Graeme Base on graeme Base

One of the most interesting things to read, I think, is authors' own reflections on what they produce in their books. Australian children's picture book author and illustrator Graeme Base is finding a new dimension to his work, 'Animalia', in a cartoon series based on that book, but I was delighted to arrive home from work to find my partner had bought me a copy of Julie Watts' book on the body of work produced by this wonderful author and illustrator. One of the things Base has to say on the 'C' page of his ostensibly (but much more multilayered than the genre suggests)alphabet book, 'Animalia', is his reluctance to find all that there is on the page, in response to questions regarding all that might be found in his illustrations of words starting with 'C', for example: '...It's a game which can be endless: on the C page there's a camera, the cow, and some cats, but over here there's a piece of cake. What sort of cake is it? Chocolate cake. Chocolate cream cake. Chocolate cream cake crowned with a cherry. Chocolate cream cake crowned with a cherry with a crisp, crunchy, caramel crust carefully cooked by a consummate chef and containing calories and carbohydrates and cholesterol...it goes on and on'. Animalia, for those of us that know it, is a wonderful book (I just took this quote from the page opposite showing 'Zany Zebras Zigzagging in Zinc Zeppelins') but Julie Watts' take on the complete body of Bases's work is just delightful.

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