From folk culture to modern British

A Folk Art revival is quietly inspiring artists and illustrators, but as De s McCannon discovers, Folk Art means more than drawing owls or men with beards. It has nothing to do with extreme right wing politics. The illustrators currently inspired by Folk Art are not only reshaping their idea of illustration, they are rethinking ideas of natio

Pattern and Pedagogy in Print: Art and Craft Education in the mid twentieth-century classroom

In this article I compare a set of early and mid-twentieth-century print publications supportive of the ‘new’ art teaching in schools. The educator Marion Richardson’s reflections on her use of pattern in the classroom in Art and the Child (1948) is considered alongside publications by artist-teachers such as Robin Tanner’s Children’s Work in Block Printing (1936) and Gwen White’s A World of Pattern (1957). The monthly publication Art and Craft Education first published in 1936 was a magazine for teachers of art which showcased the work being done in schools around Britain that were involved in the ‘new’ art instruction. Pattern-making in schools in these publications is positioned as a modular and constructivist form of learning encouraging multisensory and exploratory ways of looking at and making sense of the world. Ackerman (2004) outlining theories of constructivist models for learning stresses the need for children to be ‘builders of their own cognitive tools’, and I argue that the exploration of pattern offers multiple strategies for the child to explore their phenomenological experience of the world. Pattern-making is also presented as a democratic form of creativity and a means of introducing the concept of art into everyday life, inculcating an appreciation of well-made things in daily life. I argue that through the lens of this pedagogic print culture with this emphasis on the benefits of teaching pattern-making in schools a nostalgic and pastoral English arts and crafts sensibility can be seen meeting a modernist cultural agenda via psychological theories of child development, creating a distinctively egalitarian, child-centred and craft-led model for learning. Revisiting this moment in childrens’ education in Britain offers a timely insight into alternatives to the current educational landscape, with its emphasis on measuring pupil’s achievement and downgrading of creative subjects in the school curriculum

A History of Everyday Things in England: Illustrators of Mid-Twentieth-Century Social History Books

The illustrated books considered in this article present histories of everyday life and align with the genre of history writing that had existed at least since the nineteenth century, of women documenting the domestic sphere, challenging the hegemonic and dominant narratives of history and presenting ‘Englishness’ instead within the practices and objects of the everyday. The use of illustrations to evoke empathy, describe the detail of ordinary lives and offer graphic interpretations of data shows an engagement with the pedagogical possibilities of visual literacy in schoolbooks, allied to developments in the state school system at the time. The books demonstrate a variety of approaches towards the function of illustration in textbooks for children. These approaches include presenting ‘picturesque’ narratives, promoting imaginative empathy through the use of contempareneous visual source material, and encouraging critical thinking through pattern recognition in the assessment of information graphics. The article considers the visual mode in each book and maps its production onto social, political and ideological contexts of mid-twentieth-century England, offering feminist perspectives on the notion of history writing, scholarship and pedagogy

The Time-travelling Antiquarian: Illustrated Tourist Guides to North Wales from Pennant to Piper

This article seeks to examine the visual tropes of a specific genre of illustrated guidebook, originating in Thomas Pennant’s ‘extra-illustrated’ copy of his work A Tour in Wales published in stages between 1771–1776, and its legacy within twentieth-century depictions of the region. I would like to argue that illustration has contributed to a set of scopic practices and a social imaginary of the Welsh landscape, which are established with Pennant’s work and which endure into the twentieth century with the work of John Piper and the Shell Guides. There is an entanglement of time and space, of real and imaginary landscapes within these images, and I argue they represent a form of imaginative time travel. In addition to positioning the traveller in a particular place, the images also refer to particular spots of historical time. The practice of ‘extra illustration’ (sometimes called ‘Grangerisation’) through which the reader customizes their copy of a book also braids multiple temporalities into the reader/viewer experience of landscape. This is mediated by the nature of these extra illustrations, which are from disparate sources and historical contexts, appearing contiguously within the text. The depiction of the traveller in these images constructs and encourages the performance of a particular kind of touristic persona. The tourist is cast in the role of an eighteenth-century antiquarian – the amateur scholar seeking out archaeological remains, ruined buildings or ‘picturesque’ views, equally interested in collecting folklore as they are in historical fact, and engagingly non-specialist in their interest in a diverse range of subjects and approaches

The Jobbing Artist as Ethnographer: Documenting ‘Lore’

