When Text & Image Combine: An Interview With Joanna Concejo
The accomplished Polish illustrator Joanna Concejo talks about why paper is ‘fickle’, her grandmother’s storytelling, and her illustrations for ‘The Lost Soul’ – a children’s book by Nobel Prize winner Olga Tokarczuk. ‘The Lost Soul’ was published in an English translation by Antonia Lloyd-Jones in February 2021.
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Joanna Concejo, photo: courtesy of the artist
Agnieszka Warnke (AW): Pencil – or coloured pencil?
Joanna Concejo (JC): Both. But at the very beginning, at the moment when I thought that it was all getting to be too much – that I needed to go back to the very basics of drawing – I used pencil only. But I reached for the coloured pencils again fairly quickly. At first, I was very frugal and cautious with the colour, but little by little, I allowed it to express itself. Now, it’s of course essential.
AW: And what’s your favourite colour?
JC: All I see is which ones I use more or less. Lots of green, blue, yellows, browns – I have to buy more of them constantly. When it comes to pinks and violets, they can sit there for years; I only use them occasionally.
AW: Are there any other tools that are essential to your work?
JC: I always need sketchbooks to note down my ideas in, or to use while I’m drawing so that nothing gets away. When I have time, I might do a little sketching. It’s not enough just to have an idea – you have to contain it inside of some form. It’s part of my process to test everything out in my sketchbook.
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From ‘The Lost Soul’ by Olga Tokarczuk, illustrated by Joanna Concejo, 2017, photo: Format Publishing House
Paper is another story. I really like different kinds of paper, especially used and distressed paper that I find or that someone brings to me. I have a lot of it. Almost all of my books are made from salvaged paper. The only problem is how fickle it is. Seeing as it’s old, and it’s lived through something, it’s much more brittle, and sensitive to use. Sometimes, it doesn’t even want to take the pencil – for example, when there are holes. You have be careful and make adjustments for each piece of paper. The last time I did this, I had a thought – maybe this is enough? Maybe I should start using some really good paper.
JC: My daughter found the notebook. She wasn’t looking for it in particular, but she came by with it one day, when I was starting to work on the book. And I really needed it.
AW: What led you to begin drawing?
JC: I started like everyone else does – in childhood, so much so that I never stopped. There might’ve been some moments when I drew less, because I didn’t have the time, or because other approaches were interesting to me, other techniques. But at a certain point, it got to be too much. I thought about it, and I realised that drawing is something that is really mine, that I really know how to do. I decided to return to smaller, more intimate formats – the ones that felt close to me and where I felt comfortable. You can open a notebook, grab a pencil, and that’s enough. I consciously chose drawing instead of something else.
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Spread from ‘Kiedy Dojrzeją Porzeczki’ (When the Blackcurrants Ripen), written & illustrated by Joanna Concejo, 2017, photo: Wolno Publishing House
AW: Have art and books been a constant in your life?
JC: I am interested in books – but more in the sense that adults do pick them up, and read them, so I also want to know what’s there. I’ve read quite a few of them, but it’s not something that’s filled up my time. I was the kind of child who preferred to go out with friends – to play in the yard and run, just so as not to have to be at home. It was outdoors, always.
AW: Do you think the place where you grew up, in the countryside in the Pomorksie region, impacted you as an artist?
JC: It certainly did. And not just the place – the whole environment. I was really in my element there. Everything that captured my attention was outdoors. I was also shaped by the stories my grandmother told me, the way she told stories. You could never tell if the story was true or not. I was convinced that Little Red Riding Hood lived in our village. Everything was all mixed together, fantasy and reality. It’s possible she was also consciously playing with us that way.
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From ‘The Lost Soul’ by Olga Tokarczuk, illustrated by Joanna Concejo, photo: Format Publishing House
AW: Is it easier for you to think of one illustration for a book, or a sequence of images?
JC: There can only be one image on the cover, and you have to compromise on a lot of things. No. Even if you don’t know what to draw, you can pick something you see out the window. To me, the most important thing is to allow my hand to draw something; then, it’s not important if it’s going to be useful or not. Of course, there are those days when everything I’ve drawn, tested, sketched – I don’t wind up being able to use any of it. But even then, it shows that something was working between my hand and my head.
AW: Is it true that ‘M Jak Morze’ (‘S’ As in Sea) might never have come out?
JC: The author of the first version of the text, which was created for the illustrations and partly finished, withdrew from the project. So there was a whole book without any text. That was a tough moment. As it happens, my husband is also a writer, so first, I asked him to do it. When he did, I sensed that the text wasn’t really working with the images. I wondered what I would do. I couldn’t go knocking on doors and ask different people to write me something, only to tell them ‘no, no thank you’ if I didn’t wind up liking it… I figured that I would have to write it myself. I just wasn’t sure if I could.
