Shaun Tan: Author Talk | Digital Season

Summary

In this engaging digital artist talk hosted by the Sydney Opera House, Shaun Tan shares insights into his journey as an author and illustrator with over 8,000 students from across Australia. Tan discusses his childhood influences, the creative process, and how themes like loneliness and difference are central to his work. He passionately explains how art can communicate complex ideas and emotions and highlights the significance of persistence and adaptability in creative careers. The talk is filled with warmth, humor, and profound takeaways, making it an enriching experience for aspiring artists and writers.

Highlights

• Shaun Tan emphasizes that everyone is an author from a young age, starting with simple drawings and stories. ✍️
• Inspiration can come from childhood favorites like Dr. Seuss or movies like E.T. 🎥
• Tan discusses the use of sketchbooks to capture and develop ideas for future projects. 📓
• He explores themes of loneliness and being different as they are universal and deeply personal. 🌌
• Tan shares insights on the importance of allowing stories to evolve naturally during the creative process. 🌀

Key Takeaways

• Art is a powerful tool for communication and can address serious world issues. 🌏
• Drawing and writing can help build connections and friendships. 🤝
• Creative ideas often start from personal experiences and childlike wonder. 🎨
• Books can be a safe way to explore personal feelings like loneliness. 📚
• Persistence and adaptability are crucial in overcoming creative challenges. 💪

Overview

Shaun Tan, celebrated author and illustrator, invites over 8,000 students into his world of creativity during a digital talk hosted by the Sydney Opera House. With the captivating charm of his storytelling, Tan takes us back to his childhood when simple acts of drawing and storytelling were his gateway to friendship and understanding the world around him.

Discussing the roots of inspiration and artistic expression, Tan candidly shares how childhood joys, like reading Dr. Seuss or imagining epic movies like Star Wars, planted seeds for his creative journey. He elaborates on how each drawing and story is an exploration of ideas, highlighting how themes such as loneliness are ever-present in both personal and societal spheres.

As Tan tackles the intricacies of a creative career, he encourages young artists to welcome flexibility and resilience. Sharing anecdotes of setbacks and triumphs, he emphasizes that the artistic path is filled with challenges that require persistence but ultimately lead to meaningful and rewarding connections with audiences worldwide.

Chapters

• 00:00 - 01:00: Introduction and Start of the Talk The chapter begins with an introduction by Jack, who welcomes over 8,000 students from across Australia to a digital artist talk. Jack expresses excitement about the nationwide participation, emphasizing the presence of students from every state and territory, all watching the talk live.
• 01:00 - 05:00: First Questions and Inspirations The chapter begins with a warm welcome to Sean Tam, who joins the discussion to share insights about his creative process. The session involves addressing questions from students who have submitted videos, aiming to explore what it means to be an artist. The chapter sets the stage for a thoughtful discourse on creativity.
• 05:00 - 09:00: Themes in Shaun Tan's Work The chapter discusses themes in Shaun Tan's work, beginning with his inspiration for becoming an author. It highlights that everyone is inherently an author, illustrating the natural inclination for children to write and draw from a young age, as Tan experienced with his early love for these activities.
• 09:00 - 14:30: Creative Process and Overcoming Blocks The chapter discusses the creative process and strategies to overcome creative blocks. It starts with a personal story about being good at drawing circles and learning to write, which was a bit delayed. However, once the narrator learned to read and write, they fully engaged with the creative process. Creating stories became an enjoyable activity. Furthermore, the narrator shares how drawing and writing skills helped in making friends during childhood, along with a knack for telling jokes and stories. This reflects the importance of creativity in social interactions and personal development.
• 14:30 - 18:00: Social and Historical Themes The chapter explores the author's early life experiences as a small child who was the only Asian kid in their class. This cultural and social uniqueness often left others uncertain of how to engage with the author. To navigate these social dynamics and build friendships, the author leveraged their skills in drawing and storytelling. These talents not only facilitated social acceptance but also paved the way for a future career as an author and illustrator. The chapter reveals how personal and cultural identity played a significant role in shaping the author's professional direction and social interactions.
• 18:00 - 25:00: Setbacks, Criticism, and Advice for Young Artists The chapter discusses the challenges faced by young artists, including setbacks and criticism. It emphasizes the importance of perseverance and finding inspiration in different sources. It suggests that inspiration can be fleeting but can be reignited by engaging with other stories and artworks. Additionally, the chapter offers encouragement to young artists to keep exploring and creating despite the difficulties.
• 25:00 - 31:00: Creating and Adapting "The Lost Thing" The chapter titled 'Creating and Adapting The Lost Thing' explores the creative inspiration and developmental process behind a project. The author reflects on how experiences from childhood, such as reading Dr. Seuss books, sparked their creativity and led them to create their own version of such imaginative tales, notably crafting 'The Blue Land of Noon' which included pop-ups. The narrative underscores a pattern where observing something captivating leads to creative endeavors.
• 31:00 - 35:00: Conclusion and Final Words of Advice The chapter concludes with a personal reflection on inspiration and creativity. The author reminisces about being inspired by movies like E.T. and Star Wars during their childhood. These films motivated the author to explore their own creative pursuits, such as directing films or creating stories with similar themes but original content. The essence of inspiration, as described, is being so moved by something that it compels one to create and emulate those experiences.

