"Wonder has no opposite; it springs up already doubled in itself, compounded of dread and desire at once, attraction and recoil, producing a thrill, the shudder of pleasure and of fear. It names the marvel, the prodigy, the surprise as well as the responses they excite of fascination and inquiry; it conveys the active motion towards experience and the passive stance of enrapturement."

-Marina Warner, 1996

Something incredibly inspired is conjured from this, my favourite quote, when trying to explain what it is about the world, about stories and about drawing pictures which enliven the illustrator’s mind so significantly. Illustration is a couplet of image and text, one next to, beside or inspired by the other, it is chiefly words which inspire the imagination to create the image. There is a process beyond the literal which makes the words and image do very separate things whilst lying next to each other. They are not in love with each other but are siblings with complementary or contradictory personalities. Sometimes they disagree, grow up or grow out of each other, other times they run away and become something else, or happily come home and converse again.

As in all things it is a metaphor which explains the point, it is an image realised that muddles the sense together to create new meaning. It is the teller and the told in one castle with separate wings, one for the aftermath of the imagination of the story and one for its conception.

What is really important about illustration however is that it can work both ways. You can start with words and end up with a picture, or begin with a picture and end up with words. Either way one cannot live happily without the other, once the process of picture-making has happened words spoken or written, ‘spring up already doubled in themselves’. The happy ever after is long ago and a long away thought when things end and no more begin. It is the content, not the wrapping up of it which creates ‘the active motion towards experience and the passive stance of enrapturement.’

Amelia Johnstone MA RCA
Lecturer BA (Hons) Illustration

more about Amelia...
I was born on 7th May 1977 at 12 O’ Clock midday in Chesterfield hospital in Derbyshire. As the fourth of six children I spent summers growing up in Dorset and Devon on rivers and in woods playing alone, or making up elaborate games with my siblings, or cousins or imaginary friends. Life was all about imagination then, and continues to be now. Illustration has always been there, always been my discipline and as a child I used to carry my favourite illustrated books with me, go for picnic breakfasts and eat marmalade sandwiches out of illustrated tins and live life as though always in a story.

One of my earliest illustrated memories is ‘Struwwelpeter’ this book brought my nightmares to life, and is the reason I stopped sucking my thumb. It was in the bookshelf in the room I used to stay in, in my Grandmother’s house, and when the lights went out and the door stood a little ajar the scissor man would come...

...The door flew open, in he ran,
The great, long, red-legged scissorman...

In his fashion of white socks red trousers long nose and tousled hair he haunted me through those early years, imagining as soon as I put my thumb in to sleep that he would awaken from his book like state and come to life to chop off my thumbs. That illustration had the power to change me, and I think has even more significance in my work. ‘Shellewellyn’ my male alter ego was possibly conceived in these early years, but it is only a connection I made recently whilst teaching a project to design stage sets for the poems. Shellewellyn’s victims may be left in an even more tragic state, look at the work to discover.

My Grandmother was born in India at the end of the Raj, her stories of that place and reading novels by EM Forster and Frances Hodgson Burnett lead me to travel there in 2001 to explore that most important part of my imagination, the past. My Great Grandfather, affectionately known as Bear, shot a tiger which had eaten one of his servants and the head was placed in the stairwell at Granny’s house in Derbyshire, the story I was told, however, was that the tiger had jumped through the wall and that its body had become lodged there, it couldn’t be set free so the face was framed and the rest remained inside. That tiger, like the scissor man, came creeping into my room at night to eat me….and he again visited me in India in the Himalayas whilst others slept I felt his breath and heard his feet padding around our exposed tent. The stories I was told as a child, the smells and memories of that existence, that part of my life, which continue to inspire and excite me, as well as provoke feeling of the happy melancholy. A feeling which helps me to feel alive, and to live life.

My first dissertation ‘A long time ago when wishing still helped’ – Imagery, Imagination and Private Worlds, describes how it is through these late night dreaming hours that ideas are born and identities grown.

In 2004 I became part of an exciting illustration movement which culminated in the publication of Le Gun magazine. Le Gun describes me as ‘a spiritual descendant of the Bloomsbury Group with a male alter ego called Shellewellyn’ it explores even more of this other side, the place where demons, ideas and strange manifestations of another sort of reality, lurk, leap about, have fun and wreak havoc.

I have exhibited in London in both solo and group shows and around the world with Le Gun. I am currently working on a book about two jealous sisters ‘Orange and Lemon’ who have a tendency to let heads roll; 'here comes the chopper to chop off your head'. And most recently have begun to research and make images for a new version of Hansel and Gretel with an Angela Carter twist.

I imminently leave my Ludlow garret and move to Cardiff to begin a new job as a Lecturer in BA (Hons) Illustration. I shall miss my Hereford children, talented peculiar and exciting gaggle of imaginations, but can’t wait to explore new ground, discover new things and make something happen.