Making the Unbelievable, Believable: Magical and Fictional Worlds in Visual Art. On the nature of fiction and belief, and how it is the often almost imperceptible details that help us make the leap that lodges a fictional space in our minds. 'In the Victoria and Albert Museum there is a medieval sculpture of an angel, and the tunic dress has slits embroidered around the edges where the wings come out. Now that is a true angel. It's like when snow is painted, it has to embody real snow to be believable.' We think of the snow in Pauline Bayenes' illustrations for CS Lewis's Narnia series, and the way a single slash of black on white implied a deep, crisp coldness. From the link, talking about the Disneyfication of Winnie the Poo: 'The tiniest marks do an enormous amount of work in terms of giving you an emotional and unconditional love for one of those characters in the original drawings.'

The debate also mentions the Magic Pencil exhibition, a British Council initiative from a few years ago to bolster the international presence of the country's children's illustrators. So much of our mental landscape is shaped by illustration, specifically illustration for children's books, spaces that are created when the mind is primed to store imagery.

Below we reproduce a short piece from things 9 on an exhibition held a decade ago at the Prince of Wales' Institute of Architecture, back when it lurked on the edge of Regents' Park. As well as Baynes, the exhibition included work by Tove Jansson and Maurice Sendak.

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Children's books are occasional spaces, exotic locations that do not have the familiarity of our own homes and rooms. But how does children's literature portray the house? Can it simultaneously provide both familiarity and exoticism in that most familiar space? Alan Power's eclectic exhibition at the Prince of Wales' Institute of Architecture is a comprehensive picture of the role of the house in children's books, illustrating many literary locations. From the original artwork for Lewis Carroll's Alice, through the elaborate architecture and world of the Moomins to the post-psychedelic fantasies of today's sophisticated illustrators, there is something from everyone's past on display.

For children, the spaces described in these books have the same physical resonance and psychic presence as those infrequently visited physical spaces which seeped into the consciousness as 'special places' - like grandparent's houses, with their attics, cellars, hidden spaces and history. My own grandparents lived in a small, 1930s house in the suburbs of Bath, traditionally styled but with a strange pebble-dash and concrete finish. Even the house's name, Greenways, had the mysterious aura of, say, the House at Green Knowe, Lucy Boston meets Narnia. Elements of adventure abounded; a dusty, child-sized attic, bare save for boards and mote-filled streams of light from a single tiny window. My grandfather's workshop, a remote eyrie festooned with tools, was circumnavigated by a miniature railway, which whirred around at head height whilst he worked. The garden's rampaging herbaceous borders towered above children, becoming a maze of secret passages and hedgerows. Alongside an overgrown pond thick with snails and buzzing with dragonflies, ran a model railway - hand-built model steam trains chattering through Meccano signals and points made from knitting needles. Buried deep within the front hedge was my mother's childhood Wendy house, the ceiling sagging beneath the foliage above, the floor splintered and torn like a replica ruin.

This space impinged greatly on my consciousness, and merged and melded with the vivid descriptions and pictures that filled the books of my childhood. But the journey into past memories is frequently marred with disappointment, and unsurprisingly, it was a shock to revisit the house in adulthood - and be surprised by the small scale, the harshness of the house's appearance, the newly-built houses that filled the garden and the neatly manicured flower beds. But although revisiting the spaces created within children's books appears to be a similarly risky journey, books retain their personal voice and sense of intimate scale.

In children's literature, the house frequently represents a space outside conventional experience. Through the protagonist, the reader transgresses the rules and conventions established by adults. Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are aptly illustrates this journey. The hero, Max, spirited from the 'safety' of his bed and transported to a strange new world, free from the shackles and conventions of everyday life.

But such transgression is frequently punished, or at least carries the implication of grave consequences; witness Alice's (mis)adventures in Wonderland. Or, for example, take Dr Seuss's mischievous thing one and thing two who run riot in a space placed in the temporary custody of children. The Cat in the Hat, representing the temptation of transgression, ultimately cannot convince the children that these things mean fun. Beatrix Potter's dark morality tales of Peter Rabbit and Tom Kitten focus on the innocent abroad, adrift in a world of serious 'adult' concerns. The message is simple: do as we say or…. In contrast, Catherine Storr's Polly and the Wolf stories neatly inverts this grave message. Despite depicting a traditionally sinister children's book character, Storr's Wolf is a downtrodden loser, forever thwarted by Polly's cunning and his own pitiful stupidity. Even Polly's journey into the clearly transgressive (and messy) space of the Wolf's own house culminates in the child's victory. But for the most part, such stories focus on the invariably negative results of invading a forbidden zone, or inviting an alien, unwelcome presence into your own space.

Naturally, real life is rarely rudely interrupted by anthropomorphic invasions, or wayward journeys into fantasy realms. Sadly, it becomes increasingly apparent that as we grow older, the physical spaces we held dear as children have become integrated with our everyday, mundane existences. Transgressions become limited by laws and rules and spaces become property, with onerous implications of trespass and theft. Perhaps only children's literature provides us with a satisfying journey back into a murky past clouded with the knowledge of subsequent experience, for now we know that rules were not made to be broken.

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Another form of fantasy living space was enacted on America's West Coast in the post-war years, when the Case Study Houses transcended their original brief as low-cost housing prototypes for the masses and evolved into the epitome of aspirational living, perched atop canyons and dunes. Accompanying Taschen's facsimile reprint of Arts and Architecture is this website, also entitled Arts and Architecture, upon which you can find extracts from every issue and details of the houses that were submitted.



Other things. Is Detroit worth saving? versus 'An auto industry bail-out will fail' / houses of the future fail to find buyers. The life-size exhibits at the MoMA show Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling remain unsold, save for Horden Cherry Lee's Micro Compact Home.

Sidebar revisits. Transpontine, rich in South London history, complete with the Transpontine South East London History Map and posts about walking through New Cross and William Morris in South London, as well as this blog on the location of London's Stink Pipes. All recommended.

75 years of the hunt for Nessie, cryptozoology as embedded cultural meme. No concrete evidence whatsoever exists indicating that the Loch Ness Monster is real; it is a phantom trope designed purely to excite the Daily Mail.

Labels: illustration, linkage

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