Shaun Tan: Author Talk | Digital Season Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 good afternoon everybody my name is jack and i would like to welcome you to this digital artist talk we have over 8,000 students joining us today which is very exciting and you were watching us from all over Australia when I say all over Australia I mean we have students from every single state and every single territory which is very very exciting and you are all watching us together live right here right now so
• 00:30 - 01:00 I would like to welcome each and every one of you and a very special welcome to Sean Tam hello thank you so much for joining us Sean thanks great to be here and all these students who are watching have sent us videos with questions about them and well watch the questions we'll hear answers and in doing so we'll learn a little bit about you your creative process what it means to be an artist does that sound good yeah great so we'll go to our first we're gonna start at the very beginning a very
• 01:00 - 01:30 good place to start and our first question is a video from Central West Leadership Academy okay what inspired me to become an author well the first thing to say is that everybody already is an author and as a kid I loved writing and drawing I think all kids do it's just a natural thing as soon as I could hold a crayon I was drawing something I think
• 01:30 - 02:00 circles was my I was very good at circles and as soon as I could write I wasn't actually I was quite late in learning to read but once I did you know you could read and write and realize you know what you could do with you know creating stories yeah I really engage with it and also as a kid I I made a lot of friends by being able to draw and write quite well and I was good at telling jokes and stories and you know
• 02:00 - 02:30 making things up one of the reasons for that is that I was a very small child I was also the only Asian kid in in my class in the area where I grew up and so I was kind of and be unusual and I guess kids didn't know what to make of me but if I could draw and tell stories I would make friends very quickly and and that might actually be one reason I became an author and illustrators that that for me was a way of making friends and being socially accepted but also I
• 02:30 - 03:00 really loved it I mean who doesn't love writing and drawing or at least listening to stories looking at pictures and if you can make them all the better thank you okay so now we have a question from st. Philomena in school in Morey New South Wales inspiration to start writing and why okay well there's a lot of different sources of inspiration and they come and go you know so you just sort of read
• 03:00 - 03:30 something and think oh that's amazing I'd love to do that I remember reading dr. Seuss books for instance and I would I just love the way they rhymed and I love that weird floppy fairy world strange things and and so I I wrote my own dr. Seuss book I was probably about ice it was called the blue land of noon and and I had little pop-ups and things and so typically what would happen when I was a kid is I would see something I really liked and my reaction has often
• 03:30 - 04:00 been at least if it's visual or a story I want to do something like that you know I even remember watching movies watching et which was a big movie when I was a kid and thinking I want to direct a film one day you know I want to do that so that's I guess that's what inspiration means it's when you're so affected by something that you want to do something like that yourself and I grew up with Star Wars and I was making little my own version of Star Wars you know as different world different storyline but similar ideas with writing
• 04:00 - 04:30 I think I only became really quite interested in writing stories around the age of 10 11 I mean and then so that's kind of a time when that creativity really kicks in I think it's a really good time to 1 2 to start doing creative work and I would read some books there was one called the tripod trilogy by John Kruse
• 04:30 - 05:00 surfer which was a science-fiction series and I was very inspired by that and I would write one that was like that it's not quite copying cuz I wasn't interested in copying stuff I just want to do something like that but in my own way and then later on I discovered a TV show called The Twilight Zone which was the old 1960s black-and-white TV show very strange weird stories sometimes quite frightening and with um with unhappy or peculiar endings and I really
• 05:00 - 05:30 loved that that just kind of clicked with me and so I started to write short stories that were in that vein and that led me into science fiction and I was reading a lot of science fiction short stories and I also came to realize writing at first it was just a fun thing to do but as I got older I realized oh you can actually say serious things about the world through writing and yeah when I was younger that hadn't occurred to me but when I was you know 11 and 12 and certainly as a teenager I realized
• 05:30 - 06:00 hey art is not just entertainment is how we communicate about problems and issues in the world what you were saying at the start when you were little and you would read and write and illustrate and you built social communicating as a building of community as well yeah well the basic impulse doing creative work is like I'm thinking this thing I'm seeing this thing are you seeing what I'm seeing you know it's like if a if a UFO lands in your backyard you don't just pull up a
• 06:00 - 06:30 chunk I only enjoy this yeah you run and grab someone to look at it even if you miss it yourself you'd rather see it with somebody else so it's really trying to just you know say are you seeing what I'm seeing you know are we both seeing this together and then have a discussion about it and say yeah it is both I love that it's both very private you can do it by yourself alone and but it can also be social because anyone's you got it right you can show it to somebody and so what do you think about that and what about when inspiration comes how do you
• 06:30 - 07:00 catch it what do you do do you just let it sit and filter or do you write it down or all manner of ways well as a as a I like to think of myself as a professional creative now I sort of you know I've been working long enough that I can call myself that you do that is a bit of a trick is is trying to remember things like if you have a good idea don't trust your brain to remember it also don't trust your brain to develop it you need to sort of work it out on on paper and well actually I keep
• 07:00 - 07:30 carry sketchbooks around they're all different shapes and sizes and I draw in them all the time and if I have an idea I will I'll sit down and I will draw different things I also if I see interesting pictures even if something on the internet I'll I'll cut them out and and be inspired by them so I actually actively look for inspiration
• 07:30 - 08:00 all over the place and collect things objects you know scraps of paper little notes I have lists in my iPhone like if I think of something I quickly write it down because I'm I'm gonna forget it later and later went on stuck for an idea and you got you know a writer's block which means when you can't think of anything or how does block your staring at a blank canvas as I don't know what to paint I go to my sketchbooks and I my lists
