, he adds. "He has his garden and his house and toys and this is what they do for him.... It's a little bit of a vision for him of the end of this unrelenting trajectory that he's on."

At his lowest point, the giant hears the birds singing and sees the start of life again; then he understands. "So it's important to take him to that point where he had everything he wanted but it imprisoned him - it has become the opposite of what he wanted."

Deacon also decided to do much more with the winter spirits in his version of The Selfish Giant than we have seen in other versions. He explains, "The winter spirits are described as people in Oscar Wilde's text but in the versions of the Selfish Giant that are available, no one seems to have done much with them and I felt that they are the most interesting characters in the story.

"They were fun to draw and it's important to have something you feel excited about bringing into the world." He admits that they are "probably scarier" than images you would generally find in children's picture books but classic texts like this gives you more freedom, he says.

One of the most vivid expressions of the winter spirits is the face of the hail spirit at the window, when the giant is in his bed. "That was very important to me," says Deacon. "Remember the giant's face when he's shouting at the children at the beginning of the story? He has a very large face and it's a mask of anger and hatred. That's how the children saw the giant - but he didn't see himself like that.

"The winter spirits are the embodiment of what he feels and when the hail looks through the window it has a mask of anger and hatred so the giant is being faced with a reflection of himself." Deacon has presented the giant in the same proportion to the winter spirits as the children are to him.

The picture book also has a very natural rhythm and Deacon explains, "During my career I have created about ten picture books and lately I have got very interested in the layout, how that supports the rhythm of the story and the page turns, and now I spend a lot of time just checking the beats of each page.

"I draw a little circle with a sketch and some text and paste those onto my spreads to get a feel for the story and to check it has the right pace and energy at any given point. Once I'm happy with the layout I can start working on the final illustrations."

 

CROC AND BIRD (PAPERBACK)

MAY 2013

PUBLISHED BY RED FOX PICTURE BOOKS


Author and illustrator Alexis Deacon has already made his mark in the picture book world with titles like Beegu (a little lost alien), Slow Loris (Loris is a sloth) and A Place to Call Home (about a small furry family trying to find a home). His artwork and his stories are very distinctive and his most recent title, Croc and Bird, is also characterised by its quirky story as well as its humour and warmth.

Croc and Bird begins with two eggs on sand. From one hatches a crocodile and from the other, as the title suggests, a bird. At first you wonder if Bird will survive the encounter but Crocodile takes Bird under his wing, so to speak, and they become 'brothers' who share every growing-up experience, from singing and nest-building to floating and catching buffalo. When they meet a host of other 'croc and birds', however, they have to re-think their identity and decide where their loyalties lie.

Deacon chose the combination of a crocodile and a bird because, he says, "If you think of all the possible egg combinations you can have, that's the most satisfying. The creatures had enough in common but were diverse enough for it to be amusing and I liked their comparative scales - Croc is big and long and clunky and Bird is so pink and dead-looking at the beginning."

While he wrote the text for Croc and Bird in 2006, the completed book has been a long time coming. He explains, "At first I wanted to explore the comic potential of Croc and Bird to see where humour could take it. I asked, 'What's the funniest thing they can give to each other? and I was working out their roles as I went along.

"Croc and Bird have to bring each other up, they parent each other and themselves. So how would they respond to x, y or z as they are growing up and what could be the funniest response to certain situations that could also express their characters?"

Croc and Bird have slight but subtly different characters that help them to survive. "Bird is an optimist in the face of the odds - he makes a nest from three sticks and calls it 'home', while Croc is a bit more of a pragmatist and is very trusting," says Deacon. "Bird sets the agenda and Croc makes it happen."

The illustrations as they finally appear are very different from those Deacon had first envisaged. "I was thinking of doing a more stylised version of a bird and a crocodile but then I came to do the research for each of them.

"When I draw animals in picture books I like to go out and draw the animals in question from real life. When it comes to designing the actual characters, I want to put in some of that information - they have so many visual aspects that are useful to express what they are - but you can't include every feather or scale. If you put my characters next to a real crocodile or bird they will look very different, but there's enough taken from nature to show what they really are."

He adds, "Animals are extraordinarily appealing to watch and when I do so, I try to imagine how they perceive the world both in human terms and in animal terms; watch a cat for ten minutes and it will tell you any kind of story."

When it came to creating Croc and Bird, Deacon kept the images and text very pared down to reflect the simplicity of their world, says Deacon. Among the images he has some favourites, for example when Bird 'catches' a buffalo and also when the river washes the pair upstream where they meet other crocodiles and birds. Deacon says, "The very simple world they inhabited before that point disappears and there is a big jump to there being lots of other creatures in their world."

He adds, "I also liked the final image (of Croc and Bird together in a tree) a lot. I wanted you to turn the page and understand that Croc and Bird really do like each other a lot and that being back together was very important to them."


As for his future projects, Deacon is currently working on a new project for the V&A, a graphics and illustration show where the V&A has commissioned a short story and given a number of illustrators each a section to illustrate. The exhibition will open in early June.

He has also recently undertaken a residency in the Galapagos islands, followed by an exhibition and a book. He is also developing new projects in comic books and is currently working on a comic by the late Russell Hoburn following an earlier collaboration with The Soon Child.

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