It represents everything about creatureliness that is vulnerable, untameable, frightening, rule-breaking and free. It is a visually exhilarating and hallucinatory book. This month, Creature-“a beautiful collection of paintings, drawings and reflections on creatures, our constant companions”-comes to bookshops. A truly enthusiastic and curious student of the world. I left with the impression of someone who became more interesting and less certain as our conversation progressed. We continued to talk about his process and ideas after our panel was done, through refreshments and a book signing, up until the moment his publicist politely ushered him away.

It is a mystifying, contradictory space of sensical nonsense, floodlit darkness and sweet gravitas that defies rigid black-and-white thinking.Īs mentioned, I had the good luck of meeting Tan in 2017. He works in a chiaroscuro zone where there is often a literal softening into a grey or a glowing mid-range. One of the first things that drew me to his art was the sense he imparts that life is not built on polar opposites but on juxtaposition, overlap, and recombination. (Note: the possible benefit of a wayside point of view is you never lose your perspective, your edge, your mission of noticing.) From his wordless masterpiece The Arrival to his inventive The Lost Thing, the film adaptation of which won him an Academy award, Tan conjures characters who are often on the outside looking in. As an artist, his line is both sharp and misty, sage and innocent, untethered to the laws of realism and yet socially and ethically attuned.Īs a fellow half-Asian settler (in my case, living in Canada), I recognize a hybrid sensibility and a quality of neither-here-nor-thereness in Tan’s work. Extraordinary worlds where unexpectedly ordinary things occur. He builds worlds inhabited by small affecting creatures who somehow rebuff any diminishing association with cuteness. He spins strange tales that rearrange habitual ways of seeing and that often pose nettled questions about how humans treat more-than-human life. He grew up in West Australia amid “the forested southwest, the arid north, the vast inland desert, the endless beaches.”

For those who may be unaware, Shaun Tan is one of the most lauded contemporary illustrators in the world, a revered cult figure among fellow creators, and deservingly so. Very few artists are as game to try new things, unafraid to interrupt the fatal momentum of “past success” (check out the creative leap Tan takes in The Singing Bones).īut I am getting ahead of myself. No one beckons the unexpected visitor (the small, lost, unwanted) as joyfully. No one evokes the strangeness of the world as well as he does. Sometimes it’s disappointing to meet an artist you truly admire but meeting my fellow panelist Shaun Tan at the Melbourne Writers Festival in 2017 only fed my admiration.

Dinosaur sketch cute