I'm actually more attracted by just making things in three dimensions and toys and games. I reckon in another life I could have been an industrial designer and been happier, or as happy, if not as successful.

Graeme Base: Toy Engineer
Melbourne

Graeme Base is a musician, toy-maker, and rehabilitated advertising creative who has authored books that have defined several generations’ experiences with the written word and drawn universe.

Actually, while most well-adjusted ten year olds were taking in the story and fantasy of Animalia and subsequent stories, I was wondering how this Graeme guy could create a universe where everything on the page was some type of magic liquid, and spent the better part of that time with my face pressed against the details of the pages, discovering matte, shine, specular highlights, and the language of tone through the images.

So it was a special kind of “meta” to edit these portraits of the artist that gave me that vocabulary of what made up the details of an image, some 30 years ago.

I spent a morning with Graeme and wife Robyn waxing lyrical on creativity and transition.

Some of the things you’ve made are responsible for being the backdrop of a large amount of childhoods worldwide. You’ve got a creative history spanning illustration, music, and now toy construction. Talk me through your relationship with the romance of the recluse in creating things early on, and how that’s changed shape when compared with what you’re creating now.

I never wanted to be a writer as a child.

I was always going to be an artist.

But, I wrote so that I could control what I illustrated.

And then Animalia happened, and sort of carved out my niche.

So, I just kept doing it: I had this enormous amount of control over my creativity and had no collaborative impulses. That, to me, would be a come down: not being able to do what I wanted.

So, I was very selfish in a lot of ways with my art.

Even to the extent that collaborating with an editor, I find agonizing. It's like pitched warfare, these poor editors, and they're really good at their job, and there's no lack of fondness. But my instinctive reaction to anyone, whenever they say, "Oh had you thought about this, or what about that?" is, “No, I have thought about that, and I've decided this.”

I really think in great detail about everything that I create.  

So, that comma wasn't just there because it just fell out of my fingers. I decided on a colon, rather than a comma, rather than a dash, or not using that word because I was going to use it three pages later here.

Because it did the job better.

And so, it's not that I was right and that couldn't be improved; I'm not so egotistical that I don't think I'm perfect.

But it was the need to express in that collaborative moment, that I've already thought of it.

The pure artist doesn't ask their gallerist, or their public, or their patron, "What do you think, do you like this, do you like that? Would you like it to be blue or red, or shall I make it higher or lower?”

In collaboration, there's the need to compromise that I just never had to deal with when I was young and starting off. And I think now, I'm really bad at it as a result. Ten to five years ago, I would have said I'm just chronically unable to work with other people.

I think I've mellowed, to tell you the truth.

The cost, is that you probably missed out on a hell of a lot of good fun and creative growth that you get from a really good collaboration.

For some years after the initial, “I'm going to be an artist when I grow up” trope, it was music. I just did art because somebody paid me to do the stuff. But really, it was the music that was driving me forward creatively, and yet I managed to completely cock it up by not being able to collaborate.

So yeah, double-edged sword.

I'd play everything – drums, bass, guitar and the vocals. So, I'd come out and then I'd say to the drummer, “Here’s the feel, and here's the guitar, and here's the riff.” And they'd just start doing something else.

When I was young, I wouldn't say, "Hey that's fine.” I wasn't flexible. I’d say, "No, no, I wanted the kick on three," or, "This is the line and you're not playing it long enough.”

So, I destroyed the band.

I really did.

The band died in the end because of exactly that problem I had of not being able to let other people have their creativity.

And yeah, I missed out. I actually screwed that up badly. I've recognised that for a long, long time.

The thing is I didn't fail by doing it with art. With art, it actually worked for me and continued to. I called the shots and it's been a good career.

As an artist now, what have you kept from that early bullish-ness, and where has it lead now ideologically?

The absence of line, and the absence of detail: it's something that in both music and art, I've constantly struggled with over my career. I'm always doing pictures where every corner, there's space to put something else.

Too much detail.

The same with my early compositions, musically.

Seventeen ideas, and I'd use all of them.

It was impenetrable because I didn't understand that if I had just written the song with just a guitar and a mic and somebody's beautiful voice, it would have been so much better than all of this big orchestral, trying to lift it and so forth – detail. It's taken a long time. I stopped playing music earlier than necessary for me to change my ways.

With my art, I have actually now made the transition.

My favourite picture in my book Eye to Eye is the one when the main character goes way down into the depths of the ocean and comes eye to eye with a whale, a blue whale. It's all sea. It's just a big blueness. There's just a whale, and there's a little minisub.

You don't see any other detail.

There's another one in The Legend of the Golden Snail – plenty of pictures, with lots going on. My favourite one is this picture where it's just an ocean. It's the best picture in the book.

