3 Questions with reference to Laurence Zeegan

Burkina Faso for Oxfam and The Guardian 05-12-2012

 

How do we define Illustration?
What makes good Illustration?
What can Illustration do?

With reference to Laurence Zeegan’s 2012 ‘Where is the content? Where is the comment?’ and his 2010 ‘Computer Arts 0174 Illustration Now!’

Ian Bray – Oxfam’s senior press officer contacted Olivier Kugler to ask if he would be interested in doing a series of drawings highlighting the food crisis in the Sahel Zone. Kugler spent a week in Burkina Faso, travelling gathering reference material including photos, sketches and interviews. From this he created a 5 page series of drawings that were published in the Guardians G2 suppliment as a visual report of the 2million people at risk of hunger in Sahel. Oxfam aimed to raise 66 million pounds for food and clean water as part of their ‘Food Crisis in Sahel’ appeal.

Laurence Zeegan boasted in 2010 that the purpose of illustration was to ‘communicate, persuade, inform, educate and entertain with clarity, vision and style.’  The reason I chose Olivier Kugler’s work is because it is aesthetically and visually pleasing, it draws you in to the characters and the scene that he sets; but as you begin to read the text he creates a narrative of the life of the characters involved with purpose to persuade, inform, educate and communicate his concept. As a reportage illustrator Kugler is most successful because his lines are simple, layered, his compositions are very well thought out as well as blocks of colour where necessary. You could almost call him a journalist, in the way that he travels gathers his evidence and feeds it back to us as an audience.

What I like most about illustration is that we are able to communicate a message with our understanding of the circumstance, depicting a concept and creating emotion in the viewers. What I think Kugler does best is creating a sense of narrative and personality to the characters that he is interviewing so we get a real sense of the struggle, which enforces emotion in us and pushes us to act and help. Oxfam and The Guardian clearly felt he was successful at this also. Kugler is certainly not ‘so entrenched in navel-gazing and self-authorship’ he is not making art for arts sake, he is not creating work that will just ‘take pride of place on the coffee table’ but rather to try and help change the world. In 2012 Zeegan described illustrators as creating work that was ‘all about the materials, rather than the message. All about the quantity rather than the quality.’ As if they had been sucked into a world of commercial art and this coffee shop culture that sits back, self-absorbed, letting the world pass them by and doing nothing to make a stand.

 I definitely feel that Kugler’s work speaks for itself that Zeegan could not be more wrong. Illustration is not simply a drawing. I do not draw simply because I want to make a nice drawing that will sit under my bed and be forgotten about. I am drawing for a purpose, to communicate something, to work towards a brief and display a message, a narrative.  Kugler is not replicating what he see’s infront of him but rather selectively picking out the bits that he feels will be most engaging and reflect the concept and layering them together with text. If the Guardian just wanted images that were ‘function following form’ they would hire a photographer.