The artist whom I am writing about happened to go to the RCA, so I took a shot in the dark and sent him an email. To my delight and surprise, he responded! And he allowed me to ask him some questions via email.
The following is our correspondence:
B: How do you think about your audience? Have you always aimed to make work that is aimed at adults?
TG: I haven’t really considered it like this before, but I suppose I always did want to make work aimed at adults. I read lots of comics as a teenager and all through college (and I still do) and I was inspired by those. I was particularly inspired by Edward Gorey because he made picture books for adults that don’t follow the rules of comics.
I think of my audience as being people basically like myself: not super-clever or fantastically educated, but interested in things and willing to go to strange or new places if the work is interesting.
My idea of the audience might subtly shift depending on the project. I realise the readers of my New Scientist cartoons are, in general, probably more up on science and perhaps a little less interested in literature than my Guardian Review readers, but in both cases I want the work to be accessible and interesting to anyone open to trying it.
I’m currently making a picture book for small children and it has been an interesting, and at times hard, challenge to write for a different type of audience.
B: When/how did you find your ‘style’? Or, have you always had a certain way of drawing people?
TG: I flailed around a bit at college trying to find a style and felt, at the time, that I got nowhere. But now when I look back, I can see the common factors in most of the work I made. Which is not to say that there were not complete failures and wrong turns into dead ends.
I think my style came together when I got into making comics. I found it so hard to tell good, cohesive, fun stories that I don’t think so much bout style . When I was starting out I just used the drawing style that came to me when I wasn’t trying to be an artist, kind of the way I’d draw a quick preparatory sketch or diagram in a notebook, or a stupid drawing to amuse a friend. Which is not to say that the work isn’t carefully composed, just that it comes out of a simple language of doodles and ideas, rather than ‘realistic’ or virtuoso drawing.
The stick figures that I often use grew out of my early comics, partly because I am not very good at drawing faces. Over time I realised that the universal, unspecificness of a stick figure (raceless, pretty much genderless) is often useful in storytelling. Hopefully a lack of detail allows the reader to fill a lot in themselves and perhaps sympathies more as a result.
B: In terms of the writing/drawing working process, do you find that one part comes before the other? Are they ever at odds?
TG: Generally I start with something in my head that is neither words nor pictures, just an idea, and when this gets noted down in my sketchbook it becomes words, pictures or rough little cartoons that include both. The easiest ideas to work with have both elements, but sometimes I get a very wordy idea and have to work to make sure it doesn’t look boring on the page, or it’s a very visual idea and I need to find just the right text to convey the idea while letting the visuals lead.
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