I've learned that now.

Those are my ‘guitar-and-vocals’ pictures where I just understood it's great as it is.

I think I would have, in another life, as I say, been an industrial designer. Something to do with form and problem solving. It all comes down to that: problem solving.

Whether it's a story, and how to divide it up into bite-sized pieces for a picture book, text, or an illustration; and how to tell three parts of a story in one static image or a piece of music; and how to segway effectively from the verse to the chorus without it getting boring; and going up to another key without it seeming obvious, you know.

All of those things are problem solving.

Finding clever ways of achieving an end, effortlessly.

Or, making a toy, which one day somebody will play with and couldn't even begin to imagine the thought that has to go into the most fundamental and the finest element of it.

Finding the best possible way of making something work beautifully in everything. Creatively and practically.

As someone so detail-orientated, and leaning into a craft with more precision requirements than say, illustration or music, how has your relationship changed with “stuff not working”.

(With kids) you can see a mile off it's going to fail, but you let them fail anyway. I can't do it. And I know it's been a problem with my own kids that I was, "No, wait, wait, wait. Better way of doing that is this.”

And it's wrong.

I've got to let them cock it up first and then go and say, "Well you might have a go at this, try this".

But I can't. I jump in first because I want to fix it.

I'm a Mr. fix it. That used to be the joke name that my family would call me, here comes Mr fix it. Whenever anything goes wrong in the house, I’ll happy spend far more time than it's worth trying to fix it and finding a way of fixing it.

When I go over to friend's places, before we sit down and have a cup of coffee they say, "Oh the handle's fallen off the fridge,” or, “It's wobbling here, can you fix that?” Because they just know that I love doing it, and I wouldn't rest until I could. Even if it was just a tiny 20 cent, throwaway item.

"You know what? If I got a piece of ... and then drilled this in there and so forth, I could fix it.”

That's a great sense of satisfaction.

I have this real problem with optimization in everything I do. If there's a really good way of doing something, it really irritates me if I make a mistake and don't do it that way.

The word curmudgeon seems to come up a lot know when people are talking about me.

The grumpy old bastard thing.

It becomes a triteness, but they all happen to start with P.

Passion, it’s what gets you started, what gets you up in the morning, and it leads to practice, which may get you better. A lot of it is hard work, perspiration if you like; perseverance, seeing it through; and patience.  

All of those things don't mean anything if you don't actually finish. You can start some. You can get half-way through, three-quarters through, nine-tenths done, and if you just don't slog it out and get it finished, it was all for nothing.

Emotionally, for yourself, for your audience, for your bank balance – nothing.

Wipe it off.

I'm absolutely driven by completion.

My problem is emotional. It's like, if I don't finish this, I've just been wasting my time, and I couldn't bear that. I remember in college, I wasn't the best kid in the class, but I was the most consistent. There were kids who did clever solutions to these design problems and brilliant little moments of genius.

I never had those, ever, not once. 

This isn't false modesty.

It wasn't in me to do that, but I never missed a deadline.

I never didn't get it finished, whereas these other guys would get triple-A and then totally not even deliver the next project because they've had a problem, and they crashed out.

I was always B-plus, but absolutely consistent.

I suppose maybe that's a bit of a work ethic thing going on there. Maybe I'm old enough that my parents postwar work ethic rubbed off on me. It's absolutely fundamental to what I do.

The masochistic postwar attitude to work and completion is an interesting thing. I’m curious about the intersection of that, and the “fear of the grind” that seems innate to lots of creatives who are more allergic to doing a 9-5 grind for someone else than a 7am-midnight for themselves.

Fresh out of college, I did a graphic design course, commercial art. I just thought, well I love drawing, and if I can make a decent amount of money doing it, that'd be pretty good.

So commercial art it was.

I got out, I got a job. Didn't much like it, went away for a year, came back, got another job. Didn't like that, got another job. And then, I was called into the owner's office, a tiny little design studio, and he just said, "I'm going to have to let you go, Graeme.” 

And my initial response internally was to whoop with joy that I wouldn't have to come back after lunch and keep doing this shit.  

But I didn't actually let that out. I just said, "Oh okay, why?" It seemed like a decent question. And he said absolutely deadpan and straight to me, "Because you're destroying my business.”

I went, "That's cool, I hate it too.”

So, I was gone.

Robin and I were dating at that time, and we were heading out for lunch. I was just in this brilliant mood, and it was getting close to the time where I had to go back to work, and she was saying, "Gee you better get back pretty soon." I just said, "I'm not going back, I just got fired.” And she went, "what?" I said, "yeah I feel great, it's fantastic!"

