Meet the Artist & Author Simon Howe

Simon Howe is the author and illustrator of  Going Home, The House That Walked Away, and Shoosh!. He has also illustrated many titles for other writers. Now he has branched out into junior reader territory with Betsy & Bon, a collection of three sweet stories featuring a charming pair of bees as the central characters in three stories in one hardback volume, aptly described as ‘sweet’ on the cover.

On his website under Essays he talks at length about art, meaning and making books. Titles include Reading Books with Children, Fairy Tales and Fatherhood and more. I highly recommend them for anyone interested in exploring further the thinking of a writer and artist.

Simon kindly agreed to be interviewed by StoryLinks.

On Writing

You say you make picture books about childhood, family, hope and home. Why do you think it important to write about these topics?

I like to think of these topics as the foundation of any story. Childhood and hope are closely connected. In fact, you could say that childhood and hope are the same thing. It’s the beginning, the emergence, where everything is potential and possibility. Mistakes are easy to make but there are second chances and powers who protect you. Family and home are also linked. They are stability, reliability, familiarity and safety. They are where we step away from for adventure and where we return to for comfort, reward and celebration. They represent both the beginning and the end.

I chose those words because they seem to be a springboard for every story I can imagine.

In your essay Reading Books with Children, you quote Jonathan Pageau saying that ‘he champions art that doesn’t challenge or attack but remembers and reminds.’ Did this influence you in creating Betsy & Bon? Tell us about your approach to writing this book. I hope it did.

There’s a line in The Good Idea, where Betsy says to Bon, “I’d rather do nothing together than something apart.” It’s a sentiment that resolves that particular story, but it also summarises the sentiment of the entire book. In each story, the characters fail at what they set out to do. They’re disappointed. And yet their companionship and love of their friends turns each disappointment into a victory. Each failure becomes a triumph because they win each other’s company.

I’ve tried to avoid moralising. The only story which could be easily said to have a moral is The Hive, in which the bees initially reject their animal friends from coming to live in their hive because, “only bees live in hives.” At a glance, this story’s themes are diversity and inclusion. If anyone reads it that way, that’s perfectly fine. But it’s not quite what I intended. It’s true that only bees live in hives. And Betsy and Bon don’t change their mind because the decision was wrong. They change their minds because the decision didn’t suit them. Including their friends isn’t shown as right. It’s simply shown as better.

It’s not a book about rights and wrongs. It’s a gentle celebration; one of children who orientate themselves towards togetherness and joy in the face of unrealised goals and disappointment. It’s about the clumsy negotiations and compromises of loving relationships. It’s about where happiness truly is.

Why do you think we ‘are fascinated with stories. With how a nothing becomes a beginning and then a struggle and an end.’ In the context of that quote, ‘stories’ refers to the story of making something.

When someone has made something, we understand that at first no thing existed. Then there was an idea, and then a struggle of craft, time, doubt, and perseverance. And then a new thing exists. Even if we don’t know exactly how a thing was made, we have, until recently, assumed the struggle happened. And the struggle makes it a story. Now we have AI generated media that might dazzle us for a moment, but didn’t cost anyone anything. There was no struggle in the middle, and that makes it a bad story.

I believe people will seek out good stories because we like seeing people do difficult things. We don’t really care about a pig living safely in a brick house. But if we know that the pig had brothers who made their houses out of flimsier materials and were consequently eaten by a wolf, we’re enraptured. We want the struggle; we want the story. So the opportunity that artists now have is that their work has a long and interesting struggle that people are hungry to see. Their process is now part of their product. Perhaps the most important part.

In An Admiration of Fine Books you say ‘Writing books is an admiration of the world.’ This is such a gorgeous phrase, can you elaborate? When you find something delightful or wondrous, you give it your attention. I think it works the other way around, too. If you give something very careful attention, delight and wonder emerge. We pay attention to what we admire, and we come to admire what we pay attention to.

Writing a book requires a lot of attention. To finish it you need to either be driven by admiration from the beginning, or disciplined enough to find it along the way. And what do we write about? We write about the world. Each other. What we see and feel and face and wrestle with. You can’t spend so much time organising these things through language or paint and not appreciate them for their strangeness or beauty or pleasure or melancholy.

