Legends is Victoria’s comic-book shop for true believers. The art show I visited this week is in a tiny back room there.
The walls have been covered with brown paper, and a bevy of original watercolours is posted with push pins. Most are priced from $25 to $200. These bare facts give no indication of the wonderful talent of their creator, Renée Nault.
Nault was born in Vancouver and came to Victoria at age 12. She decamped to Toronto for a four-year session in the illustration program at Sheridan College. At that time, all her courses were studio courses and were taught by practising professional illustrators.
She was soon launched into the illustration world in Toronto, and before long had an agent in Los Angeles. In the following years, almost all of her professional work was created for American clients, in particular the Los Angeles Times.
Illustrators always draw out other people’s ideas, but of course she didn’t get into the field to become a hack. Nault dreamed her dreams in comic panels, where she could cut loose and let her own ideas flow. Her self-published full-colour, illustrated story, Witchlings, is indicative of where those ideas led.
After graduation, Nault travelled, when funds permitted. She went to Europe and to Africa, but it was the time she spent in Japan that made a lasting impression.
During four months in Tokyo, she saw the world of Manga up close, and also met artists whose standards were higher and more challenging than comic books. At the same time, she developed an appreciation for Japanese woodcut prints, in particular the winsome beauties of the 1920s.
Naturally, she’s a plugged-in person of the modern age. You have to be, if you’re going to have an international career and live in Victoria. But she does not use the keyboard for illustration.
“I didn’t become an artist to sit at a computer all day,” she laughed. In fact, she is thoroughly “old school” — a quill pen and a bottle of ink is what Nault uses, a rarity in the digital age. She recalled art directors who, in recent years, were amazed to be sent a … piece of paper with ink and colours on it! As you’ll see in this exhibition, she prefers the effect of real watercolour washes on 100 per cent cotton paper.
We talked about influences, and she named the enduring inspiration of Arthur Rackham and Edmund Dulac, masters of the Golden Age of the illustrated book. Those artists broke upon the scene about a century ago, and their works are still with us.
And she has an appreciation for the advertising art of the 1960s, the last great age of magazine illustration. Since then, photography has supplanted the pen and brush, and there just aren’t that many magazines being published in Canada these days.
In fact, Nault rarely practises her art in newspapers and magazines, and almost never in the art galleries. She is fully absorbed in the realm of the graphic novel. Two years ago, the artist was contacted by a major publisher who commissioned her to create the graphic novel of Margaret Atwood’s A Handmaid’s Tale. It’s a fully painted 250-page marathon, and she has been working away on it diligently ever since. Her deadline is December of this year, and the book will be published in the fall of 2017.
I assumed she is backed up by a huge team at the publishing house. She surprised me by saying that she had written the treatment of the novel herself. It was her first try at such a thing and, to her amazement, the publisher accepted it almost without change.
Other than that adaptation, and all the paintings for which she is responsible, her publisher will bring in a special “letterer” of the text, necessary because the book will be published simultaneously in many languages. The public reaction when it comes out is likely to be a life-changing experience for this 35-year-old artist, I would venture.
If you look online you’ll find plenty of Nault’s work. At Legends, the exhibition walls are a patchwork papered with choice pages: goddesses and divas from the finny Mermaid calendar of 2016; panels from her graphic novel Witchlings; original illustrations created for national publications; and particularly charming pieces of her preparatory work, unself-conscious portrayals of characters from her imagination. The current show at Legends offers a rare experience to see work from all phases of her career, not behind glass, and available for sale.
Nault’s self-portrait is in the show. She’s pensive and a little gaunt. In her hands she is nestling a timid animal, which seems to be a bunny with antlers and a hedgehog’s coat of artichoke scales. There is the presence of power nestled in a whiplash line of Nault’s hair and the leaves that fall around her. And more than a hint of mystery in the dragon that inhabits the background.
While we are on the subject, Nault and I share an admiration for the paper-cut and painted people of Morgana Warren. By coincidence, Warren’s show opened Aug. 26 at Madrona Gallery (606 View St., 250-380-4660) and continues to Sept. 9. People who enjoy one will certainly enjoy the other, and they are within a block of one another. These are two very talented local artists.
Renée Nault at Legends Comics and Books (633 Johnson St., 250-388-3696), until Sept. 1.