So that was a wonderful moment. It wasn't fear of the grind, it was being ejected.

And I haven't had a proper job since.

I go on holiday, and everyone else goes swimming, and I sit by the pool and sit by the side and draw and think and plan and you know, the hours on the plane just go past, Robin watches movies, I draw, I think, I work out the next thing.  

Never switched off.

Whenever the work's there or whenever the inspiration's there, that's when you do it. James actually, when he was young used to get pissed off because I was always working. I know I should get down there and sort of, you know, throw the ball and do stuff like that.

Always available, and never available. It's this strange dichotomy, it's both. You've got me all the time, but not all of me.

I think it's probably pretty close to the secret of happiness. If you find something that you love that you absolutely have to do, and if it's also what you can do, and are supposed to do, and get paid to do, that's a gift. Not that I believe in gifts, but it's just a nice thing to have happen in your life that you're not just trying to find time to live and to do what's fundamental and central to your being.

It's just you get up intending to do that every day.

There's a lot of artists where it's just this happy confluence of those two things: artistic integrity, which is also commercial. And I think somebody who actually suffers from that (and this is a tiny sob story), it’s Steven Spielberg.

He just does what he does naturally and it's very, very commercial. And yet, he's panned for it because he's too commercial! “It can't be art, if it's commercial.”

I met him once, but I couldn't pretend to know whether it worries Spielberg that the Oscars and gongs have sort of eluded him. I'm sure he would rather have created things which were honest to his creativity. Love it or hate it, the credible thing is, it's what comes out of his head naturally. I'm sure of that. I don't think that it's something where he's not angling for anything, other than getting the ideas from his head onto film, like I do with my books.

I did enormously well because I think I am a commercial beast. I think every artist I suppose, with very few exceptions – every musician, every artist – wants people to see or hear what they've done. Very few people just do it for their own (gratification)... I suppose if they do it totally for themselves, it all just comes down to therapy, rather than art.

There’s a heavy systemic resistance to allowing young people to gain access to careers that they might see themselves in, due to that system not being up-to-date with the options.

I remember an interview that Harry James Angus from Cat Empire gave, which really resonated with me. He said that when he was a kid, music was everything for him, and he did one of those aptitude tests, like they do, where they say, "Oh, you'd make a good accountant. You would make a good lawyer."

When it came through to him, it didn't say musician.

It said, “music teacher.”

And when he dug down into it, musician wasn't even an option.

It wasn't part of what the algorithm could give you. The closest it could give was music therapist, music historian, music teacher, but not musician.

Now how is that, for not recognising that that was a viable career path? Music, to whomever wrote that program, was something you did in your spare time.

It was a hobby.

It wasn't a career.

I was terribly lucky that I didn't have parents who were aspirational for me to get a house, get a job, tow the line sort of thing. You know, succeed, as they saw it. They were just wanting me to be happy, I think.

With kids in education now… when I'm in a position where I have to say something, what I try to leave them with is that dreams can come true. It's all these trite things to say, but it's absolutely true that if you are driven to kick that footie, or to add up the row of figures, or write what I did in the holidays, or draw that picture of something straight out of your head, it's absolutely possible to make that your life's work. 

When I'm talking, I'm talking as much to the parents and teachers in the room as I am to the kids.

Sometimes I say that.

I say, "actually, I hope you're listening because this is what my parents did for me. If you can do that for your kids, if there is room in your circumstances…"

And sometimes I'm talking to schools where there isn't (those same possibilities). I've done some talks in China where I just know there isn't that option. These are poor kids in tiny state schools, and if they can just get through school and get a job, they'll be lucky.

So, I temper it a bit.

But generally speaking, Australia, the luckiest damn place you could possibly finish out in a school here, there is that largess, that leeway to try to follow your dreams.  

It doesn't mean you're not going to have to work just as hard or harder than anyone else, but if it's what you love, it just doesn't feel like work — it's joy. Nothing better than what you could possibly hope for, than doing what you love and it being your work.

So, I just tell kids, "yeah, it is possible. It is possible. You can do it."

True possibility.

I've always wanted to be an artist.

Here I am, doing it.

Can't believe my luck.

I remember thinking for a long time, I always was thinking, the phone's going to ring; it's going to be somebody ringing up to tell me, "Nope! It's all over. Go get a proper job. This is play time."

Yes, but then I'm back to play time now. This is play time. This is a joy.

"I wasn't the best kid in the class but I was the most consistent. There were kids who had clever solutions to these design problems and brilliant little moments of genius. I never had those, ever, not once. This isn't false modesty. It wasn't in me to do that, but I never missed a deadline. "

Graeme Base