• 08:00 - 08:30 and I go home yeah that's right I remember that and then I I can start so um and I do bank yeah basically yeah like a like personal library of stuff wonderful so maybe you can all get some little scraps of things and tuck them away and keep them for inspiration when you have maybe a bit of writer's block so we're going to talk about things in your books you have a lot of very strong themes and I made an attempt Shawn at trying to summarize summarize most of them but I'm probably have left a lot of there are many many many each very
• 08:30 - 09:00 exciting and unique in its own way but some of the ones we see coming up a lot colonization immigration history journeys of life future and past loneliness imagination friendship and time I'm wondering if you Shawn are able to perhaps choose just I know it's so hard but just one theme that you enjoy exploring and tell us in a nutshell why you enjoy exploring thing yes it's kind of a bit difficult
• 09:00 - 09:30 all of those things actually overlap so they're often the same thing at the same time and you know where does loneliness and end in history begin and where does history and and and some other issue begin the first thing to say is that I don't pick a theme and and create work to that theme and I have tried doing that in the past and it's never worked no and so I'm going to you know might be
• 09:30 - 10:00 a bit motivated by a particular social issue like you know say environmental destruction or something come bad that somebody's done and gonna do a story about that for some reason it never works out the way I come up with stories is I just start with little funny ideas and I just keep thinking about them and then the themes come in afterwards so I don't sometimes even know what the theme is for instance with the last thing is this about a boy findings weird creature
• 10:00 - 10:30 on the beach and that in itself is nothing but when he decides I'm going to take it home and look after it okay you got all these problems and the whole time I'm doing on my own I just love the way this looks and feels but I don't know what it's about and then writing and drawing is a way of figuring that out and and other ideas come in so then there's a government department that sort of looks after things that don't belong but it's not a very good government department and the parents
• 10:30 - 11:00 don't pay any attention to the creature why it just felt right that they wouldn't and then I thought why why can't they see it what's going on so um it's a real journey of discovery but just to get back to your question I noticed that when I look at all the work together you know sometimes I'm going through the books and looking at my folio and a sketchbook so I realized that loneliness is a is a big theme and I'm not sure why one reason might be
• 11:00 - 11:30 that when you're a an artist or a writer you are working alone a lot and loneliness and sometimes creative depression is a common side effect of doing this kind of work like if you're you can be really creative and and really buzzing with ideas and then other times you feel very lonely and depressed and like oh what's the point of all this it's all a bit silly who wants to read these books that sort of thing these are
• 11:30 - 12:00 the depressive thoughts every artist I know has has these it's just like normal I've often used that those feelings as material for work so instead of thinking that's the opposite of creative work so all like with a book like the red tree why not make a book about that and you know yeah and sort of explore it since it's so familiar to me you know classical write about what you know and the other thing is I think there is a
• 12:00 - 12:30 lot of loneliness in the world and a lot of things that go unnoticed I'm also interested in characters that don't have a voice and giving them a voice so there's a lot of people in society that don't have the opportunity to speak or we don't notice for various reasons maybe they're shy maybe they're underprivileged maybe they're in a distant war-torn country and I'm interested in what let's hear from those people because we don't normally maybe hear from them and yeah and I think
• 12:30 - 13:00 loneliness and isolation is is something we always need to be mindful of because it's an ever-present issue for everybody both personally and then in a broader social situation and in the same way you say about the UFO landing and saying hey come and watch this with me sometimes it's it's not easy to say hey I feel sad do you feel it too so if you're in a nice little place with a book you can receive that the character feels the same way you do and that's a nice safe feeling yeah it's a book so a wonderful
• 13:00 - 13:30 world for exploring these issues too because it's quite private often when you read a book you're reading it by yourself you can read it with other people but there's a special relationship you have with the work and you're also very much involved especially with a picture book in creativity the creative act so you're right I like to create books where the reader has to invent the story and be personally very creative the book won't
• 13:30 - 14:00 make sense unless you participate and in doing that I think the reader is having a conversation with themselves maybe about their own loneliness and it's best to have a conversation with yourself sometimes about those issues in the same way that when I'm doing the book I'm having a conversation in the creation at the book yes like a conversation with myself about these issues and trying to resolve them and then I just past that that challenge or that invitation over
• 14:00 - 14:30 to somebody else okay so we have a question from Macquarie fields public school about history and social issues [Music] okay why did I choose to write books based on social and historical subjects it's an interesting question sometimes I've not chosen to but somebody else has suggested an idea and
• 14:30 - 15:00 at first I wasn't sure how to tackle that so one good example is the rabbits which is a it's a book about I'm sure you're familiar with it as it's about colonisation in Australian history and when I first received that text which was written by somebody else written by John Marsden who's a very interesting writer and very established writer and he'd created a very strange little story
• 15:00 - 15:30 at first I wasn't quite sure what to do with it I could see that it dealt with some social and historical and political issues and some of them are quite sensitive and with the possibility of even offending some people and my task as an illustrator was then to to think how can I make this accessible because it was dealing with really big issues and I had 32 pages to just sort of try and create a world that would explain what's going on and I decided you know
• 15:30 - 16:00 what I'm not going to explain it I'm going to make it even weirder than than the text I'm gonna create a world where it's almost like you've never seen anything before all these strange things happen some of it is magical some of its mysterious and some of its violent and quite horrifying and I'm just going to draw it as if you're having a dream and and then you wake up from the dream at the end you think what was that about so that's how I'm going to approach it so I sort of working in in both ways sometimes my stories start with a