JC: Someone asked me if the book couldn’t work without text. I didn’t think it would. It was created for a text – not the final one, but another one – but a text no less. I think that without a text, there would’ve been too many misunderstandings and too many pauses between the images. The pauses needed to be filled and linked to one another.
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From ‘M Jak Morze’ (S Like the Sea), written & illustrated by Joanna Concejo, 2021, photo: Format Publishing House
AW: This also shows that the illustrations you created were universal, even though they were created for a specific text. Something in them allowed for another story to grow.
JC: When I work with a text, I don’t need to use the illustration to repeat what’s written. The story within the illustrations themselves is already moving in some direction. When this initial text went away, the shift allowed for another one to emerge. There were a few things I couldn’t change: the illustration showed a boy, so the main character had to be a boy. There’s the sea, so there had to be the sea. Besides those two elements, there was space for another story to emerge.
AW: In the case of Olga Tokarczuk’s ‘The Lost Soul’, the text came first. So first you read it… and then what happened?
JC: And then nothing. But that’s always how it goes for me – I read something through a few times, and nothing. Some images might come to mind, but that happens to everyone when they read, doesn’t it? I need a little time for something to come into focus. I try not to think about the text all the time. I gather everything that comes, and only then do I look at what will be useful and what won’t. This involves sketching, notes, and writing down or doodling all manner of things – which can turn out to be fairly unrelated to the text, but there’s always some sense in it. And then I wait for something to hatch.
With this story, I waited a long time, because I was working on another book that I wanted to finish first. At a certain moment, I put it away, because an idea came to me for The Lost Soul. It was an ordinary object – a pair of children’s gloves tied together by a little string. And a moment with two children sharing these gloves: sitting on a bench, a girl wearing one and a boy the other. I could see that it was them [from the story] – little Janek and his soul. That’s how I imagined it. With these kinds of gloves, you need to cut the string in order to share them, but if you give one away to someone, there’s the chance that it’ll get lost. That’s what happens in the book – but in the end, they find each other.
AW: Speaking of these gloves, they reminded me of one particularly beautiful illustration, in gold, in ‘M Jak Morze’. The woman brings these yellow-orange pebbles back from her first trip to the sea, and the golden colour [in the later image] seems linked to that. Do you enjoy making those kinds of connections – those sometimes personal things, but not necessarily so, that we have to look for in order to find?
JC: I do play around with that somehow, but I don’t know if it’s really to engage the reader in some kind of game. I can’t create a book with anything else other than what I have. I find personal things, things that involve me. Otherwise I would have to experience other people’s lives – but I can’t live anyone else’s but my own. I like when it comes from what’s happening around me or from things I find. That also seems safe to me. No one can find any fault with it, because it’s coming from my own experience; I don’t have to explain it to anyone with any kind of intellectual framework, because it’s simply true. If I draw certain characters, they’re often inspired by people I know or met. I do sometimes create characters from my own imagination, but I prefer it when they’re somehow linked to reality.
AW: When I wanted to look at the book ‘Kiedy Dojrzeją Porzeczki’ (When the Blackcurrants Ripen), I ordered it from the National Library in Warsaw. The librarian who handed it to me touched the cover and said, ‘how beautiful’. Do you also experience your illustrations through other senses?
JC: I really just draw. I spend a lot of time with the drawings, because they often take several days to create. I do touch them, of course, because I’m using my hands in the process – I hold the pencil and the coloured pencils, so there is physical contact. But I really try to do my work well and not think of much else.
AW: Henryk, the protagonist of ‘The Lost Soul’, says that he loves the quiet.
JC: I also love the quiet.
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From ‘The Lost Soul’ by Olga Tokarczuk, illustrated by Joanna Concejo, 2017, photo: Format Publishing House
AW: Do you work better when it’s quiet?
JC: I prefer quiet to any kind of music. Sometimes I turn on the radio, because you never know what they’re going to play. I don’t know how I would pick a specific kind of music to work to.
AW: Do many books remain on the shelf before they see the light of day? That was the case with your first book, ‘Pan Nikt’ (Mr Nothing).
JC: Yes, that book lay there for a while. Actually, I created it twice. It was a personal project that I thought up at some point – I wrote the text and made all of the illustrations. It was still before that moment when I thought it was all getting to be too much, the different techniques and possibilities.
