Monika Vaicenavičienė

Monika V

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Intervju: Susanne SandströmWho is Monika Vaicenaviciene?

I am an illustrator and now, as it turned out, picture book author – that is how I introduce myself profession-wise. I am from Vilnius, Lithuania, I finished my BA studies of Graphics and Printmaking at the Academy of Arts there, and currently am settled in this sweet city with my family. But I did my Master’s degree in Visual Communication at Konstfack in Stockholm, and had lived in Sweden for a while, and a part of my heart still lives here. I am twenty-eight years old. I like woods, gradient skies and medieval world maps.

How did it all began…how and why did you start making pictures/picturebooks?

It is hard for me to pin down the beginning. During my childhood together with my sister I used to do exhibition of our drawings on the old tile wall at our house, and go to draw

at the riverside with my grandmother. I liked to note things that looked nice or strange or hilarious to me, then make collections of little books with my notes and images. Making marks and telling stories with my drawings have been an important way to comprehend and communicate the world around me, for as long as I remember. After finishing my high school studies I made a decision to apply to the Art Academy in Vilnius – that was a rather spontaneous decision, actually; I had been considering subjects as varied as ecology, geography, art history – but I think choosing art studies really helped me to make good use of my love for stories. Visual storytelling has been an essential part of my creative practice, but after finishing my studies in Vilnius, I rather focused on different commissioned and personal illustration projects. I did some posters, book covers, artworks for music bands, educational visuals and so on (and I still do).

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aicenavičienė

Vad är en flod?, Vaicenavičienė, M. Opal 2019

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I think my visit to Bologna Children’s Book Fair helped me rediscover the possibilities and appeal of picture books. It is indeed so inspiring to see so many different themes, styles, and techniques at one place. After that, I started looking more attentively into different picture books, researching their structure and storytelling methods. And I became keen to try out to create a picture book all by myself. For me, the picture book is a wonderful medium. Making a picture book one can create a whole complete world in one entity which could be held in your hands. Making a picture book one has to think a lot about the structure of the narrative, its inner dynamics and pace – it’s like directing a play or a film:

What does your (creative) working process look like? What techniques and tools are important for the process?

My creative working process usually starts with research. Depending on my subject, I look for reference images, read as much of relevant material as I can, make notes. Then I try to come up with a good structure for my project, it is so important for me to work out a structure in which my visuals (or narratives) feel at home. I pin down key visual principles for the project, think about visual metaphors, visual links. Of course this kind of initial creative process setup has mostly to do with picture books or

© Monika Vaicenavičienė

you have to consider the many means of telling a story all at once. A picture book can bring together words and images; very specific things and things that could not be said easily but only felt; art and science; and could be a very effective tool of communication.

other storytelling projects. My technique is quite simple, though it requires some time as it usually involves several steps. I usually start by making a rough pencil drawing on a sheet of paper that is basically the same size as the final printed illustration is going to be.

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© Monika Vaicenavičienė

I mainly use watercolours, gouache, and colour pencils to draw; for black-and-white drawing I often use a mechanical pencil. Sometimes I add some papercut collage or scratch the surface a bit to make some interesting marks. Then I scan my drawings and refine them digitally with Photoshop, if needed. Sometimes I draw all the drawings on the paper at once; sometimes I draw separate layers and textures and combine them digitally. When I create, I think not so much about my style as about my methods: what are the reoccurring shapes or colors, what are the main principles of my compositions and what do they tell.

Where do you get inspiration from? What, whom are you influenced by?

Some things tend to inspire me and find a way into my artistic practise over and over again. Not so few of them, actually. Language, how words and texts create relations between things; metaphors. Folk and so-called outsider art. Decorations, ornaments – marks of people trying embellish their living.

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Old medieval mappae mundi – with all their peculiarities and imaginative ways to reflect the world as it was known. People, their small gestures, animals, seasons. Books that I read in a right time, that help to look at the mundane from a different perspective, that remind of the spectacular ways in which our world works – and all sorts of stories told well. Science. Problems. Nature.

Challenges? On an individual and market level – what are they?

On the individual level: create content that would not shy away from difficult topics but at the same time tell about all the wonders our world is; encourage people to think about the ways we are all interconnected; suggest a visual world with my illustrations that people would recognise as their own, as familiar, as true, that would draw them in and let them slow down for a while. On the market level: find a good medium and work out good methods for telling your stories; accept that a certain amount of accidental overlooking is hardly avoidable.

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Which books from childhood do you remember? Why this specific book do you think?

