Has the Boomerang come back?
In 2010 I bought my first dSLR camera and set out in pursuit of a career in photography. I wanted to be a music photographer so did what you did back then, I put a shout out on MySpace for a band to do a long-term project with. In the end I worked with two bands for a year each running consecutively.
One of the bands, The Good Ship Band, had a song I absolutely loved entitled Boomerang Girl and between us we decided to do a photo sequence of stills to bring it to live visually. I wrote up the story and frame by frame breakdown based on my interpretation. I turned out what I thought the song was about wasn’t the same as how the guys wrote it but they liked my version so we ran with it. It was way to ambitious a project for someone with such little experience but the naivety somehow stopped me overthinking the outcome and over the course of a couple of days we managed to complete it. It ended up as a photobook and a ‘video’ promotion. We never hit the heady heights of fame and fortune but I loved doing it.
So what’s that got to do with illustration and where I am now?
Bear with me and my train of thought. For a while I’ve been wrestling with introducing narrative into my work. I’ve been looking for lightbulbs or unicorns but no luck yet. I have dived into some graphic novels and whilst they were close, no answers. I think though I may have been asking the wrong questions.
However through a chance encounter in Cornwall last week, I met a graduate of Falmouth University class of ‘24 who told me they were taking a year to develop their portfolio before returning to do a Masters in Authorial Practice I had no real idea of what that was so now I’m back home I’ve been doing some research around it. In short, authorial illustration involves expressing your own voice as opposed to being a pencil or camera for hire fulfilling someone else’s brief.
Without knowing it, I think this is the explanation I have been looking for. In my illustration and my photography before it, I always struggled with the lack of Why. Why was I doing this ? What was it for ? Why did I want to make that portrait? Why do I want to draw that house / person / place. In short, I couldn’t find my connection to the task. Coming back to asking the wrong question, I have continually looked at the ‘how’ people do things as a potential answer. I am now coming round to thinking the how matters so much less than the why. I still have some more reading to do around this but maybe I was coming at it the wrong way round for me. I was, and continue to make, records of things, people and places and never managed to find that satisfaction I found in Boomerang Girl. Is that because with BG, I expressed my own narrative from start to finish? Do I need to write and draw my own work, express my own viewpoints, stories, narratives?
This is still a work in progress and right now I am reading ‘The Authorial Illustrator; 10 year of the Falmouth Illustration Forum’ which is really opening my eyes wide as to the potential scope and so much more further research into authorial illustrators that have gone before. I’ll come back with my thoughts on this book a little later once I’ve read it.
But to come back to the title of the piece. Was I on the right path nearly 15 years ago and due to lack of confidence in being able to do it again, got lost going down a 1000 rabbit holes that have only now led me back to where I started.
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