Kristina Swarner Interview - Magazine TM
Full edited transcript below
Photograph by Sara Rose
A Thriving Vision
Magazine TM Interview with Kristina Swarner
I’m Kristina Swarner. She/her. I graduated from RISD in illustration. I mainly work on children’s books. For the last year, I’ve been trying to work more on my own stuff. I’ve sort of given myself a sabbatical type year, and done a lot of paintings. Mediums that I usually use (recently) are collage and risograph. Yeah, so it’s kind of branching off. I’m sort of in a new place right now, you know?
When I was a kid, my parents had a lot of art books around and I was always, like, laying on my stomach on the floor looking at art books and I just thought they were so cool. The first time my parents took me to the Art Institute, I think I was about three or four years old. I just said, “I’m going to be an artist.” My parents were like, ha ha ha, that’s cute. I’m like, no, I’m really going to be an artist. The one painting, one of the paintings, I just always was so fascinated by was La Primavera, by Botticelli. There’s just so much to look at. It was like going into this other world and you weren’t quite sure what was happening. I know it’s allegorical and you know, obviously I didn’t know about allegory ‘cause I was a kid. Who are these people and why is she smiling, and why are they dancing and, you know. It’s a very absorbing painting. It was in one of the books that my family had. It’s in the Uffizi in Florence.
There were two things really that affected me growing up, and I know I’ve talked to you about this before, but one was my grandparents house where I spent a lot of time was in the country and I used to just spend a lot of time exploring these sort of mysterious woods and ponds and like swamps and things, and that sort of sank into my psyche. Then also I have very, very vivid dreams, as you know, and sometimes I will dream paintings -I’ll have a very detailed dream about a painting and how it should look. Yeah, the two things kind of come together and I sort of try to recreate the world I’m in. So with exploring nature, and dreaming, it’s this other world I feel like I get into when making art, and I try to bring that forth in my artwork.
Yes, that worked out kind of funny. It was Chronicle Books, and the book was Yiddish Wisdom, which was some translations of Yiddish sayings, and I had sent the art director a little booklet I’d made of some illustrations I’d been working on. I sent them to her in the mail, and she wrote me a handwritten letter back saying “I love them. I put them on my computer so I’ll remember you.”
Then I heard from her again about a week later saying, “Oh I just saw your illustration in Utne Reader magazine, [which is now defunct.] I would love for you to work on this book”. It was my first book, and I was so overjoyed I went into the bathroom and looked in the mirror and just burst into tears.
No, Chronicle were so good to work with. What I sometimes like to do when I’m illustrating is to take images I’ve done previously out of my sketchbook, and work them into the assignment, because I don’t, I don’t really like working from, a, what’s the word, a, constricted sort of way. I had a lot of images in my sketchbook that were very easily adaptable to the proverbs in the book, and they loved them. They were very open to my ideas. Yeah, it was a great experience.
Let’s see, I had taken a lot of printmaking courses at RISD. When I graduated, I no longer had access to a press or any facilities. So I was trying to sort of simulate that look with drawing, and it wasn’t really working for me. Because part of the reason I love printmaking so much is the surprise. When you lift the paper up, it’s always a surprise. I realized I could do linoleum prints on my own without a press, and I was so excited one night that I got some linoleum, and I didn’t have any cutters, so I sharpened the ends of pen nibs and stuck them in a cork, and I carved like seven or eight little prints and printed them. Then I painted over them with watercolors just to see how it would look, and I was really pleased with the result, and that’s actually what ended up being the booklet that I sent to Chronicle Books that got me the job, yeah. I had done watercolor over ink and all kinds of things, but I had not done it over a print before. It just called for it. I don’t know. I just thought, okay, this is a black and white print and I don’t have any red ink and this needs to be red and this needs to be, like, whatever. So it just, you know, it did what I needed it to do.
It was pretty natural. It just evolved. Then after a while, when I started making more books, I realized some of the techniques I was using weren’t as conducive to looking good in print, so I had to sort of change some of the blues or, you know, use less colored pencil. It wasn’t how I wanted the final painting to look, but it made it easier to look good in print, for a book.
Yeah, that was such a great project to get. I grew up reading that book, and I already had visualized basically the entire book, in my head, so when it came time to do the illustrations, it was almost as easy as breathing to make the sketches and the characters and everything, even like the little details, like what was on the shelves and the wallpaper, everything. It just came out of me very naturally.