• 16:00 - 16:30 dreamlike idea and it's it works its way towards a social historical issues such as immigration with the arrival the original idea for the book wasn't about immigrations it's about a man with a suitcase in a strange place and then by drawing that over and over again I realized maybe he's a migrant and then I started to do a bit more research and I just became very interested as a result of research in where did my family come from and what was it like for them you
• 16:30 - 17:00 know and why don't I do some drawings on that subject so that's that's a case where things move towards a certain theme in the case of the rabbits kind of went the other way starting with that theme and as John Marsden had already done he'd created he'd sort of talked about animals arriving in a strange land I thought okay I'm going to do something like that and and see where it goes and just be totally free and open minded and not thinking about it too much and yeah
• 17:00 - 17:30 he came up with this really strange book which has been translated all over the world including in countries where they know nothing about Australian history but they all understand the story and hugely popular in Mexico which is interesting because I think we've got parallel histories about in I got one group of people invading another place and then having to deal with the you know resolving the tensions that exist wow that's a great question thank you for that question
• 17:30 - 18:00 so we've talked a little bit about one of the things you're exploring being loneliness I want to ask you about exploring differences being the odd one out so we have one of my favorite characters Sean is Eric the exchange student who lives on the Petri and the lost thing and the socata we've mentioned both of those so not only do we have that experience of being the odd one out in those books with the creatures but as you mentioned in the arrival we have people as really really old people being in a new place and going through well that's like really really young babies being a new place going through what's up what that's like
• 18:00 - 18:30 across all ages everyone experiences this and I want to know well I do want to acknowledge that you somehow magically managed to celebrate that and honor and acknowledge how hard that is to go through how and why why do you explore it how do you do that what's that about I mean question yeah it's a really good question like you know I would I would even maybe argue that all stories are about people feeling different Harry
• 18:30 - 19:00 Potter you know Luke Skywalker in Star Wars I don't know Heidi the people are stalking all these stories are like about people who are fundamentally different and that's exciting you know but it's also very troubling and if you were if you are interested in being a writer and artists one thing that's good to know is that stories come from
• 19:00 - 19:30 problems okay so if you want a good story you set up a problem straight away and I can't think of any more common a problem than feeling that you're different from everybody else and and not knowing what to make of it and the truth is that that's what makes us interesting as people is that we're all really different but there's a lot of pressure in society to be cool to be popular to be the same to be successful all these ideas of what it is to be a
• 19:30 - 20:00 good person and I'm sort of interested in the fact that being a good person means being super unique you know and being really different because that's that's a one resource that you can offer that other people can't offer is your own weirdness you know and I've made a career out of it I guess is like saying I can I can think of some weird stuff which in in other situations could be actually quite embarrassing but maybe I can I can
• 20:00 - 20:30 do something with that and if I can work it into a story and in a way that might be appealing for other people also then then that would be interesting you know and I think the other thing is a theme that interests me is the idea of being honest about your own nature instead of trying to be something all the time to just sort of say hey I'm a I'm a foreign small foreign exchange student that
• 20:30 - 21:00 looks like a burnt leaf in the case of arrogant and that's just how it is and let's just you know I won't try and be anything else I just do things my own way and I hope that other people respect me for that rather than respect me for trying to be something that they want and I guess it's why do I do these stories as a young person as I'm sure you all know that you just have a lot of feelings of self-doubt and a lot of your
• 21:00 - 21:30 difficulties are about you know feeling isolated or the risk of being isolated and I don't know it's just a theme if you look at all your favorite movies and stories you'll see this theme again and again because it never goes away it's it's something that all through life there's this question of identity and who you are and where you belong and yeah it's something that also the act of writing and painting is almost perfectly set up to explore those ideas sitting
• 21:30 - 22:00 down alone in a room and having a having a think about where you belong is quite a good exercise okay so we have some questions about your creative process now we talked about the themes in art we've got a question from Land's about public school about the time it takes to write a book yeah horrible well I should break it
• 22:00 - 22:30 down I say to do say to paint one picture takes me about a week which is pretty good it can be anywhere from three days to a month but a week is about is about right and that's when I was about you know in primary school hold it that's crazy you know spending a whole week on one picture and I wouldn't have had the patience for it the most I would spend you know we don't say 10 11 12 is about one day that's a long time to spend on one picture but
• 22:30 - 23:00 basically it doesn't really matter for me the longest I've spent on a book is five years which was the arrival and that's just because it was such a it's got so many pages and so many things that I had to draw and drawing is very slow okay writing can be actually quite quick if you've got a lot of ideas and you can type reasonably fast you can write them out but I can just say you know there was a tiger in the jungle that's easy now to draw a picture though I'm gonna have to go away for a few yes I being an
• 23:00 - 23:30 illustrator it's a very slow way of telling a story and I'm here requires a great deal of patience the good news is that over the years I've become more and more patient so I used to only be able to sit down and draw for about an hour at a time and then I get sick of it now I can draw all day I don't you know I don't get sick of it that's just practice the quickest book I've ever done none of them are quickly the last thing was pretty quick because I was so unemployed I didn't have anything else to do not took that took me a whole year
• 23:30 - 24:00 and I know because I started it on the kitchen tables really hot sweltering day and so now what do I do I got no jobs I'll just write a story about we creature on a beach and send it to publish and see if they if they go for it and and then I really got into it and I finished it the following January it was sweltering yeah that's why the book looks like it's always a hot day okay we have another question about the
• 24:00 - 24:30 creative process and this one comes from scotch oak or even into pieces do you have the same problem and if you do how do you clip this yes so I would say I certainly have the same problem and and every creative person that is the problem of being a creative person is I
