Illustration: The Cinderella Art-form

"Saturday Evening Post" cover by Norman Rockwell 1922


Here's a reminder of the talk I will be giving to-morrow evening.
I hope to be able to record and podcast it at some future date for anyone who can't get along.

"Illustrator PJ Lynch will give a lecture entitled Illustration: The Cinderella Art-form at The National Print Museum in Dublin, on Thursday 3rd December 2009 at 7.30pm. Admission is free.

He will discuss how in the area of children’s books, authors are generally, and thoughtlessly privileged over illustrators. And how in the visual arts arena, illustration is very often categorized as being at best, a lesser, junior art-form, and, at worst some sort of low brow craft, tainted by commercial motivations. Lynch asks if the boundaries between disciplines are breaking down, and whether contemporary illustrators can rise above the limits imposed by tired old definitions."

Profile of PJ Lynch from the BBC's "The Hungry Eye"

Here is a short BBC film, directed by Maeve O Cathain about my early books.
Made in the mid-nineties, it features my work on The Snow Queen, Catkin and East of the Sun and West of the Moon.
I was living and working in a basement apartment in Dublin at that time. The only heating was an open fire, and most of the smoke came into the living room, so that for the time I lived there I was always pretty unhealthy. I certainly look unhealthy in the film.
My landlady was the writer Polly Devlin. She is an extra-ordinary, larger than life character.
I came to know Polly's sister, Marie Heaney, and her husband the poet Seamus Heaney. Some years later I illustrated a book of Marie's Irish myths and legends, The Names Upon The Harp.