Illustration by Edward Gorey for the Gashleycrumb Tinies

I was thinking about the influences in our lives and how they subtly push us in specific directions and away from others. So I made a list of the illustrators who had influenced me, or, as I came to suspect, I was drawn to because their work resonated with me. After that initial interest, of course, their work further reinforced the part of me that was open to them from the start. Influence is a tricky thing that way. We are pulled to something through our own interest in it as well as its own inherent pull, in the way that compatible magnets work on each other. The expression “drawn to” is revealing in itself: We are drawn in as we are redrawn, remade in our own image but even more so.

So here is who draws me in:

1. Charles Schulz. Not just his big-headed characters but their loneliness and powerlessness which come through as much from the words as the sparse landscapes and simple lines.

Peanuts comic by Charles Schulz

2. Edward Gorey and Gustave Doré for their faithfulness to and, in fact, fascination with danger, especially of childhood.

Gustav Dore's illustration for Little Red Riding Hood, Les Contes de Perrault, 1867.

3. Garth Williams for his rich characterization achieved often through simple line drawings.

Garth Williams's illustration for Farmer Boy by Laura Ingalls Wilder

It’s like drawing. When you draw you’re not rendering an exact likeness; that would just be pointless since a camera can always do that better anyway. Instead, you’re rendering an impression that’s rooted in the artist and in the moment the impression is made. So that’s a distinction between two types of reading and a related one between two methods of generating art. But reading about Goya has led me to think briefly about distinctions between his Caprichos and his painted portraits and then, by extension, to think about whether Goya was more of a painter or an illustrator, and next to consider whether Goya was more of an illustrator than other Spanish painters, and finally to consider if there is any meaningful difference between those two words anyway.

I wanted to make my musings a little more concrete so I compared Goya with the other two well-known artists to come out of pre-contemporary Spain: Diego Velázquez and Domenicos Theotokopoulos, or El Greco, the Greek. (I didn’t bother with Murillo or Ribera or Coello in the interest of keeping things simple.)

Vulcan's Forge (Diego Velázquez, 1630)

When I think of Velázquez I imagine great sweeping canvases masterfully composed, with vibrant colors offset against swooping black shapes. I think of spotlit subject matter, the way the torsos of Bacchus and Vulcan are lit up by some unknown magnificent source. Velázquez tells  you where to look and even lights it up for you. The words that come up for me in relation to his work are (a) perfect, (b) vibrant, and (c) controlled.

La Agoria en el Jardín (El Greco, 1590)

The word I get for El Greco is motion. His paintings even make your eyes move with them. The figures stretch and reach. His brush stroke is long and fluid. The movement gives these paintings a freedom and looseness you don’t see in Velázquez, but El Greco shares with that painter a love of rich color, a commitment to composition, and an enjoyment of paint. In the case of both of these great painters you feel that they are working to commemorate the spirit of a moment or event in paint. You are moved by the historical or religious context that the painter consciously evokes.

Detail of Dome of San Antonio de la Florida (Francisco Goya, 1798)

I can’t say that about Goya. When I look at his work, I am thinking mostly about the people in it. His populist approach was in keeping with the time period–he painted about a century later than El Greco and Velázquez–which coincided with the end of the Enlightenment. Through painting and drawing and etching, Goya was telling the story of the people in his work. When he painted the dome of the Church of San Antonio de la Florida with the story of St. Anthony’s miracle, he didn’t approach it as his predecessors might have, emphasizing the miracle and its meaning. Instead, he painted the people who were witnessing it and participating in it. The emphasis is on their varied, believable reactions. His brush strokes, even as they are looser and more “impressionistic” than those of Velázquez, are used in the service of conveying the realness of their clothes or their gestures or their facial expressions. He even adds a faux railing around the dome to give the people in the painting something to lean against, something to keep them from falling into the laps of the viewers below.

Shootings on Third of May (Goya, 1808)

Even when Goya is painting a historical event, such as the executions in The Third of May, what we are presented with is not the emotion of the experience in a grand, highly composed painting, the intention of which is to make us have the appropriate human response to a particular war. Instead, we are looking into the face of a specific man who is just about to die.

And that difference between Goya and the other two Spanish masters is the one that I was detecting unconsciously I believe when I thought the word illustration. Because when we are illustrating a story we are often approaching the task of painting or drawing differently than when depicting an event or a mood. When illustrating, I at least am thinking about the people or the animals or the trees in the story. I’m thinking about the specifics of their experience, their story, and not directly the larger implications on the human timeline, even if that is the context within which I am responding to the characters, even if that is the subconscious conversation I am having with art or history or literature. My focus is on so and so sitting in that chair.

I am unconcerned about medium in this analysis. I am unconcerned with subject matter. What I am talking about is the artist’s focus, what each of these three men was really looking at on the canvas or the copper plate. The differences among them certainly have a great deal to do with when they came along. But you could also say that had Goya, with his particular skill in what I am calling illustration, come around earlier, he might not have been appreciated the way he was later at a time when so much of what had seemed reasonable and orderly and in keeping with the desired, natural progression of humanity was beginning to fall apart. And even he with the publication of his Caprichos (my book rather dramatically calls them “Chilling Scenes from a Private Hell”) took a beating of sorts, failing to sell many of the quantity he produced despite the low price and his high standing. Through and through, Goya, masterful painter, was an illustrator, interested in the story of the person facing him and his canvas.

But I’m interested in a different matter, which is to capture animal emotions when drawing for children, the ones who are most clued in to the truth about animal emotions. So how to draw animal emotions? Although animals clearly emote, many do so in ways that are quite different from our human methods. Take the inscrutable rabbit, for example. If you watch a rabbit for a while you will see that her facial expression rarely changes in a way recognizable to a human. But she will offer plenty of other emotion cues:

• Her eyes will glass over and her ears will lay back if she is relaxing.
• Her nose will twitch rapidly if she is trying to ascertain what you are about or where that smell is coming from.
• She will begin honking if she finds you upsetting or exciting.
• She will yawn if she is tired.
• She may nip you if she wants your attention or finds you annoying.
• She will begin doing wild happy hops if she is feeling joyful.
• She will stand up on her hind legs if she is curious or on the lookout.

These cues (with the exception of sound cues) are easy enough to capture in a drawing. A rabbit’s ears alone can convey a range of emotions. Many people know how to read the body language of dogs and cats, and so we can figure out easily enough that if we draw a dog with its eyes closed and its tongue hanging out, we convey calmness and happiness. And simply drawing a cat’s face head-on with round eyes will suggest his intent to pounce.

But even if a person looking at such drawings knows nothing about the emotions or the means of expression of the particular type of animal being portrayed, a basic instinct kicks in and the viewer understands immediately what the animal is feeling. (Conduct an experiment if you need to collect data on this.)