• 24:30 - 25:00 have an idea how can I get it out in the world so that other people can see it how can I make that UFO land in the backyard rather than just thinking about it well there's a few different ways to answer that question firstly the boring answer is hours and hours of practice you know if you want to learn to draw a horse you go draw about 500 horses and you'll become pretty good at it but that's a lot of paper and pencils and hours
• 25:00 - 25:30 I remember reading that you you need to spend if you spend 10,000 hours on a thing you become really good at it I don't think you have to spend quite that amount of time I reckon 5,000 hours but that's still a long time if you break it down into days so first of all having those technical skills and it's the same with playing a musical instrument you want to get to the point where you know the instruments so well you don't have to think about playing it you can just focus on that on the emotion or the idea and and your body just does it
• 25:30 - 26:00 automatically it's not that simple even when you're experienced and you're well-practiced and I find that even now I have an idea and and usually it's not very clear but sometimes it is nice go oh this would look great I want to paint it exactly like it is in my it never comes out that way I just can't do it and but I've learned not to worry about that I let it change and the process of painting and drawing and writing is not and people often make the mistake of
• 26:00 - 26:30 thinking you think something first and then you draw it no no it's it's like the drawing is the thinking so as you're as you're drawing something you draw something there to raise it draw it differently I mean that bird would look better as a lizard and you know what if it's doing this what if it's you know we'll make it running and what's it running from and until dark shadow over here that looks kind of like a cloud and and there's a storm and and then ideas just come and before you know it you're in a place that you didn't think of before and and
• 26:30 - 27:00 I've learned to trust that process like just believe that something good is going to happen if I just keep muddling along and and don't try and control it to motion the moment when I start going no this story is not going in the right direction and it needs to be important it needs to be good then the whole thing breaks down it's got to be it's really difficult but it has to be really playful all the time and the good thing about writing and drawing is no one's watching you while you do it so I do lots and lots of little drawings
• 27:00 - 27:30 I write lots of different things in a sketchbook and then I go through and I pick out the good bits and it's usually I would say rule of thumb is about 10% over the stuff that I do I think is really good and I'll take that 10% and I develop it more and then I'll take a 10% of that take it okay develop it more and see constantly growing like growing vegetables in a garden and getting him juicier and more colorful and there's a lot of revision and so on but yeah the
• 27:30 - 28:00 original idea is often very different from the final idea and the final idea is usually better and trusting that process as you say don't try and lock it in just just get going yes yeah and we know a big part of the creative process journey is arguably towards the end although it's never finished when you make that work and then it's time to release that into the world which can be very frightening but releasing out there gives it into the minds of many many people each of whom will hopefully have a different interpretation and so I
• 28:00 - 28:30 would like to know from you if there's I'm sure there's been many but if you could choose one thing that a reader or readers experiences of your art have shared with you that has surprised you you never thought when you release that art out there wow I never thought a person would feel X Y Zed yeah I'm all the time and and that's something that's just like really surprised me growing up as an as an artist is how everybody sees things really differently when I was younger I
• 28:30 - 29:00 thought you've got a message and an idea and you're trying to deliver that in a way that people understand almost like a preacher giving a sermon I've got something to say know what it is you need to know it too I'm going to impart the information to you and I've come to realize more and more just from people's reactions they're not even seeing the same thing I'm seeing but they're often getting the same emotional feeling okay
• 29:00 - 29:30 but the way that they think about it is differently it's because it one's different you might come from a different cultural background you might be a different sex like male or female that'll affect how you how you look at characters in a story you might have brothers and sisters you might be a child you might be an adult you might have experienced traumatic things you might not have and so different people react to things in different ways and I'm probably the book that's created the most diverse range of reactions is the red tree and mainly because there's
• 29:30 - 30:00 almost nothing in the book it's just a series of weird pictures they're not explained and it shows this sort of quite terrible things happening but they're they're kind of funny dreamlike terrible so not not really disturbing just so kind of a bit unsettling and so many different people have interpreted those images in different ways and and told me about their personal stories and what this this image reminds me of the time that this happened to me and some
• 30:00 - 30:30 people have said that it's actually saved their lives like at book signings have come up to me and said this they couldn't explain how but they said that the book has saved their life maybe they were so depressed that they thought there was no point in living and then they they read the book the book doesn't actually it's not meant to be therapeutic that was a real surprise also a number of psychiatrists were using the book and they wrote to me and and I was selling quite a few books it's in stacks to psychologists psychiatrists
• 30:30 - 31:00 and also some nurses in in a hospital in Sydney who are using it with the families of people with terminal cancer just to what how I think the books are used in that case is because the books don't really say anything and there's a lot of room for the reader to to just interpret a picture and talk about it people are able to talk about feelings that are hard to talk about if somebody says just says tell me how you feel I mean that's
• 31:00 - 31:30 quite a hard thing to do but if you've got a weird picture in front of you there's a little girl in a boat in this stormy sea sometimes a patient or just anybody can just look at that say I really relate to this image and it reminds me of this and it may it I feel this and this and then it starts a conversation so a book is just a beginning of a conversation but it's up to readers and other people to finish that off and if it is only inside someone's head and you say tell me how
• 31:30 - 32:00 you feel that that can be really overwhelming but as you say if it's already out there it's already a visual thing that they can point to and that leapfrogs them into is you're talking about something else it's much easy to talk about something else than to have to talk about yourself and I think that's the beauty of all books and paintings is you've got something over there that is that you're putting yourself into when you talk about but it feels again it's a safe environment and it's fun you know as those really becomes a fun thing to do so I just want
