When a picture is worth a thousand words …
Author and illustrator Caroline Magerl explains why illustration is a universal language and words are sometimes not required.
In the large Paris hall where the Salon du Livre is held every year, there are a host of French language publishers, each in their booths. I look for the stand of Editions Deux (who publish my picture books in French) where my happy task for the next four days is to draw and sign books.
My one anxiety is that I speak very little French. In preparation, I took lessons, but Josef who teaches at a local venue gleefully announced in a voice surprisingly loud for an octogenarian: “You will never get it!” At least he said it in that lovely French lilt.
But I had a plan to deal with my lack of French, and it goes to the heart of why I write picture books. In front of me, I had placed a sign. It reads: Je parle en images. (I speak in pictures.) I was excusing myself, but there was something more that I was trying to say with my little sentence.
Understanding the language spoken around us was not something I took for granted as a child. When my family and I migrated from Germany, neither my mother, aunt or two-year-old self spoke English.
If there was a disconnect in terms of verbal communication, there was however no lack of overwhelming visual impressions. The sky over Sydney was the hard flat blue of a gemstone, with a sense of immensity, horizon to horizon. The prickling line of a bushfire that approached our back fence with an uneasy sound. Or the little green pine tree, planted dead centre in our yard, a living flagpole for a German household.
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As much as the impressions of this new country swept me up, there was a line of communication back to our old country. It came in the shape of battered brown cardboard boxes, sent by my grandmother from behind the Iron Curtain.
How much I looked forward to these packages. Omi (my grandmother) had a knack for choosing picture books. The books were, of course, written in German and, as a five year old, I was able to read them.
I was only vaguely interested in the stories as it was the pictures that were the loudest voice, and the pictures not only told me something of the world we left behind but they told me something about my grandmother, who I had never met.
I was born near Frankfurt on the west side of the wall. She was on the eastern side. I only had these parcels to give me a sense of what she might be like. I decided that question from the books she sent. Anna Magerl liked hedgehogs, bears, foxes and cats. And she liked them dancing through woods of all kinds – drippy, weird forests, sparkling stands of beech trees. There were vignettes of moors, little streams with flute-playing frogs charmingly depicted.
In short, I surmised my grandmother loved nature, as seen through the eyes of picture book illustrators – highly emotive, highly coloured by the artists vision.
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The East German and Russian illustrators who contributed the visual elements of those picture books were my first instructors in a non-verbal language. It is fair to say that these books shaped my life’s course, because slowly and inevitably I realised I wanted to write and illustrate picture books of my own. I am glad to say I did just that.
For every one of the five books my Omi sent, I matched by writing one of my own. It was not planned this way, but the fifth and latest book, Tomato Sandwich, is a book without words.
Tomato Sandwich emerged from the necessity to find a way to teach students one thing – that we all speak in pictures. In this I showed students a string of pictures, which told the story of a little girl who is given an unwanted sandwich. Their task was to read the story and guess what might happen next. The children became co-creators of the story, and the results were at times very funny.
This lesson went with me to Quebec, to London and to Adelaide. As I delivered the lesson in these far-flung places, my belief was confirmed. It turns out we all speak in pictures.
If sighted, imagery is our mother tongue. Imagery is what streams in to our young eyes and form a vast, loose library, one we add to all our lives, with all the attendant emotions, associations clipped to them, perhaps by some frantic and disorganised inner-librarian.
At least, that is how I like to see it, pun intended.
I cannot speak French, my German is increasingly woeful but, never mind, Je parle en images. We all do.
Tomato Sandwich is a book which, I hope, will encourage the understanding that in reaching for the meaning of a picture, we make a leap. In that leap, we meet our own unique imagination.
Caroline Magerl is an artist and author/illustrator based on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast. Her previous book Piano Fingers (Des Doigts Pour Un Piano) was nominated in the annual Prix Janusz Korczak de Literature Jeunesse for picture books. The prize committee commissioned a short film in which the author explains her inspiration for that book.
Tomato Sandwich by Caroline Magerl, Walker Books, $25.99.