One of Australia’s most cherished and awarded picture book illustrators on what makes a good painting, the mechanics of life and the fine line between utopia and dystopia
I half imagine that when I meet him, Shaun Tan will be a diminutive Australian Willy Wonka, all hat and cane and colourful outfits, with a strange and wondrous creature by his side. It isn’t disappointing exactly to find he’s a perfectly ordinary, softly spoken middle-aged man in a puffer jacket and faded black denim jeans; it just needs the slightest adjustment in perspective.
Tan is one of the country’s most cherished and awarded picture book illustrators, a master of surrealist suburban fantasy. His 2006 wordless graphic novel The Arrival won the New South Wales premier’s literary award, and he won an Oscar for the film adaptation of his picture book The Lost Thing. His books are filled with curious hybrid creatures and freakish, fantastical landscapes, but in person he’s positively sensible.
“In my day-to-day life, I’m not creative at all,” Tan says as we prepare to take his strange and wondrous creature – AKA French bulldog Reuben – for a walk in the local Brunswick West dog park near where Tan lives with his artist wife Inari. “But when I sit down to draw, it’s like a moment to pause and question: what does all this mean? And how come I live like this and not another way?”