• 32:00 - 32:30 to know have some questions about the images in your work we know some of your influences they're contemporary Australian artists like Jeffrey smart John black Edward Hopper and you create images that are often very dreamlike and there's a word that we know called surrealism so I want to know two things one if possible in a sentence you if anyone's watching and you've never heard that word surrealism if you wouldn't mind defining that and telling us what it is about surrealism
• 32:30 - 33:00 that you like why why do you use it mm-hmm I will surrealism the short answer is surrealism is basically weirdness often it refers art that's a big dream like so things are very clear you know there's the objects and landscapes but they're there more from the world of dreams and reality and is a very fun place to work in because of course it opens the possibilities to anything you know and
• 33:00 - 33:30 another word that's used often is the subconscious so instead of the thoughts that you have you know you hear the voice in your head that's making thoughts it's the stuff that's beneath that it's like other ideas and feelings that sometimes are pretty hidden inside of you and they might come out in different ways you know they can come out when you're playing a game they can come out when you're singing or doing doing something that's a little bit different to what you would normally do for me right it's with writing and
• 33:30 - 34:00 drawing a lot of those ideas come out it's also a great way of communicating with other people to to sort of imagine that a story is a dream because everybody has dreams and we all kind of know what they are in fact there may be the first kind of fiction that we ever experience like fictional story is a dreams and where something's happening that sort of makes sense but it's not real and I don't actually use a lot of people think I use dreams as inspiration
• 34:00 - 34:30 for my work but I don't because I just don't remember them I wish I did but I don't remember them but I like the feeling of when I'm doing a painting aside this feels like a dream in that it's kind of real and I believe what's I really believe for a moment what's happening in the picture and that helps me to paint it is just I believe that there are these creatures here and weed landscapes but that it's I think there's a deeper like emotional truth there and and they're often things that are hard
• 34:30 - 35:00 to explain in words that's what I like about pictures you can paint a picture of something it's very difficult to wouldn't be able to find the right words for it and there's a certain kind of feeling and particularly feelings of weirdness and I don't know about you know everybody watching but I I feel feeling I feel that I'm weird all the time I feel that the world is weird you know it's not just me it's everybody else out in the world and I think nor normal things that that's an illusion
• 35:00 - 35:30 yeah the idea that everything's normal you're just forgetting how weird it is you know when you sit down and start drawing anything even the most ordinary object like an apple a glass of water start going man that's weak it's a weeping yeah words we say them over and over again that's about words actually we have what question a few questions about the words that you do or don't write you've mentioned sometimes there's an absence of words or very minimal words so the
• 35:30 - 36:00 first question about words comes to us from Macquarie fields public school actually I'll go to my question first and then we might throw to their video I have a question about words one of my favorite books can't choose a favorite but I love Sakata top top top and the hieroglyphics in the arrival I want to know how why you have these made-up words and languages or not and how do you decide on the sounds mmm huge question shot yeah the made-up
• 36:00 - 36:30 words was fun got to remember all words once upon a time were made up someone said I'm gonna call that a cow yeah they other person probably laughed I said that sounds stupid and then they everyone started using it start becoming normal and I love reminding myself that language is made up and and and then I've always
• 36:30 - 37:00 loved stories where people have imaginary words like dr. Seuss stories or you know even even other other books you know science fiction books where there's alien languages and The Hobbit with people speaking in elvish and so on it's just a reminder of how many possible worlds there can be and I like having words and also visual images that they're like symbols but they haven't had anything attached to them so for
• 37:00 - 37:30 instance the Tok Tok Tok sound that this kind of makes we don't know what that is and so I like that everybody's guessing including me like what's that sound was sighing you know is he saying something or what's going on a visual example is the red leaf in the red tree every picture has a little red leaf in it and I like the red leaf because it's not a symbol that necessarily means something already I'm always looking for little
• 37:30 - 38:00 images that don't have a meaning like if you had a four-leaf clover you can't use that because it's got a meaning already if you have a love heart can't use that even a flower is a little bit suggestive is like people have already added meanings to certain objects so more as a Sakata is a good one because I haven't really read that many stories about that particular insect and so it's a good call it an open symbol there's a symbol for something but we don't know what and words can be the same thing and
• 38:00 - 38:30 sometimes you can have a whole book like the arrival which is full of there's no words at all and it's just symbols but we don't know what they mean and and I think we're really hung up on meaning to be honest like people ask too often what does that mean forget about it you know just like just look at it and think well you know how does it make you feel I think about it more emotionally first instead of wanting to have an answer all the time I mean something like the red
• 38:30 - 39:00 tree as you say it has so few words and and that has had one of the biggest most diverse reactions because you've given that gift of make with it what you will yeah that's right and I've yeah as I was saying over the years I realize more and more that an artist doesn't tell people what to think and artists just give them a space to think their own thing and you step back a little bit away from the story so I don't I don't feel like I own any of those stories they're not really mine I just try and put things together so that they're working like you know
• 39:00 - 39:30 building a little robot and then once it starts walking by itself like I'm done you know it just goes off and whatever happens happens and yeah the book the book works because it can be interpreted in different ways and sometimes your books don't stay as books they change into other things so you've had stage productions of things like the red tree and the rabbits and one of your books the last the last thing became a movie
