Base, Graeme (Rowland) 1958-

views updated

BASE, Graeme (Rowland) 1958-

PERSONAL: Born April 6, 1958, in Amersham, England; immigrated to Australia, 1966; naturalized Australian citizen; son of Geoffrey Donald (a civil engineer) and Elizabeth Enid (Philips) Base; married Robyn Anne Paterson (an artist), August 1, 1981; children: James Geoffrey, Katherine, William. Education: Swinburne Institute of Technology, diploma of art, 1978. Religion: Church of England. Hobbies and other interests: Listening to, writing, and playing music.

ADDRESSES: Home—Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. Agent—c/o Author Mail, Penguin Books Australia Ltd., 250 Camberwell Rd., Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia.

CAREER: Worked in advertising at design studios, including Art Producers, Stannard Patten Samuelson, and Paul Pantelis and Partners, 1979-80; keyboard player in band Riki-Tiki-Tavi, with wife, 1980-85; author and illustrator of books for children.

MEMBER: Australian Society of Book Illustrators.

AWARDS, HONORS: Picture book honor, Australian Children's Book Awards, Children's Book Council of Australia, 1987, and Kids Own Australia Literature Award, secondary school category, 1988, both for Animalia; high commendation, Book Design Award, Australian Book Publishers' Association, 1988, Young Australian Best Book Award, 1989, Kids Own Australia Literature Award, infants-primary category, 1989, and selection as picture book of the year, Australian Children's Book Awards, 1989, all for The Eleventh Hour: A Curious Mystery; winner of Dromkeen Medal, 1998.

WRITINGS:

self-illustrated; children's books

My Grandma Lived in Gooligulch, Nelson Australia (Southbank, Victoria, Australia), 1983.

Animalia, Abrams (New York, NY), 1986, published as Animalia: A Special Anniversary Edition, Viking (New York, NY), 1997.

The Eleventh Hour: A Curious Mystery, Viking Kestrel (London, England), 1988.

The Sign of the Seahorse: A Tale of Greed and HighAdventure in Two Acts, Abrams (New York, NY), 1992.

The Discovery of Dragons, Abrams (New York, NY), 1996.

Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky: A Book of Brillig Dioramas, Abrams (New York, NY), 1996.

The Worst Band in the Universe: A Totally CosmicMusical Adventure, Abrams (New York, NY), 1999.

Animalia Mini Book, Viking (New York, NY), 1999.

Animalia Midi Edition, Viking (New York, NY), 2001.

The Water Hole, Viking (New York, NY), 2001.

illustrator

Max Dann, Adventures with My Best Worst Friend, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1982.

(With Betty Greenhatch) Susan Burke, The Island BikeBusiness, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1982.

Lewis Carroll, Jabberwocky: From "Through theLooking Glass," Macmillan (London, England), 1985, Abrams (New York, NY), 1987.

other

Animalia Colouring Book, Puffin Books (Camberwell, Victoria, Australia), 2002.

Also author (with Craig Christie) of the contemporary opera Tutankhamun, based on the death of the Egyptian king. Composer of instrumental music.

ADAPTATIONS: The Eleventh Hour: A Curious Mystery, The Sign of the Seahorse: A Tale of Greed and High Adventure in Two Acts, and The Worst Band in the Universe: A Totally Cosmic Musical Adventure are being adapted to film.

SIDELIGHTS: An innovative writer and illustrator of children's books, Graeme Base is known for his sense of humor, intricate and colorful drawings, and use of wordplay. His best-selling alphabet book, Animalia, received widespread acclaim from critics and the public, despite difficult captions such as "Horrible hairy hogs hurrying homeward on heavily harnessed horses." As the author and illustrator once commented to CA: "Everyone is influenced by his childhood. The things I write about and illustrate come from a vast range of inputs, some from the earliest impressions of a little child, others from things I saw yesterday, and still others from completely out of the blue, though no doubt they owe their arrival to some stimulus, albeit unconscious. I have a great love of wildlife, inherited from my parents, which shows through in my subject matter, though always with a view to the humorous—not as a commercial device but as a reflection of my own fairly happy nature."

In Animalia, which won several awards for illustration in the author's adopted country of Australia, Base packs each page with items whose names begin with the featured letter; in a competition, one eagle-eyed reader listed 2,400 of them. The artist also hides drawings of himself as a boy throughout Animalia's pages. While noting that "Base's skill is shown at its best in books with little text," Twentieth-Century Children's Writers essayist Keith Barker praised the drawings as "so complex and intricate that it is not surprising to learn that most of his books take up to three years to produce." Calling the work a "family entertainment of an alphabet book," Washington Post Book World contributor Selma G. Lanes noted that Animalia would provide enough interest for an entire "rainy day's diversion." And Gahan Wilson, reviewing the work in the New York Times Book Review, found Base's "bright and busy" illustrations similar to "posters along a carnival midway," although he maintained that the "drawing in them does not stand up to the level of work offered in . . . other books, good-hearted though it is."

