A world of influences and ideas
Jake Hope talks to Dave McKean about the value of collaboration and finding the right people to work with. He discusses his influences, inspiration and why illustrations are a fundamental part of story-telling.
THERE isn’t a time when illustrator, graphic novelist and artist Dave McKean can remember when he wasn’t interested in drawing. As a child he drew animals, birds, footballers and dinosaurs.
When he reached adolescence, he drew more fantastical and surreal images – an approach he feels might have worried his parents a little. Dave attended Berkshire College of Art, an experience which he describes as having hugely widened his horizons.
“I went in with a certain facility, but a very blinkered view of what I liked and what I wanted to do. As well as getting to try many different techniques and media, I was challenged every day, and convinced to look up, open my eyes and absorb a much wider world of influences and ideas.”
This idea of challenge is something that has permeated his work ever since as has the sheer breadth and
Spring-Summer 2023
range of influences which have come to characterise the scope, range, and dynamism of his style. Dave has worked with an impressive array of talent from a huge range of disciples including, but not limited to Neil Gaiman, Stephen King, Richard Hawking, John Cale and Heston Blumenthal. Thinking about collaboration, Dave says: “I like the balance of spending half my time on my own work and half in other people’s worlds. I learn a lot, see the world from a different perspective. Many have been challenging in ways I would never come across in my own self-penned work.” Out of the different writers Dave has worked with, he regards Iain Sinclair as the closest to his own particular tastes in prose, “his train of thought, multi- layered experiential style has certainly influenced my own”. Dave also feels his latest graphic novel, Raptor, has been influenced by a number of extraordinary natural world writers including Robert Macfarlane who he hopes to work with.
Thinking more about other artists he would like to collaborate with, Dave describes how he has approached several without success including Peter Gabriel and the late Iain Banks, saying: “I’m always up for a challenge, especially with writers who enjoy the mix of words and pictures and appreciate that strange ‘third thing’ that they conjure when combined well.”
Fragmentation
Maintaining a career when working across so many areas is not always straightforward. “It’s much easier if you just do one thing over and over again, you get your little place on the bookstore shelf, and people know where you are and what you do. I’m so fragmented, I’m all over the place, but am not definitively in one place.”
Despite the challenge of this, Dave also recognises the benefits, adding: “I love the different challenges and trying new things. And I like not having a style and
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