• 39:30 - 40:00 we have a question from Central West Leadership Academy about the lost thing becoming a movie did you ever expect the last thing to become a movie I thought about it I thought about it but I expect very few I've learned to expect very few things many are rarely disappointed but I thought about it because the last thing when I when I worked on that book for a
• 40:00 - 40:30 start when you're you choose to work in a particular medium that is the materials that you use or that are available for you to use you're quite limited always say if you're a musician it's hard to sort of show a visual thing okay if you're a if you're an illustrator it's hard to show movement you know because I my pictures are very still you know the medium is still and frozen so you're showing a frozen world and when I was doing the
• 40:30 - 41:00 last thing most of that it's it is about a frozen world it's about a world where nothing really changes where people are caught in this this city where on their just become terminally boring and and nothing can change and everything is static it's like the weather is always the same the lighting is the same and I did sort of when the creature came into the story I thought I'd is so good to see it move you know and I can suggest it a little bit like you can see its tentacles sort of if you've issued draw
• 41:00 - 41:30 them a certain way you can imply motion you know we're boys throwing Christmas decorations into its open organs you know you can sort of show things happening but you can't really realize that motion the other thing is sound as an illustrator even as a writer you can suggest sounds beacon actually make sounds that people can hear so the idea for turning it into a film actually came from a film production company they contacted me because they'd seen my book
• 41:30 - 42:00 at a book fair in Italy and it was a British production company originally and they said are you interested in turning this into the film and I said we actually yeah kind of because I always imagined you know I knew what sounds the creature maneet I mean I leave it to the audience to decide that I've got my own ideas and and that the atmosphere and all these things I've been thinking about I live with this world for a whole year so I kind of I really I really loved it and
• 42:00 - 42:30 we did a few little tests I worked with some other digital Alex because I actually don't know how to do many things I know how to paint and draw and write that's about it and technically I'm not very skilled and I don't actually have any formal technical training in illustration I've just learnt by looking at things and and doing them and doing our classes at high school and so on so computer animation it's real mystery to me even now but fortunately I was working with some extremely talented artists who work in
• 42:30 - 43:00 digital media and we were able to work together and so the resulting film is it's a lot of people's ideas it's not just mine and I think it's a better product because of that you know that they brought their own expertise and ideas about how the last thing would move kind of a bit like an elephant and the sounds that would make this you know Foley and sound artists who use different objects to make noises that they record and then you put over the film and it has this magical effect of bringing it to life so yeah it was a
• 43:00 - 43:30 fascinating process long it was 10 years from the first conception working on that when all those imaginations come together to create something would take a long time everyone would have such yeah it's very slow patience is the big thing with with creative work just being really patient and also doing things over and over again which can actually
• 43:30 - 44:00 drive some people crazy I just have a certain personality type where I like doing like drawing the same thing over and over and over again until I get it right and yeah I've been lucky to meet other people who have a similar illness but they like to draw things and and work on things until we get it right but yeah once once it comes together it's very magical and you don't see any of the difficulties all you have is a and it's the closest thing to a real dream is is
• 44:00 - 44:30 a is a nice short film set in an imaginary world we do have a little clip of the last thing for you to watch so we'll watch that right now
• 44:30 - 45:00 hello [Music] [Music]
• 45:00 - 45:30 [Music] do they go you got to see a little bit of a snippet of the last thing that Sean was talking about and the last thing
• 45:30 - 46:00 actually we touched on the beginning one you a very big award called an Academy Award I would like to know a little bit about what that was like getting that award from the time you were nominated through to standing up on that stage accepting that big award in front of all those people what was that experience from Justin Timberlake he had to shake my incredibly sweaty hand I'm so nervous [Music] that's the main thing I remember about is nerve-wracking because as a I'm quite
• 46:00 - 46:30 a shy person you know I'm not extroverted that's why I like writing and drawing because I can talk to people without having to meet them so it's quite an interesting thing to then go into the film world and it's a very social medium you know and before that going to screenings that's the first time I'd seen my work projected on the screen and hearing people react to it as it's happening so it's very much about audience reactions and you know like a social environment and then the whole Oscar
• 46:30 - 47:00 event is a bit strange the good thing was that we were a team so it wasn't me winning an Oscar it was our film and so we were there as a team and I was just representing the team so that was really nice and also representing Australia you know and representing you know Perth in Melbourne which is two places where the film was made and actually the film was made like really small studios so with very few people and so I was kind of we're very proud that we had made a we thought what we thought
• 47:00 - 47:30 was a good film that said the first two film festivals we entered into it was rejected so that was really disappointing we thought huh we're deluded nobody likes our films sounds really strange to then people gradually liked it more and more and then you know was longlisted for an Oscar there's a lot of film skits in and they cut that list and we're still on and they cut it to nominations and we're still on I realized why I guess we'd better go to LA you know just in case yeah first time
• 47:30 - 48:00 I want exceed I've seen some high school ball and yeah we were all went over there we were kind of joking about it because we thought it has just so we're up against Pixar and these other big studios with huge production teams and I remember when they said you know and the winner is I lost see I did my first list this is ridiculous it has gone too far sweaty shaking just yeah yeah and then
• 48:00 - 48:30 it was just like I just trying to represent the filmmakers you know and just to really make sure that they got the due credit and everything so which is quite new if I can go remember all those names and I mean but yeah it's really interesting but really the best thing about it was meeting the other filmmakers there and they were it was a very warm friendly environment I have to say going to the Oscars I didn't expect it very funny there's people a lot of people there who
