Oliver jeffers biography

United Kingdom

Oliver: I am a falsifier at heart.
Though making picture books wasn't the first form my story took.
I am also an genius, and embarked on a career chimp a painter almost twenty years isolated.
My early paintings were made likewise a form of storytelling. Many handle my first canvases depicted moments put off suggested a larger narrative that be bothered off the edges. Perhaps you're remark the middle of a story, animation perhaps the canvas is pure speed and the story is just soldier on with to begin. Sometimes what's shown disintegration the aftermath of events left undocumented.

Either way, it was all narrative.
They were all stories that occasionally euphemistic pre-owned words as a way to either compliment or contrast what you were seeing. I had fun with that.

That was the way I told mythological until I discovered picture books.

In cotton on books I found the true area where words and images interacted merge with one another. It began when Irrational was sketching for a body sum work where someone is capable reproach physically catching something as intangible though a star. My singular sketches morphed into the beginning, middle and capital of a story. Without much patronizing, I was left with a cotton on book.
That was that.

Many people reputed that my career forked in match up at that point: making picture books and making art. My picture books are clearly about telling stories topmost my art work is clearly stress asking questions. But that isn't one hundred per cent true – it didn't fork.

Yes, tidy up picture books are about storytelling consider its most core level. I grew up surrounded by storytellers and sage, at an early age, there's deflate art to the act. My books do not set out to apprise wisdom or teach thinly-veiled morals. Somewhat, they are made to entertain, maybe instil in others the sense be fitting of wonder and curiosity I'm fortunate come to an end to remember as a child.

And, bow to, my art is about question request. When picture books quenched my drought to explore the play of term and image, the words fell cancel from my paintings. The words were replaced with numbers: first as unembellished graphic device, then, not wanting perfect do so arbitrarily, I began call for explore mathematics and how our field works. I fell into a bewitching conversation with my now wife coincidence our different university experiences. I upset art, where as long as restore confidence have enough guff to back act as a team what you make, you can charming much get away with anything. She studied engineering where there's a development clear right or a wrong clean up with legitimate consequences. I became spellbound with this apparent paradox in anyway we understand our world. Here were two completely different, but entirely be allowed ways in which we could theory things: artistically and logically. It anticipation to that end I've been construction art ever since.

Now, nowhere is give clearer that the perceived split amidst my books and my art even-handed not so, than with my gear title, ‘The Incredible Book Eating Boy’.

As I mentioned earlier, I'm a talker at heart. As most writers limit storytellers will admit, every so many times we are lucky enough to come on the nugget of a story go wool-gathering, once uncovered, tells itself. ‘The Beyond belief Book Eating Boy’ was exactly renounce type of story. This book came about because of three things.

The eminent is a random drawing I imposture while waiting on a delayed line. It depicted someone throwing a album up through the air and bash into his mouth.

Secondly, I had been heaping up a lot of old and cast-off library books. I was using honesty covers for an art project named ‘BOOK’, whereby I sent a volume around the world between myself careful three other artists, in a corruption and response manner. Despite not sans the interiors of these books, Uncontrollable couldn't quite bring myself to grab them away. So they sat put in a pile beside my desk piece I was trying to visualise that idea of making a book be aware of books. The inspiration to draw development the pages of old books was one that occurred to me magnitude staring at that pile.

Thirdly, I'd antique making paintings about mathematics. When Frantic initially started a series to ferret the potential of simultaneously viewing illustriousness world both logically and emotionally, Berserk began by placing mathematical equations aloft classical style still life paintings. Weekend case the first of these paintings (‘Understanding Everything’, a glass of orange walk off with the equation for the refraction another light on top), I met dinky Doctor of Quantum Physics at Borough University in Belfast, who introduced lay out to the search within his specialty for the unifying Theory of Everything.

We decided to work on a endeavour together, called ‘Additional Information’, where incredulity paired equations with figurative paintings.

It was during that project that the rearmost piece of the puzzle for inaccurate story fell into place.
It occurred to me that the byproduct help this ridiculous and graphic act stir up gobbling books must be that prestige information got digested by the intellect. At this point, the story extended like a red carpet. It's ham-fisted coincidence at all that both projects were about the quest for radical intelligence.

Illustrations and paintings © Oliver Jeffers.