This article focuses on a set of scholarly books published during the period 1920–1960, written and illustrated by women who were also well-known artists and designers, which offer histories and taxonomies of ‘popular’ and ‘folk’ art. I would like to argue that their interest in popular and vernacular culture can be seen as a creative as well as scholarly engagement with the history of their own profession as ‘jobbing artists’ – the phrase Barbara Jones used to describe her wide-ranging and pragmatic creative output Jones was an illustrator of children’s books, a mural painter, as well as a curator, writer and documenter of popular taste. Enid Marx was a printmaker, illustrator and creator of patterned textiles, notably for the London Underground, and a lifelong collector and connoisseur of english folk art, and co-author of English Popular and Traditional Art with Margaret Lambert (1946). Dorothy Hartley was an illustrator, journalist, historian and scholar. They shared an interest in documenting rural crafts, the ‘Lost Worlds’ they represent, and the popular or ‘folk’ culture, which was translated into mass produced forms during the industrial revolution – ‘the things that people make for themselves or that are manufactured in their taste’ (Jones 1972: 5). The authors in question were effective communicators in several types of media, and worked as ‘cultural agents’ – whether creating contemporary visual culture or writing about the material culture of the past

Editorial

The facts are really not at all like fish on the fishmonger’s slab. They are like fish swimming about in a vast and sometimes inaccessible ocean; and what the historian catches will depend, partly on chance, but mainly on what part of the ocean he chooses to fish in and what tackle he chooses to use – these two factors being, of course, determined by the kind of fish he wants to catch. By and large, the historian will get the kind of facts he wants. History means interpretation. (Carr 1961) This second issue of the Journal of Illustration contains articles that are all engaged with the problemsinherent in writing histories – mapping the subject terrain, naming and claiming territories of knowledge, finding the tools to describe the field and interpret it productively. The scholarly scrutiny of what illustration is, its social and cultural significance, and the many forms in which it is manifest is still relatively new, and it is heartening to see networks emerging from within the humanities as well as art and design faculties,1 under the aegis of ‘print culture’. In the previous issue of the Journal ofIllustration we looked at the ways in which illustration could be seen as participating in a legacy of traditional popular art, rooted in pre-industrial, rural cultures, a functional, craft-based, artisanal and pragmatic art form. In this issue the idea of illustration is framed by the affordances of print, and ways of understanding the nexus of materiality, knowledge and print production, publishers, writers and audiences within which illustration operates

Editorial: Symposium Report: The Itinerant Illustrator, 18–19 December 2014

The Itinerant Illustrator was the guiding idea behind the 5th Illustration Research event hosted by Srishti Institute of Art, Design and Technology in Bangalore in November 2014, supported by The British Council, who provided travel grants for several of the speakers. Further partners were Intellect Books, Cardiff Metropolitan University and Manchester School of Art. As well as the two-day programme of talks, organized by Dr Sandeep Chandra Ashwath and Desdemona McCannon, there was an exhibition of contemporary illustration and animation at the college, curated by Anna Bhushan, Alison Byrne and Matt Lee, and a pop-up bookshop selling Indian picture books and printed materials. The students at Srishti undertook the branding and promotion of the event as part of their semester project. The event was well attended by an international audience, and speakers also delivered papers via Skype. We are grateful to the Director of Srishti, Dr Geetha Narayanan, for her generosity and support. Thanks must also go to Dr Ashwath for his role in ensuring the smooth running and conviviality of the event

Editorial

Illustration: ‘to illuminate’ – the throwing of light onto a subject matter through visual means shadows the history of ideas and holds a lens to the cultural conditions in which it is produced. In this issue of the journal there are wide-ranging ideas on the nature of the subject and discipline of illustration. This journal seeks to promote both writing about the subject and also hybrid and visualized forms of thinking through illustration. The remit of the journal is to consider historical and contemporarycontexts in which illustration can be observed and theoretical frameworks through which itcan be described and understood. In this issue there are articles that map historical trajectories and define modes for literary illustration, suggest taxonomies for forms of illustrative practice, and consider the phenomenological and epistemological nature of drawings for reportage and object based illustration

Editorial

Illustration is a rapidly evolving field with an excitingly broad scope. Despite its cultural significance and rich history, illustration has rarely been subject to deep academic scrutiny. The Journal of Illustration provides an international forum for scholarly research and investigation of a range of cultural, politi cal, philosophical, historical and contemporary issues in relation to illustration. The journal exists to encourage new critical writing on illustration, associated visual communication and the role of the illustrator as visualizer and facilitator in a wide variety of disciplines and professional contexts. We hope that the journal over time will extend critical discourse and methodologies for the inter disciplinary study of illustration, exploring issues surrounding illustration as a visual text, the poetics of illustration and the relationship between word and image. The Journal of Illustration wishes to promote writing about traditional and emerging formats for illustrators and the ways in which these technologies affect visual communication. The journal is also open to hybrid and experimental forms of writing, and intends to provide a platform for visual thinking and practice-based ‘visual essays’