• 48:30 - 49:00 love film they're all film dudes I realized people who tear up at the Oscars yeah it just had a good time chatting with them meeting the other animators also other quite shy people who loved drawing and writing and yeah that's one of the best things actually I would say about being in the hardest and following my my passions is I've met other people who were just like me which I'd never realized those people existed when I was a kid I was though I guess I'm the only one who who likes these weird things and and now I realize
• 49:00 - 49:30 there's dozens of us there's dozens everyone's weird we tell that said it before no one's know we're all weird just don't want to admit it okay we only have time for a couple of more questions so I do have a question and from Greenacre public school about just one last question about your career something tough about your career so let's hear from Greenacre public school hi my name is Bonnie and
• 49:30 - 50:00 I'm from go public - and my question is have you had any scary setbacks oh yes I have had career setbacks it's pretty you don't have a career if you haven't had career setbacks and hopefully they they make you stronger rather than making you weaker I guess you know I've had a lot of work rejected what's the first thing to say you know when you when you're a writer in an illustrator you're kind of
• 50:00 - 50:30 not employed by anybody you just make stuff you send it out and you hope that publishers will like it and in it the early part of my career was very hard I was actually just as good a drawer and writer as I am now I think but it was it was very difficult to get people to understand the kind of worlds that I was interested in creating my solution was basically just to keep doing it and and also talked to people who had experienced similar issues and were
• 50:30 - 51:00 like-minded and and be part of a community so early on I was I was part of a small Australian community of science fiction writers and illustrators and I think we really supported each other and I actually had my first work published in in little magazines that we did and so I started very small and and you know and I haven't had big setbacks but there's been lots of little ones and it's just my little highlights little setbacks highlights that back highlights okay just keep doing it yeah the biggest
• 51:00 - 51:30 setback always is self-doubt when your creative person you always if you're sensitive you will feel depressed about your work quite often and even when it's actually really good you still feel it's bad it's just something that happens and a lot of people stopped making art because of that they said I can't I'm no good I'm not an artist this person so much better than me I can't do it well though you know those people then don't become is as simple as that
• 51:30 - 52:00 so the people who succeed are the ones who just keep going and basically great keep going if you are thinking of being an artist like she once said at the start just get going you want not always fun if you can keep doing it when it stops being fun then your real artist well I do have one lucky last question to sign us off it's from Lance valve public school about a bit of advice we'll go to that video now how do you deal with criticism ah yes criticism first thing I how main
• 52:00 - 52:30 way I deal with criticism is I go out of my way to avoid it and what I mean by that is when I'm working on something like privately like in my sketchbooks and developing a book and I draw it many many times I don't show many people you know I will maybe show my editor as someone I trust that works at the publishing company I'll maybe show my wife who's also an artist and whose judgment I trust and maybe I'll show you you know one or two other friends I'm very careful about what I showed to
• 52:30 - 53:00 people because I want to make up my mind first you know I want to decide what's good and bad before other people do that and once I've worked on something for long enough I've actually already made those decisions like I know it's not perfect I know which bits are good and which bits are not so good and when it goes out and some people you know and I've had pretty bad criticism of my work I don't care that much anymore because I'm already happy with it so the other
• 53:00 - 53:30 thing is is always think about who is the person doing the criticism because often those people are lousy lousy artists I have to say I always say you know you go and do something then you know if you if you criticize me you do something better then and maybe sometimes they do and I have fair enough yeah I think it's very easy to especially in the internet age it's very easy for people to flippantly criticize something and without giving reasons
• 53:30 - 54:00 that's when they just say I didn't like it but why you always got to give reasons but you I mean some criticism is useful but it's going to be from a trusted person like a teacher who you really trust a parent that you know you really trust and and parents opinions aren't always that good you know because they sometimes they say things are too nice when they're not actually so or a friend you know some friend who really understands understands you and well very very quickly as our last little
• 54:00 - 54:30 thing that I would like to ask you we only have the tiniest bit of time if you had one piece of advice for those watching today what would that be one piece of advice well some of you may want to become artists and writers and you're probably watching really interesting ly know what I have to do it's so different for every person the world is always changing so you know when I started working there were no computers you know so everything's different now and I've had to learn and adapt the main thing is to be
• 54:30 - 55:00 open-minded to just be adaptable know this that your work is going to change you you are going to change your ideas are going to change and basically to be persistent and I guess you may not remember much from what I'm saying today but if there's one thing I or two things I'd like you to remember firstly you should start something try and finish it that'll really help you a lot in in learning how to do things it actually finish your painting your drawing your
• 55:00 - 55:30 story just finish it and that's what's got me through a lot of things and the second thing is expect to be depressed about your own work I think so many my friends in high school who have really talented artists they stopped being artists because they believed that their work was no good they didn't give it time to develop it's got to have time to develop and and expect to be disappointed by what you do once you expect it and you know it's normal to be disappointed by by bad art or that you
• 55:30 - 56:00 do then you just keep going and doing more good arts so you know I think that's that's the best bit of advice I can give that would would help a potential young artist thank you very much and thank you everyone for joining us today we've had such a wonderful time we've learned such a great deal about Sean about his career from the start to now and especially importantly we've learned different ways we can each be artists in our own way which is so so important so thank you very much to Sean for joining us today
• 56:00 - 56:30 I'm sure everyone is clapping very loudly the whole country is probably shaking and thank you each and every one of you who's joined us today we hope you've had a really lovely time and get drawing get painting finish them listen to Sean and we'll be next time you