Base's next book, The Eleventh Hour: A Curious Mystery, also encourages young readers to look closely at image-packed drawings. A story in verse about the disappearance of an elephant's party feast, it provides young sleuths with a book's worth of codes, puzzles, and other hidden clues to help Horace the elephant discover which of his guests made off with his birthday party feast. Base accompanies his illustrations with a rhyming storyline, as well as a sealed "top secret" section containing a coded message to assist those sleuths who remain stumped by the book's end.

With The Sign of the Seahorse: A Tale of Greed and High Adventure in Two Acts, Base introduced even more text into his illustrated tale. A fishy saga, the book finds Pearl Trout and Corporal Bert (a crab) in love, despite the fact that the coral reef they call home is being threatened by polluters. Likening the book to a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta and heaping praise upon the volume's "dynamic, radiantly colored" illustrations, a Publishers Weekly reviewer noted that "Base's exemplary verse, perfect scansion and witty rhymes . . . blend to create a comic saga of Brobdingnagian proportions." Despite what he calls an "eventful tale, which includes an epic journey, pollution, extortion, and true love," Barker found that Base's strengths continue to be most keenly shown in "pictures [that are] stunning and full of intricate detail," according to his appraisal of The Sign of the Seahorse.

"For me, the relationship between text and illustration is the very essence of producing a good picture book," Base once commented. "Because I write the books I illustrate I have the luxury of being able to refine the text as the illustration ideas emerge. Through the whole life of a project (and it can take several years sometimes) I constantly revise the relationship of the two parts, looking for unnecessary duplication of information, mistakes in continuity, and ways of improving what I have come up with to date. I started off in the publishing business illustrating other people's texts and found it very frustrating, mainly because the text was considered sacred and unchangeable, putting ridiculous restrictions on the eventual harmony of word and picture."

Among the components of his extensive training in graphic design at the Swinburne Institute of Technology, Base credits his understanding of spatial dynamics and typography with influencing his technique. "My style is tightly controlled and quite linear, although I use strong colors, largely instinctively, having only a vivid mental image of what I hope the picture will look like as a guide. The paintings are done on hot press illustration board with watercolors and transparent inks, using brushes, pencils, technical drawing pens, and a scalpel (for scratching). I also use an airbrush for skies and mist and breath from horses' mouths.

"I aim my books primarily at myself. Although I would have to be a fool to totally disregard the eventual marketplace, my most important audience is me. After I am happy with a verse or an illustration, I let other people see it and hope they will share my enjoyment, finding the same stimulation of the imagination as I have experienced creating it. I never talk down to kids, for this is fatal. Much better to aim over their heads and allow some subtleties to go unnoticed than to earn their scorn by serving up 'kiddie fare.' This makes people think I direct my work at all those parents out there, but I don't—I direct it at a certain hybrid, part adult, part child, that is in all probability the basis of all well-balanced happy people. An adult who cannot allow himself to be childlike is lacking something somewhere."

While Base maintained that Australian picture books had tended to be somewhat parochial in their content, he has seen their content become more universal in their approach due to "the much greater availability and influence of overseas input. This is a good thing," he added. "The public awareness of the importance of good picture books is greater now than ever before, making it possible to describe the recent years as a renaissance for children's book publishing in Australia, recognizing and embracing the role of picture books as central and vital to the teaching and development of children."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

books

Children's Literature Review, Volume 22, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1990.

Twentieth-Century Children's Writers, 4th edition, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1995.

periodicals

Booklist, February 1, 2000, Stephanie Zvirin, review of The Worst Band in the Universe: A Totally Cosmic Musical Adventure, p. 1020; October 1, 2001, Gillian Engberg, review of The Water Hole, p. 322.

Books for Keeps, November, 1988, p. 28; November, 1989, p. 22.

Kirkus Reviews, September 15, 2001, review of TheWater Hole,p. 1353.

Magpies, November, 1988, p. 4; September, 1989, pp. 20-22.

New York Times Book Review, November 8, 1987, Gahan Wilson, review of Animalia, p. 54; January 24, 1993, p. 17.

Publishers Weekly, March 11, 1988, p. 101; March 24, 1989, p. 36; October 5, 1992, review of The Sign of the Seahorse: A Tale of Greed and High Adventure in Two Acts, p. 69; November 18, 1996, p. 74; October 22, 2001, review of The Water Hole, p. 76.

Reading Time, Volume 31, number 1, 1987, pp. 23-25; Volume 34, number 1, 1990, pp. 8-9.

Resource Links, December, 2001, Zoe Johnstone Guha, review of The Water Hole, p. 2.

School Library Journal, November 1992, p. 88; November, 1996, p. 103; December, 2001, Beth Tagart, review of The Water Hole, p. 88.

Tribune Books (Chicago, IL), November 12, 1989, p. 7.

Washington Post Book World, November 8, 1987, Selma G. Lanes, review of Animalia, pp. 17-18.