Artist and activist Van T Rudd became a picture book illustrator by accident. After more than 20 years working across murals, street sculpture, live protest, painting, and punk music, he made his picture book debut in 2017 with The Patchwork Bike, written by Maxine Beneba Clarke.
In Clarke’s distinctive, lyrical language, The Patchwork Bike tells the story of three siblings who have to make their own fun in their ‘mud-for-walls’ village home, and Rudd uses cardboard, acrylic paints, sticky tape and other found materials to echo the resourceful creativity of the child protagonists.
The Patchwork Bike, Lothian Books, 2017. Cover image supplied.
The book won the 2017 Children’s Book Council of Australia (CBCA) Crichton Award for a debut illustrator and the Boston Globe-Horn Book Picture Book Award 2019, and he’s since completed a second book with Clarke, The Patchwork Sky (forthcoming) which looks at refugees on a global scale.
‘The patchwork sky refers to how everyone’s got a patch of sky above them but the circumstances are different in each place, so the sky is unifying at the same time as it’s a sort of entrapment,’ Rudd explained. He’s now working on a picture book of his own about soccer and kids in factories.
Rudd – also known as Van Nishing – talked to ArtsHub about making pictures and rejecting the ‘illustrator’ label.
How did you become a children’s book illustrator?
I had no intention of becoming a children’s book illustrator. It was just after meeting Maxine in 2015, she was interviewing me for The Saturday Paper and she mentioned that she’d written the words for a children’s book and I naively said I’d have a go at illustrating them.
‘I went into the project thinking, I’m not just going to do an ordinary children’s book.’
I went into the project thinking, I’m not just going to do an ordinary children’s book. I saw this artwork by EVOL, a German street artist who’d done some work on cardboard, just mesmerising, and I borrowed some of those ideas and then turned it into my own creations.
What was the process like?
The Patchwork Bike was about two years in the making. Maxine already had the words, she’d given a basic framework for the story, so it was quite easy to dive right in. I did a couple of images, Maxine and the publisher liked it, so we signed a contract and they gave me a map of the sizes and layouts. I didn’t worry so much about the size: I just wanted to use paint on cardboard and I worked quite big – some of the boxes were nearly 2 metres wide.
I did about 30 images all up, photographed them, compiled them and sent them to the publisher in a vertical format. They played around with the composition a little bit, just slight shifts.
How did you develop the characters and imagery in collaboration with the author?
I already knew Maxine a bit from anti-racism channels and slam poetry networks and she’d seen some of my street sculptures so I knew our politics weren’t far off. She was also quite open with how to approach things in a creative way so that was the other bonus.
The whole time I’m doing this, I’m not thinking I’m a children’s book illustrator. I just want to make some interesting artworks that match the story. So at the time, we’re approaching 2016, when Beyoncé was on top of the cop car for the Formation video. I’d been involved in protests here and in Chile against capitalism. At the same time there was the Arab Spring, Black Lives Matter, and the Occupy movement, so I had all these political inspirations.
Inside page from The Patchwork Bike. Courtesy of Van T Rudd.
My indirect aim was to make a bridge between the African village setting of Maxine’s story and contemporary politics, and in particular US politics – referencing how the US economy has been built through slavery, the ongoing battle between the rich and the poor, and the role racism plays in that. The Beyoncé video gave me the confidence to do the image of the kids dancing on the cop car – one doing pirouettes, symbolising the Occupy movement, and one doing the ‘hands up, don’t shoot’ gesture of the Black Lives Matter movement.
Another part was capturing the playfulness of the kids, plus a streak of rebelliousness. Maxine didn’t mention sunglasses but I felt like the main character needed it – sort of a statement like, you can’t fully know me. I wanted to shy away from the stereotypical children’s book characters that are wide-eyed and sort of naïve and reverse that a bit.
What advice would you give visual artists wanting to explore the world of children’s books?
Don’t think in categories, like a children’s book has to be tight illustrations on white paper. You know, there is a lot of stuff out there that’s quite experimental but there could be more. If you’re confident with visual arts generally, just send out ideas to authors that you enjoy and also write a children’s book yourself. It’s not easy and it’s not hard either, I reckon, to write. Stick to a timeline and just do it, don’t drag it out.
Van T Rudd mural in Hosier Lane, Melbourne, in solidarity with the Climate Strike, March 2019.
Psychologically, for me it helped that I was naïve about the publishing industry because it meant that I could just go hell for leather. Just try something. Make sure it’s kind of breathtaking in its own way and enjoy the creative process. I wanted the images to provide a sort of parallel story alongside Maxine’s words and to carry a flavour of political activism.
And lastly, don’t be ashamed of promoting your work. Many of us are aware that capitalism has its own internal contradictions; I’m not a purist who says I’m going to fight the system by being outside of it. As a visual artist, you might want your work to get out to poor and working-class people but in the gallery system, you might find it’s only going to the elite. One of the benefits of a children’s book is that it reaches a lot of students, teachers and parents. And once you have a publishing contract, you have all this middle-class legitimacy – once you’re in that world, it’s so much easier to go further.