When my work started getting noticed, the Italian publisher Topipittori contacted me and asked if I had a project. I sent them this text, writing that basically, I wasn’t sure about my own writing, so I said that changes could be made. I also sent them a few illustrations from the first version. We discussed starting the project over again, with a few new ideas – not because the ideas themselves were bad, but it was more an issue with how they were expressed. It was simply too complicated. The first illustrations were very different from the ones that ultimately appeared in the book, especially from the standpoint of technique.
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From ‘Dzikie Łabędzie’ (Wild Swans) by Hans Christian Andersen, translated by Bogusława Sochańska, illustrated by Joanna Concejo, 2017, photo: Wydawnictwo Tako
I have other projects, too, that have never seen the light of day. Maybe I’ll come back to them someday? But I’m sure I’ll wind up making new illustrations for them.
AW: Do publishers often give you feedback on your drawings?
JC: Very different kinds. I don’t have any examples of cases when it was especially concrete, like: this colour doesn’t match, you should change it. At the beginning, I worked in a rather traditional way, meaning that I set about drawing finished spreads, showing the publishers a storyboard – with everything sketched out, page by page. And only when we were totally sure of everything would I begin to create the final illustrations. Sometimes I had a drawing ready, and I knew that it wasn’t right, but I had to try to make it work. Many of the drawings for Dzikie Łabędzie (Wild Swans) weren’t quite right when they first defined. Until one illustration came out that really worked the way it should. It became my taking-off point – I created everything else around it.
For the cover of my book Les Fleurs Parlent (Flowers Speak), for the French-Belgian publisher Casterman, I had to change some of the details. The illustration shows a little girl who has flowers on her skirt. At first, I had one version of the skirt, and they asked me to change it. The little girl was bending her head slightly and looking down, but they wanted her to look at the reader. I wound up changing the cover three times.
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From ‘Dym’ by Antón Fortes, illustrated by Joanna Concejo, 2011, photo: Tako Publishing House
Now I make my books much more slowly, and there’s less feedback or none at all. Sometimes I design them myself at home – without a publisher, without anyone – and I edit it myself. I only show it when it’s finished. If there are any comments at that stage, I talk with them about it, but it happens less and less these days.
AW: How do you decide on a particular illustration for a given text?
JC: I have to know that the text has potential, a place for itself, so that I can add to it. There are books that are very image-based, literary, for which I don’t find a text to be necessary. Sometimes I don’t see myself in a book, stylistically speaking. But when I decide on one, it means that I already see the possibility of images for it – and that won’t be just an addition, but an equal player, allowing a kind of third quality to emerge from the text and the image.
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From ‘Il Signor Nessuno’ (‘Pan Nikt’) (Mr Nothing), written & illustrated by Joanna Concejo, 2008, photo: Topipittori Publishing House
AW: Do you have a specific emotional relationship to a particular book or illustration?
JC: It’s hard to say, but the first book I did is definitely special to me. And the fact that someone wanted it, that it would be published… I even had some very pretentious thoughts, which I’ll go ahead and share with you. I thought: ‘Gosh, I made such a fantastic book, how could I ever do another one?’ That really makes me laugh now. Luckily, I didn’t stop at that stage.
Then there are a few books that are very close to me: Kiedy Dojrzeją Porzeczki, M Jak Morze – even more so because I wrote the text… There’s also another book that may be coming out in Poland. I wrote it together with my husband, and the French title is Ne Le Dis à Personne (Don’t Tell Anyone Else). It’s a kind of correspondence between the two of us about our childhood memories. We wrote it, and I illustrated it. It’s very close to me, very personal.
AW: Do you like to work as part of a duo?
JC: I don’t think so. I’m kind of a loner. But I do work as part of a lot of teams.
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From ‘Czerwony Kapturek’ (Little Red Riding Hood) by the Brothers Grimm, translated by Łukasz Musiał, illustrated by Joanna Concejo, 2015, photo: Tako Publishing House
AW: In another interview, you said that you wanted children’s books to stop being categorised as children’s and young-adult literature. When you’re working on a project, do you imagine your reader?
JC: No, it’s not necessary. I create the story, but I don’t know who’s going to pick up the final book in their hands. For example, I was asked to create Czerwona Kaptura (Little Red Riding Hood) for eight- to 12-year-olds. I told the publisher I didn’t understand the request – I don’t know how to make a book for children of one specific age or another. I figured I couldn’t control which bookshelf it would wind up on. I realise that books with pictures, besides comics, will always be grouped under ‘children’s and young-adult literature’. It devalues all of these kinds of books somewhat. It’s too bad when someone’s convinced that it’s just for kids – what if somebody else might enjoy it?
Interview conducted in Polish, Mar 2021, translated by Lauren Dubowski