Hayley Potter: When we talk about believable fictional worlds in art, we are talking about creating magical visual environments that are believable and real in their own right. These may be the kind of worlds you read about in a book or encounter as a sequence of pictures, but these worlds have the power to carry your imagination beyond the limit of text. It seems to be impossible to escape the importance of magical and fictional worlds in today’s society; is this because the need to escape has become so essential? 

Marcela Alejandra: As visual communicators, creating a strong personal and fictional world is important to us. Here at the RCA we are encouraged to develop a personal way of making images. We want to discuss how that feeds into commercial work in a wider context.

Michael, what do you consider to be a believable fictional world?

Michael Foreman: Well, I suppose in my work I have been trying to set the surprising in the real world. Traditional stories, fairy tales
and so forth – I’ve set them in a landscape that is appropriate to the text, but also in a landscape of which I have first hand knowledge –
a landscape that I’ve drawn and travelled through. So, I’m not trying to create a believable fictional world as such because I always work with a real location. The main character that drives my stories is the actual place rather than a person or creature. I will set a story in a particular environment so that the characters can come alive.

Marina Warner: Ruskin, the painter, has a very famous passage where he is discussing a griffin, a creature that as far as we know does not exist… they may yet be discovered, but they remain unbelievable at the moment. Ruskin has this illustration which he says is a picture of a true griffin and next to it, another picture of a false griffin. Side-by-side, he then tries to resolve what a true griffin is and maintains

that it must come from the imagination. The false griffin is made up of parts. Someone has taken the claws of a dragon, the talons of an eagle, the beak of a hawk, etc. and has put them all together. Ruskin says that as this has not turned molten in the imagination, it is not a true griffin. But if you show students these two pictures, it is very difficult to spot the right one. It isn’t obvious which griffin is true or false. I think that this idea applies to the landscape of the imagination, not just to the landscape of reality. Imaginary worlds need to be embodied to have real features. The imaginary body has to be a working body.

Hayley Potter: Kiki Smith appeared in that exhibition didn’t she? 

Marina Warner: Yes. Actually Kiki is a very appropriate artist to discuss, especially her work titled ‘Telling Tales’ which re-told fairytales in a very unusual way.

Hayley Potter: Her drawings of the wolf girl and sculptures of ‘Daughter’ are a good example. This invented creature represents what the daughter of Red Riding Hood and The Wolf might have looked like.

Michael Foreman: Well, with ‘Memories of Childhood’ for example, which is about my childhood from the age of three, it starts when a bomb comes through the roof of our house in 1941. It came in at and angle, missed my bed by about six inches, bounced on the floor, bounced over my mother’s bed, hit the mirror on the wall and dropped into the fireplace and the flames went up the chimney. The book ends when I just start art school and I get a kiss from my first girlfriend. I float right down the street, my feet not touching the ground. So that’s autobiographical, but within this are all kinds of stories that have come out later in my books. There were no books in my childhood home, but the village was full of soldiers and sailors from many different countries and the stories were told rather than written. Stories were very important. They were for the whole community, not just for children.

Marina Warner: That appears to be happening again.

Michael Foreman: When I started illustrating books for children, I was asked, with television coming in, did I feel that this would be a problem for books? “No”, I said. TV was brilliant for books because children were absorbing all of the news unfiltered by parents or teachers, and I felt they were more aware of what was happening in the world than children had ever been before. Suddenly there were very few subjects that would be out of bounds. It was very liberating because you could address any subject under the sun. Beforehand you would have to treat each subject very carefully.

Marina Warner: I would like to know how everyone feels about the current design of famous books, and how they are translated into TV and film – such as the Tolkien renderings and Narnia and Harry Potter. It seems to me that there is rather a gulf opening up, of how we imagine these things, and how they are realised.

Marina Warner: Do you not think that animation would be better? I thought the recent Narnia film was quite deplorable and had it been drawn it might have kept some of the feeling of the original book. For example, in the film when they went through the wardrobe there were many fur coats, almost like a store of them – that felt quite different to the book. In film everything is always so exaggerated and there is so much detail. Unlike the broken dreams and fragments that the novel conveys, there is just nothing left out in these new renditions. They want to employ ten thousand prop makers. It is very much over done.

Isobel Manning: I think that the pace of films is the biggest change because you are so immersed in every single little aspect straight away. Where as in a book the illustrations give little things away and leave more to the imagination.

Ben Norland: Marina is right about what can be done in film now with CGI, there is a density of information which is packed into that space which is quite overwhelming. It leaves very little room for imaginative exploration. When I think of Shepherd’s drawings of ‘Winnie the Pooh’ and compare the original drawings to the new examples that are produced by Disney, there is very little left in the new animations that represents the original idea. The tiniest marks do an enormous amount of work in terms of giving you an emotional and unconditional love for one of those characters in the original drawings. The moment you put that into film, or a critically accurate animation, they suddenly have to flesh it out and every molecule becomes important and too obvious.

deeply researched. We are doing a book about the Holocaust at the moment and you have to get that right. It has been a horrible book
to do hasn’t it, Ben?

Ben Norland: Well, yes. Another thing to engage with is that picture books are quite short. Typically they are thirty-two pages and some
of those are used up with copyright details and what have you. In the
end a story is told over only twelve or so pages and twelve blocks
of writing. I say to people that it’s a bit like writing a sonnet actually. It’s a small thing that has to be intensely structured. Publishers can spend ages discussing whether one sentence is on one page or another because it just completely changes the timing and amount of space one has got for the amount of narrative that has to take place across the next three or four spreads. These are the important things that we discuss.

Larissa Nowicki: Michael, you mentioned how travel played a part in your books. By incorporating your experiences into the story you give readers an opportunity to become familiar with places they might never experience in person. My earliest impressions of England came through books and fairytales, which remained within my mind for years before
I actually travelled here. On arrival I found myself in an unfamiliar country that was somehow also very familiar because of the memories of these characters and places I brought with me. When fiction and reality merge in this way you understand how powerful the imagined is in shaping our impression of the real world.

Michael Foreman: Travel for me has been important, as it presented a different way of working to me. I was sent all over the world to draw things and particularly while I was away I was getting involved in the legends and folk stories of those particular places and cultures.
I would always draw what was happening in the street, on the square, particularly what children were doing. There are differences between countries, but some things are universal and those are the kinds of books I try to do.