What comes to my mind first is The Woodland Folk series by Tony Wolf (aka Antonio Lupatelli) – a series about a community in a marvellous wood where animals, dwarfs, giants, fairies, elves, and dragons come to live together. I am not so sure about the stories of those books, would they appear ingenious or delicate for me now (I haven’t opened the series for some years now – but I will go and

check them as soon as I finish with this interview!) – but the illustrations were just gorgeous for me. Or, actually, I didn’t think about them, whether the illustrations were beautiful or well-drawn – I just felt a kind of belonging, of hospitality in that world; I thought I would do well in that woodland, roasting a corn cob with hedgehogs or sharing a joke with an old fairy. But, of course, there were many other wonderful, beloved books too. Mysterious stories of Michael Ende and Vytaute Zilinskaite, a Lithuanian children’s author; stories of Roald Dahl about kind-hear-

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© Monika Vaicenavičienė

Ur: Vad är en flod?, Vaicenavičienė, M. Opal 2019

ted kids teaching malicious adults. A lot of Astrid Lindgren’s books. Moomins of Tove Janson and wit of Lewis Carrol. The Wind in the Willows, The Trip to Panama, Winnie the Pooh, What Do People Do All Day?, Anne of Green Gables… And fairy-tales, lots of them: by Hans Christian Andersen, the Grimm Brothers, Wilhelm Hauff, Lithuanian folklore.

Do you have a favourite illustrator/artist/picturebookmaker?

illustrators. The problem is that I often forget to add someone when I am asked to name them, and afterwards regret for not giving them decent credits! But let me mention some of my favourite picturebook makers at least. Some of my contemporaries: Maira Kalman, Laura Carlin, Carson Ellis, Blexbolex, Jesús Cisneros, Isabelle Arsenault, Sydney Smith…

I greatly value works of many artists and138

Ur: Vad är en flod?, Vaicenavičienė, M. Opal 2019

The best and the worst when it comes to being an artist/illustrator?

Best – being able to express what is not always easily rendered in words, help people notice connections, little details, suggest different ways of looking at our world. And worst… I don’t know. I love my job, and I can’t really come up with objective, constant drawbacks of it. Sometimes I get tired of the intense work schedule that comes with freelancing, but at the same time, I remind myself that it is me who is the owner of my time. Sometimes I feel overwhelmed from all the tasks and plans that I have to do to make my career sustainable, like writing emails, negotiating contracts, thinking about selfpromotion – but when I do manage to get them under control, I enjoy the sense of accomplishment and being able to learn. While to name the worst is hard, I think to name a most difficult part of being an artist/ illustrator is easier, and I think it is related to the best part of being an artist: knowing that

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your work may reach people instantaneously, without your explanations, and have certain effects on them. That is a responsibility I think about, especially when I creating children’s books.

Can you tell us about the making of ”Vad är en flod”?

I have been interested in geography for a long time. In school times, I used to participate in student geography Olympiads and, during breaks between lessons, draw maps of imaginary places. An interest in a concept of a place as a space where stories from different times and contexts may meet and intersect has followed me ever since. I love rivers. For me, they are about being connected to the world, about a sense of neighbourhood; about being close and being far away at the same time; about interdependency. When I think of rivers, lots of cultural, cartographical, philosophical, linguistic, even

© Monika Vaicenavičienė

typographical associations come to my mind – and offer many starting points for a story to develop: paradise rivers of milk and honey, stream of consciousness, living water of folk tales, flowing current of time … I remember I heard a story once about a Lithuanian deportee to Siberia in the Soviet times who would come to a riverside, sit down and look into the river, hoping that the current would flow her gaze to her beloved left at home. I knew I wanted to make a book that would carry the gaze of a reader likewise, that would help them to reach faraway places and times by means of imagination. And of course – I have been living close to a river all my childhood, and going to the riverside to draw with my sister and grandmother is still a vivid and precious memory. All of this – and more – I was carrying with me and when I got into the Visual Communication Master’s program at Konstfack, I decided to make a project dedicated to rivers. Research was an integral and vital part of my project. What Is a River? is composed of river

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stories from various contexts that I arranged into my narrative. The book combines factual information, various stories from riverine environments as well as more loose associations and metaphors. From the start, my research was quite a serendipitous process. I was gathering bits of interesting river stories from all kind of sources that came into my view: documentaries, encyclopaedias, web pages of environmental projects, news articles, old and contemporary photos, descriptions of museums artefacts, ethnographic records, memoirs, various maps, poetry etc. I also noted down my own memories, associations and thoughts. To keep all my references in check, I devised a system of small cards with sketches which helped me note a particular story quickly and see how it could be fitted together with others. Then, if I had an idea that some fact or story should go into my book, I would delve deeper and try to find out more about it. A lot of my research is left behind the pages of the book. There is not enough space to include everything – and, what is more important, there is no need, I think. It would make the narrative heavy and not accessible. Therefore, for instance, though I mention in my book that rivers’ names have some common themes between them – like movement, or might – I do not trace down their specific etymologies. If interested, readers could do that themselves; my book is here to open their horizons rather than supply with factual knowledge. After graduating, I sent out the dummy of the book to several publishing houses, and started working with Opal to prepare the book for publication.

What are you currently working on?

Currently, I am working on a couple of projects: a collection of comics about the streets of Vilnius, my hometown, and a new picture book with another author – a book about mystery of a winter’s night, a need for friendship and a seek to communicate what’s inside of a heart. I am also starting out another book of my own, also about nature and our relations with it.

© Monika Vaicenavičienė

© Monika Vaicenavičienė