Illustrator and children's book author Elise Hurst has the gift of an unassuming little A5 moleskin sketchbook to thank for the heroine of her exquisite new book Adelaide's Secret World (Allen and Unwin). It's a story designed to appeal as much to adults as children about the difficulty of reaching out to others and making connections, and it's being launched this weekend as part of Elise's second solo show at QV's No Vacancy Gallery in Melbourne, which runs from 11-22 November. The exhibition showcases the sumptuous oil paintings through which Adelaide's story is told. Like all the evocative, surreally anthropomorphic, richly detailed stories, prints and cards Elise has produced over the past decade or so, it grew from the seeds of her incredible pint-sized sketchbooks.
Elise is the daughter of a painter in a family brimming with keen amateur artists. She grew up doodling and drawing characters on anything she could find, announced her intention to become an artist in early primary school, and found classroom fame via a series of unflattering caricatures of teachers she hid in secret compartments in her folders. "People get paid money for them now," she says. "Big noses, big ears, strange expressions. From a fairly early age I drew to get a reaction from people around me. I love showing stuff if I think it's worked out alright. Otherwise I quickly cover it up and don't let people see it until I've managed to fix it."
Elise accumulated a few sketchbooks by late high school. "In year 12 I used to sit up on the roof at my parents' house and try and do landscapes, which felt daring," she recalls. "They weren't very good, but it was fun sitting up on the roof." Mostly, though, she preferred drawing "on school books and corners of things, probably like every kid does," she says. Even into adulthood the pristine pages of sketchbooks induced in her a pressure to succeed rather than permission to play. "Sketchbooks are beautiful but there can be a lot of stress in them as well that I find I don't have with doodling. So I have to kind of work around my own peculiar insecurities to be able to really enjoy working in them."
The moleskin journal that changed the course of her life was given to Elise on the eve of a trip to Paris with her husband Peter about 10 years ago. True to her primary school word she had carved out a career for herself as a freelance illustrator - a jack of all trades who for 13 years sustained a punishing schedule working seven days a week and evenings (with a half-day off for Christmas!) churning out everything from educational series to other authors' children's books. She had fallen early and hard for the classic freelancer trap of not know when to say now, habitually over-committing herself, and never scheduling recovery time between projects. It was an exhilarating and exhausting way to work, and it left her with no time to draw for pure, personal pleasure. Worse still, perhaps, she had been adapting her style to fit the perceived need of each new project for so long she really wasn't sure what her unique, natural style really was.
The freedom of a holiday and hours spent in cafes doodling in her little sketchbook reconnected Elise to the bliss of drawing for no one but herself. With time and space for her unconscious mind to play she found herself lost in drawings inspired by whatever intriguing characters, streetscapes or events she happened to spy from her window seat. "Just being in that altered place, that altered state, you have to walk away from work - although I know I was working as well, I was finishing a book - and so to take a sketchbook with you when you're travelling is great," she says. "I often don't put much in it, but you're in the right zone, you're in a different frame of mind altogether.
"You have to switch everything else off," she says. "I like to go to a cafe so that the busy part of my brain that worries about what I should be doing and making lists of jobs and thinking about times and dates gets occupied by the hum around me. And then I can just look out the window and dream and start drawing. I find it hard to do at home, even now. I still spend too much money in cafes."
One of her first drawings was actually at Montmartre Cemetery - a loose a pencil sketch of a graveside statute:
...but what began to emerge in the days after were radically different and a world away from the brightly coloured oil colour paintings she'd been producing for many years:
Intricately rendered black and white scenes unfolded on page after page - rich with finely observed period details, ornately patterned interiors, evocative lighting, and intriguing little characters whose stories seem somehow suspended in time.
Elise returned to these images again and again, adding layers of detail, personal symbolism, and increasingly surreal settings. Eventually she realised that what her subconscious mind was doing, given time to play at last, was producing fragments of characters and stories she could use in any way she chose. Many from that first sketchbook went on to appear in the first book she wrote as well as illustrated, The Night Garden.
