Whazamo! Profile: George A. Walker

Open Book is celebrating the outstanding graphic novels and comics published here in Ontario and throughout the country with Whazamo! profiles, contests, videos and a series of original literary comics curated by Vepo Studios. Check out Open Book's Whazamo! page all month long to keep up to date.

In today's Whazamo! profile, wood engraver and book artist George A. Walker describes his recent publications, his book-making process and the important link between images, imagination and creativity. His most recent trade publications, Book of Hours and a new edition of Alice's Adventure's in Wonderland, are published by The Porcupine's Quill.

Contest! Enter to win George Walker's Book of Hours and three other fantastic graphic novels from The Porcupine's Quill and Open Book. Click here for details.

Open Book:

What is your most recent publication, and what are five words you would use to describe it?

George Walker:

I have three new books that I would describe as: visual, narrative, cultural, ideographic and encoded.

I've just completed printing the limited edition of my new graphic novel The Mysterious Death of Tom Thomson. 39 copies are in this first hand-printed edition, and Porcupine's Quill has plans to print a trade edition in the future. Porcupine's Quill just published the Alice's Adventures in Wonderland I illustrated for the very rare Cheshire Cat limited edition (1988). This was the project that I first cut my chops learning how to engrave on wood, so it is close to my heart. Friends started calling me the Mad Hatter of Toronto after it was first published! The Cheshire Cat edition is remarkable for being the first Canadian edition of Lewis Carroll's famous story, and I am grateful to the Inksters for making it widely available.

My account of the hours before the attack on the World Trade Centre, Book of Hours, is a xylographic wordless narrative. The story follows a range of characters of the doomed towers in their last day and marks the hours of their quiet busy everyday activities at work, at home and in between. As with The Mysterious Death, I first made a hand-printed limited edition of Book of Hours, and the Inksters decided they would like to make a larger popularly priced edition. Porcupine's Quill books are always very beautiful and very closely related to hand-printed tomes I make as they use fine paper and bind them properly by sewing the books first. You can find out more here.

OB:

When you're working on a project, which comes first — the words or the images?

GW:

In Steven Pinker’s book The Language Instinct he says, "Physical scientists are even more adamant that their thinking is geometrical, not verbal" (70). We think in images first! That’s why we call it “imagination.” When we have a thought it is first a picture (abstract or representative), and then it is translated into our spoken language. I first imagine my image narratives in aspect-to-aspect progressions that are translated into scene-to-scene and action-to-action visual sequences. Words are another form of narrative translation that follows the mind's initial imaging process. I think Noam Chomsky would agree with this interpretation of the thinking process!

Two of my most recent books of course have no words at all as they are wordless narratives like the novels of Frans Masereel, Lynd Ward, Otto Nückel and Laurence Hyde.

OB:

What do you do to get the creative juices flowing?

GW:

I read, I look, I study and I contemplate — I actually suffer from inspiration over-stimulation and I am really seeking a method to stop the "juices flowing" and find the elusive state known as "silence"!

OB:

What does your work space look like?

GW:

A mess! Especially when I am working (which is most of the time). I have fits of cleaning and purging followed by intense absorption into the work.

You can see my studio here.

OB:

What medium do you most often work with?

GW:

I am a book artist — so I work in the forms relating to the Book. I make wood engravings and hand print the text and art on my letterpress (Vandercook SP15 proof press). I hand bind my books and then pitch my book ideas to publishers who can produce a popular priced edition of my limited-edition works of art.

OB:

Why do you think graphic novels are finally gaining popularity?

GW:

I like this quote from James Gleick’s new book, The Information: “Every new medium transforms the nature of human thought. In the long run history is the story of information becoming aware of itself.”

Graphic narratives never left us but have had a popularity that has waxed and waned since the invention of printing. What we call the "graphic novel" today has become popular in part because of the Baby Boomers coming of age and their nostalgia for reading comic books. The censoring of comic books in the 1950s and 1960s made the comic book a potent icon of generations in rebellion. Will Eisner led the way to a more mainstream acceptance in North America with his book A Contract with God, first published in the 1970s. The impact of Japanese Manga and Hollywood's adaptations of comic book characters fuelled the frenzy.

My personal theory, of course, is that we think in pictures and are magnetically drawn towards media that provides us with a visual level of reading. Think about the popularity of the invention of the graphic user interface (GUI) by Apple. But also don’t forget the lesson Lewis Carroll taught us over 115 years ago in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, “…and what is the use of a book," thought Alice, "without pictures or conversations?”

OB:

Who is your favourite graphic novelist?

GW:

Frans Masereel followed by Lynd Ward. Masereel is the father of the adult graphic novel — he didn’t need words to tell his story &mdsah; the grammar of pictures is polylingual.

OB:

Where can we find more of your work?

GW:

On my website, www.george-walker.com, and at The Porcupine's Quill.

George A. Walker is an award-winning wood engraver, book artist, teacher, author and illustrator who has been creating artwork and books and publishing at his private press since 1984. Walker’s popular courses in book arts and printmaking at the OCAD University in Toronto, where he is Associate Professor, have been running continuously since 1985. For over 20 years Walker has exhibited his wood engravings and limited-edition books internationally, often in conjunction with The Loving Society of Letterpress (and The Binders of Infinite Love) and the Canadian Bookbinders and Book Artists Guild (CBBAG). Among many book projects, Walker has illustrated two hand-printed books written by author Neil Gaiman. Walker also is the illustrator of the first Canadian editions of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland (recently republished by The Porcupine's Quill) and Alice Through the Looking-Glass books (Cheshire Cat Press). He was elected to the Royal Canadian Academy of Art for his contribution to the cultural area of Book Arts. Find out more at his website, www.george-walker.com.

A preview of the new edition of Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland is available here.

For more information about Book of Hours and other books by George Walker please visit the Porcupine's Quill website.

Buy this book at your local independent bookstore or online at Chapters/Indigo or Amazon.