Artwork Title: From ‘Fog Island’

From ‘Fog Island’

Tomi Ungerer

Ungerer’s “children’s” books are as bleak as the gloomiest adult novel. They eschew the anodyne didacticism of feel-good classics like Goodnight Moon to take up graver themes: in Fog Island, a pair of children venture onto an island from which no one has returned alive, where the cliffs recall the steep crags in Arnold Böcklin’s The Isle of Death and the rocks have human faces.... Ungerer’s stories and their illustrations are dark, haunting, and strange, and their oneirism is captivating. They have the foreign but familiar quality of dreams: lurking beneath their strangeness is a deeper sense of recognition. “As a child I was fascinated by darkness. I was always scared and thrilled by it. You’re scared and thrilled by darkness as a child because you cannot define things, and I think darkness is closer to fantasy than light,” Ungerer once said. The shadowy drawings in Fog Island and The Three Robbers give expression to this primal fantasy of opacity, to our longing for a pre-theoretical and prelinguistic sensibility. (https://hyperallergic.com/175503/from-creepy-kids-books-to-puckish-erotica-an-illustrators-improbable-oeuvre/)
Uploaded on Apr 22, 2017 by Suzan Hamer

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