On her return home to Australia Elise bought another little moleskin, and then another and another. In the years since she has filled each to bursting with ideas and scenes and characters - strange moments in time she returns to again and again, reworking and refining over months and years.
She has learned to be patient and return to images only as their stories gradually make themselves known to her:
Her judicious use of spot colour often transforms a scene completely:
Once Elise cut back her unwieldy work schedule to focus on those projects she felt truly passionate about, more stories of her own emerged. The influence of her sketches is plain to see in her sublime Imagine a City:
...and now in Adelaide's Secret World:
It's fascinating to discover that in her early sketches Elise envisaged the main characters as humans, rather than a rabbit and a fox:
Overcoming her earlier aversion to sketchbooks took time and the odd mind game or two. "I actually found it really hard using these sketchbooks for the first time because they're very special and they're very pretty, and so I actually had to overcome a fear that I had that you don't have when you're doodling on fractions of paper (that are) already imperfect to start with," Elise says. "So the hard thing I found about picking up these moleskins is that they're beautiful and it was all this pressure to not screw it up. And so I have to start in the middle. I can never start on the first page, that's an absolute no-no. In fact I often don't have anything on the first page except a phone number in case I lose it, because I desperately want it back.
Maintaining the sense of agenda-less play so central to the success of these sketchbooks is an ongoing challenge. "One of the problems I've got now is because I use so many of the images for cards and prints and things like that, I find myself sometimes thinking about what this picture could be used for as I'm doing it. It's like throwing a bucket of cold water over your head. It's just takes all the fun out of it while you're drawing. So I have to try and really keep it all about just free-form doodling and not having an agenda."
Like so many busy professional artists Elise still struggles to make time for this languid creative play, which comes so naturally when she's travelling. But she sees it now as absolutely essential to her practice. "I learned over time to acknowledge that this was actually an important part of my work, it just didn't directly translate into a book," she says. "I didn't understand until I'd done it that it is actually essential if you want to grow your own career, and have a style, and have something that you can do that no one else can do, you have to give yourself this time just to experiment and actually develop."
"Some of that can happen through work but with illustration it's so directed that it's very hard for it to happen through work. You know what you need to be doing every time you put your pencil on the paper. There's parts of your brain that just aren't used, that are used exclusively when you're doing this kind of stuff."
Anything can become a source of inspiration for the sketchbooks - the corner of an old building, a dog tied to a post, or people she spots who already look like they've already stepped out of a children's book. Characters and details she's drawn to again and again sometimes wind their way into a narrative that plays out inside her head over many years, to which she necessarily brings her own experiences and preoccupations. A mass of swirling clouds she found herself sketching often took 10 years to eventually weave into a book.
These days her sketchbooks function as "fragments of stories", Elise says. "I focus on narrative ideas, but instead of having to make sense of an idea and flesh it out and have lots of different moments of that idea ... it's like I've leapt into the most interesting, exciting, surreal bit of a narrative.
"So you start with that thing you see, which might be somebody standing there or the corner of a building and you start drawing it then you look for the story in the scene, or around that person. Ideas will just slowly come and you start drawing them and it just builds and builds. And you're always looking for that strange thing that just seems to shift it, so that you don't quite understand what's happening. .Just something that's out of place, something that's off-kilter."
For many artists the act of sketching in the moment is an end in itself. They barely look at the results again, much less mine them for years to come. But for Elise these little worlds are ongoing sources of sustenance. "I'm building a bank of ideas and thoughts and bits of stories and they give me so much pleasure," she says. "And I really like revisiting them. When I flick through one of these sketchbooks it's like taking a trip down memory lane of a life I didn't have."
Delve into more of Elise's incredible work at http://www.elisehurst.com/ or check out her exhibition at QV's No Vacancy Gallery, 34-40 Jane Bell Lane, Melbourne http://no-vacancy.com.au/
