Fine Lines and Solid Blacks, Vol. V

It has come to my attention that sometimes in discussing the more interesting facets of an illustrator, some of the "basics" can be overlooked. Take Harry Clarke (1890-1931) for example. Harry Clarke is one of my favorites of the period. Over the past few years there has been a VIEW post on some really hard-to-find Clarke works, and he was mentioned again in reference to a collected work, more recently. To not offer a look at why I think he's worth some more study, is just, well, wrong. So let's fix that.

In the small amount of time that Clarke had to share his genius with the world, he managed to explore a few creative avenues. Stained glass design may be what he applied most of his time and talent to, and in his native Ireland there still exist many examples of his fine glass work. I found Harry Clarke while in my teens, during an after-Christmas book sale, when a reprint of Poe's Tales of Mystery and Imagination came into my possession. Like many designer/illustrators of the Golden Age, Clarke had the opportunity to do a number of gift books, his were from 1915-1925. The Poe volume is his best known, and easiest to obtain a reprint of. (It was one of the first selected for the Calla reprint program, as well) Clarke's others are not as easy to find, though a reprint of his Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault will be available this Fall. Another of Clarke's prizes is his Fairy Tales by Hans Christian Andersen. All of the works shown here come from that volume. I'm looking at Clarke in a Fine Lines and Solid Blacks segment because I think his ink work is exceptional in his use of pattern and understanding of value—value here meaning the transition(s) between blacks, grays, and whites, and how their relative placement on the picture plane affects the composition. A viewer can observe these images at a glance, or choose to dig deeper and deeper into them, where a single plate can tell its own story. Clarke's color illustration doesn't present with the same intensity through simplicity—black and white—and loses something in the printing, according to some who have seen his originals.


There has been a kind of scholarly-reawakening in regards to Clarke in the last five years, but it does look to his glass work primarily.

You can keep up with that here—
and as mentioned in that earlier VIEW blog, here's the link to Jim Vadeboncouer's page on Clarke.


Back shortly. Jeff

The Many Sides of Helen Stratton

It's been a busy season up here in the studio. I'm juggling the details of a few upcoming Dover books, just finished my first foray into sign painting...(that's a long story...) and there's prep work beginning for the upcoming Illuxcon...more prep for me than the usual show—just to get started. In any case, I've been away from here too long, and finally have enough material on one artist I've been looking at for some time, to make a worthy post.

A while back while working on Once Upon a Time, I found a volume of Hans Andersen's Fairy Tales illustrated by Helen Stratton (active 1892-1924). There's not much info to be found on Stratton, and the work I've been able to find from her is different in every job—not a recommended career trait for an illustrator. But there are some beautiful qualities in the entire range of her work, and she could put down some dark spooky scenes with the best of them. Her work on the 1899 Andersen's Tales is intense—There are probably 400 pieces of line art in the 320 page volume. She mastered working in line, one job this size might have been enough to develop a whole new grasp of a medium. To the right are some of my favorites. For some time, the only other work I'd found by her was from Heroic Legends, by Agnes Herbertson, no date. I like her color work here, her line is still present, and she still uses value well to separate (or combine) different planes within an image. Recently I found a third volume with her work, A Book of Myths, 1914. Again, a slightly different style, the color work here is almost without any line, very sensitive, and perhaps more personal. Not as strong, for my money. Like many of the day, I think her best work was her line art, the demand for color work in the teens and twenties led her in a direction she was not as well-suited for. If you can catch a look at that work in Andersen's Tales, I'd highly recommend it.

Afterward- Don't get me wrong, I think her color work has some really nice qualities. I particularly like her palette. But in comparison to her line work, I'd prefer the line. JM