Levine Querido

Nov 3, 2022

Shaun Tan/Levine Querido Creature: paintings, drawings and reflections is a new collection of images of artist and writer Shaun Tan’s best-known works as well as over 100 never-before-seen illustrations. The book also includes essays by the artist. Shaun Tan/Levine Querido Artist and author Shaun Tan creates semi-mechanical, animal-like beings that seem born of both the natural world and industrious humans. Whimsical, cerebral, socially conscious, grotesque and cuddly, Tan’s artistic universe runs the emotional gamut. Creature: paintings, drawings and reflections is a comprehensive collection of Tan’s artwork from the past 25 years along with Tan’s essays on his creative practice and fascination with creatures. “As an artist, I’m interested in what you do when you come across something really, really strange and unfamiliar,” he told NPR, “whether it’s out of fear or escapism or curiosity and maybe even love, it’s really very revealing.” In 25 years, Tan has received numerous accolades, including an Oscar for short film The lost thingbased on his book of the same name, an American Library Association Best Books for Young Adults for his 2008 graphic novel The arrival and two Hugo Awards for Best Professional Artist. Tan’s admirers include fellow artist/illustrators Art Spiegelman, Neil Gaiman and Marjane Satrapi. Shaun Tan’s Wordless Graphic Novel The arrival traces the immigrant experience, including encounters with otherworldly creatures. Shaun Tan/Levine Querido Shaun Tan/Levine Querido Shaun Tan’s Wordless Graphic Novel The arrival traces the immigrant experience, including encounters with otherworldly creatures. Shaun Tan/Levine Querido They start as doodles Tan talks about his creations as if they had a mind of their own. He says he constantly draws in his sketchbooks, “It’s often just random and very playful, very absurd words and images.” But sometimes these “doodles”, as he calls them, become something more. In the case of The lost thinghe says it started with “just a small person on a beach having what looked like a philosophical conversation with a large crab-like metal creature”, Tan recalls, “the creature looked very scary and strange and she overshadowed that little person, but the person was not afraid.” “I thought, okay, what if you saw something really big and scary on the beach…and instead of avoiding it or running away, you climbed up and started to talk to him,” Shaun Tan told The lost thing. Shaun Tan/Levine Querido Shaun Tan/Levine Querido The human searches everywhere to find out where the thing is. No one else in town, including the human’s parents, seems to care. The lost thing is a kind of fable about apathy and belonging. The need to belong can be overstated Tan says the notion of belonging comes back “every time” he writes a story or paints a picture. “There’s this feeling that belonging can become a bit of a crisis. I mean, we don’t really question the concept. We see it as a kind of virtue. And we’re all looking for it,” he says, “but we don’t often wonder what exactly it is or if it’s always such a good thing.” “I think there’s something really special about the human ability to love non-human things and quite deeply,” artist and writer Shaun Tan told NPR. Levine Querido Levine Querido “I think there’s something really special about the human ability to love non-human things and quite deeply,” artist and writer Shaun Tan told NPR. Levine Querido In The lost thing, the human helps the giant metal crab-like creature find a place it wants to stay, some kind of home filled with other lost things. The narrator says, “I can’t say the thing actually belonged where it ended up. In fact, none of the things there really belonged. However, they all seemed quite happy, so can Maybe it didn’t matter.” tan wrote The lost thing early in his career when he doubted his works had a purpose. “It kind of tapped into something I felt at the time, in my mid-twenties, about wanting to be creative, but I wasn’t quite sure where I belonged and what the meaning of my work was,” said he told NPR, “And the story ended up being about all these things, what you do with meaningless work, and is that okay? And I came to realize it’s okay. Tan grew up in the outer suburbs of Perth, Western Australia, “which at the time was a bit of a derelict place on the coast. Very windy, sandy, sunny”. He says a combination of “boredom” and “playing in nature” inspired his artistic creation and came “to shape who I am and the way I think about things”. Tan’s fascination with birds began when he was around 11 years old. While walking in a local park, a small wattlebird fell from a tree right in front of him. In Creature he writes, “a deeper empathy drawn to attention, a deeper reality. A compassion that overrode all other thought with a sense of relatedness and purpose.” Tan writes that he brought the bird home and that he and his family cared for it. In his new book Creature, Tan devotes one of his essays to his fascination with birds. For this painting, titled Empire, he writes that he “imagines a wattlebird as some sort of ancestral spirit”. Shaun Tan/Levine Querido Shaun Tan/Levine Querido In his new book Creature, Tan devotes one of his essays to his fascination with birds. For this painting, titled Empire, he writes that he “imagines a wattlebird as some sort of ancestral spirit”. Shaun Tan/Levine Querido Draw for the company “I think there’s something really special about the human ability to love non-human things and quite deeply,” Tan told NPR. He says he’s always been interested in a creature “as a companion, not as an adversary or an antagonist or a threat or something scary and mysterious. But as someone sitting next to you” . In his illustration titled “I Know”, Tan imagines a faucet creature hugging a little girl. Tan says he says, “I don’t have a solution for you. I may not be able to help you, but I know how you feel. It seems a bit more poignant that it comes from an object almost inanimate.” In Shaun Tan’s world, even a faucet can be transformed into a companion creature. “It’s such a moving object for me,” he says, “the fact that water is flowing from it, you know, whether it’s some kind of tears or a food source.” Shaun Tan/Levine Querido