Wonderfully, you can make the same comment about reading. Like writing, reading also requires intense attention. And like writing, reading is either downstream from admiration or its wellspring.

On Illustrating

In How I Make a Picture, and why it Matters you say ‘I like seeing my mistakes and how I tweak ideas along the way, and ‘I like leaving small traces of mistakes.’ There are two places I talk about leaving mistakes: in my sketchbooks, and in the finished illustration.

In a sketchbook, working with pencil, my goal is to get ideas out quickly and recognise problems. It’s where the mistakes are supposed to live. Flicking through those pages is like looking at a GPS running tracker. It shows the journey.

The other place to leave mistakes is in the finished work. Perhaps mistakes isn’t quite the right word. Choosing not to correct imperfections might be a better way to put it. If a pencil line isn’t in the right place, I might smudge it out a little bit and leave it showing underneath or beside the correct line. If the colour strays outside the line or a brushstroke stands out, I don’t always fix it. In these instances, I find imperfections add texture, movement and spontaneity. It loosens the whole thing up.

You say ‘I like muted colours. I tend to gravitate towards browns, greens, yellows and red accents. Because I know what I like, I didn’t plan the colour palette beforehand; I just followed my instincts.’ Was this your process for illustrating Betsy & Bon? Yes at first, no at the end.

I do like muted colours. I like bright colours too, but I approach them with hesitation and prefer to build them up slowly. Too slowly, I’m sure many of my publishers would say. In fact, with only a few exceptions, I don’t think I’ve ever supplied artwork to a publisher without being told to brighten it up! And that was the case with Betsy & Bon. But now it’s done I love the colours, and I think the uncoated paper stock looks and feels fantastic.

Why are you ‘more comfortable drawing than painting’? I’ve been challenging myself to paint more and more and I’m hoping this comment will be untrue eventually. But yes, I’m more comfortable drawing. The simple reason is that I’m more familiar with the tools of drawing. Finding contours and shading with the precision of a pencil point is far less intimidating than the messy chaos of wet paint. I find painting takes more time to prepare and more effort to get right. Even when working digitally (where there is no wetness), I still find it a bit chaotic. It’s about defining the forms. Relying on lines is comfortable. Abandoning lines for value and colour and implied light is all a bit stressful.

I also wonder whether I prefer drawing because a drawing, even a finished one, still feels like it has somewhere to go. It’s like a question not completely answered. And to paint takes me into the territory of conclusion and finality. Irreversibility, even. A picture unfinished finishes in the imagination of the audience. Maybe there’s safety in that. Maybe, rightly or wrongly, I feel that a resolved painting – an answered question – reveals the limits of my craft in a way that drawing only suggests.

But that all said, I do enjoy painting. It’s a beautiful and meditative medium and forces me into a relationship with colour and form that I don’t have when drawing.

Finally

Is there an illustrator/writer working today whose works influenced you? I’m not sure I could name any contemporary authors or illustrators that influenced Betsy & Bon specifically. But generally speaking, there are many, many artists that influence and inspire my work. Shaun Tan, perhaps most of all. Júlia Sardà. Beatrice Alemagna. Brian Froud. Freya Blackwood. Mark Janssen. Britta Teckentrup. Sydney Smith. Dave McKean. Clive Hicks-Jenkins. Isabelle Arsenault. Gosh, I could go on. Stop me.

What was/were your favourite books as a child? Animalia and The Eleventh Hour by Graeme Base. Dinotopia by James Gurney. Gnomes by Wil Huygen. My dad also had lots of art books lying around. He had collections of Jan Sanders and Heath Robinson illustrations that I would spend a lot of time poring over. 

And

What are you working on now that we can look forward to? There’s a lot of new work on the way! I can’t give anything away yet. But I can say that I’ve never been busier.

Wonderful, I look forward to seeing your next book. Thank you, Simon,  for talking to StoryLinks.

Visit Simon’s website for more detailed insights into his philosophy and process.