It was fun too, because they had the little pop-up thing at the back. So I got to help engineer that a little. It was so fun to see when the printed copy came to me, opening it, and the little tree coming up. (Which I had to make) in sections. It was basically almost an origami box, but in sections. I did, like five or six sections of the tree and interlaced them. I just did the separate parts and the designer did all the putting together.
I know a lot of people reading that book, wish they could find a key and go into the secret garden, you know, it’s just a wonderful idea. My mother had a really big garden when I was growing up. She was a great gardener. I was very familiar with the way a garden looks when it was thriving and when it was dead in the winter. I used to - like Mary in the story - I used to like going out in the winter and kind of scrabbling around and seeing if I could see the tulips starting to come up or anything. When I was illustrating the book I even thought about how it smelled, the smell of the dirt. It was just, again, very visceral for me, to imagine going into that walled garden and everything being dormant but a few things are starting to come to life, you know?
Well, I had been to England, and there’s obviously some great gardens there, like, Sissinghurst Castle has this enormous garden and walled garden, and all kinds of things, and I was probably sort of influenced by that as well, because they do have big walled garden you can go in, filed with vines, and you name it. It feels very English, it doesn’t feel like a garden would here.
Yes, it was like he was repressing, repressing everything (the uncle in Secret Garden). When I drew him in the book, there’s one scene where I made him very large in the foreground, just surrounded by books, she’s coming in the doorway to talk to him about asking for a bit of earth, like she wants a little garden, and he’s, he’s just looking like almost like a wall in the foreground and she’s coming in. Then later in the book, he does sort of relax and go into the garden after they get it blooming and everything. I did want to portray him, and the garden… Everything is repressed at first. Like, the garden is just like a wall in the first picture of the garden, it’s just basically a wall with her outside it.
Yeah. I was always more struck by his treatment of his son than I was by the garden, like just stuffing him in this corridor where nobody can go.
Yeah, it’s sad (but it sounds like they came around in the end, right?) They did, they did.
Obviously I am very proud of my first books. My first book for adults was Yiddish Wisdom. My first book for children was Before You Were Born by Roaring Brook Press. I was proud of both of those, and an illustration from Before You Were Born was chosen for a show in the Eric Carle Museum.
My more recent stuff, I’ve been very excited about and I’m very proud of that too. It’s not so much children’s book oriented, but it’s very exciting to me.
It’s funny, but the art, the artists I like, I don’t emulate their work. Like, they speak to me somehow, but I don’t try to make my art look like their art at all. I was talking with you, I think the last time I saw you about Shiko Munakata and Robert Coutelas, who’s a French outsider painter. Joseph Cornell, I love because he’s got the same thing I always strive for, which is, it draws you in. It’s introspective art, it doesn’t come out to you - you go into it. Kiki Smith. Maira Kalman, I love her illustrations. Lately, I’ve just been trying anything that’s like music, movies, you name it, as long as it’s not depressing.
She was wonderful (Shay Youngblood). She was a good, good friend, an amazing woman. She was a playwright, a novelist, a very, very vibrant person. When I first met her on a Zoom call, she read, I’d already read the manuscript for that book, but she read it aloud. It was breathtaking. It came from her heart. And she was very o pen to my interpretation of the story. She was so wonderful. I really, I really do miss her. It is a happy story though - it’s a story of celebration and gratitude. And I have gratitude for it. She’s someone who would celebrate her birthday every day.
The immense amount of thinking that goes into it. Like, they don’t see me out on a walk thinking about it or staring out the window thinking about it or lying in bed at night thinking about it. Because it’s like, if you drew a pie chart of my brain, I would probably say in at least 75 percent of it, I’m just thinking about art in some form. That doesn’t show where things are coming from. They don’t see that.
My whole life, I’ve had very vivid dreams and sometimes I’m awakened to not be sure if I had dreamt something or actually experienced something. They’re just so filled with imagery and I’ll wake up and I’m like, oh, I have to draw that. not anything I could have thought of while conscious and awake.
It just comes naturally. A lot of times it doesn’t make sense to draw the entire dream, so I’ll just make a distillation of the dream.
