This is an interview by Jean-Louis CLARET, author of Picturing Shakespeare
Q1. What urges you to illustrate Shakespeare?
It is difficult to determine this precisely, but I feel that I need to show, with shapes and colours, parts of my personal experience with Shakespeare’s dramatic world. It results from an encounter with the texts. There are things one can say with words and others that can be more efficiently mediated by another medium. Some may use music or dance. I’m using coloured pencils. In my case, the difference could be the immediacy or the emotional impact of a ‘direct’ gaze into a character’s eyes.
Q2. Are there things words cannot express?
I would be at a loss to say a perfume, or the taste of some exotic fruit, or a particular shade of green. I am not a poet; I cannot say precisely what I feel when I look into my son’s eyes. Not to mention my first kiss with the person I love. By the way, interestingly, when we kiss, we close our eyes because one sense is sometimes more powerful than the combination of several. This applies to images too. They allow us to grasp a world fully, keeping words at a distance for a while. The excerpts from the plays that I usually include in my images are just reminders, mentions of an origin. They are the memory of the image.
Q3. Yet these images come from words, don’t they?
They do. They are conjured up by the texts. All illustrations are sorts of palimpsests. But words convey an incredible range of things that call for images: among them are the sounds that strike us physically when the text is said out loud, the inner music that gives us goose pimples, a swirl of emotions that takes hold of us and makes us see things mentally. The French philosopher and Hellenist Barbara Cassin asks an amazing question: ‘Is the name of a thing the portrait of that thing drawn by sound?’ I humbly try to represent the figures drawn by poetry, the melodies contained by words. I try to capture the perfume of the text.
Q4. Do you represent the images you see mentally as you read?
They are my starting point. But I usually fail to do so. My mind sees images, dim faces and gazes, but my hand takes over and draws what it wants. It does not want to be domesticated. I am always surprised by what it shows me. I am sometimes disappointed, but more often than not, it reveals to me things I had just glimpsed or felt. My hand brings to the surface a deep layer of the text.
Q5. Do you represent key scenes of the plays?
I usually do not know which scene of the play I am going to represent. By the way, they are often faces and colours rather than scenes. But these faces are modelled by the events the characters have to cope with. This process is conveyed by the colour or the fabric of their clothes, the intensity in their eyes, the objects they are holding and the way they are looking – or not looking – at the observers. My wish is to connect emotionally the real flesh viewers with the dramatis personae. But I do not know what my characters will ‘say’ to their viewers. The silent conversations remain private.