François Place: Illustrator – France

I am at ease working with liquid mediums, ink, watercolour, aquarelle [...] I look for a sort of writing of the image, a sort of written image […] Then I start again and again, in order to reach this quality of the free line, as if I were writing. The line has to be precise but with great freedom. The thing with drawing is to find a gesture that is consistent everywhere. Each separate element and the whole must have the same quality, the same rhythm, the same freedom. This is why I rework so often.

F. Place

across sprawling landscapes and inside remote communities, Françoise Place takes his readers on adventures that bring them closer to the awe-inspiring diversity of the world. Drawing with the precision of a technical illustrator, in full color and immense detail, Place produces elaborate atlases that facilitate the kind of cross-cultural contact reminiscent of history’s major anthropological explorations. Part ethnographer, part magician, part dramatist, Place sets the stage for the imagination to travel far and wide whilst stretching the children’s book as a form to its material limits, through large and encyclopedic volumes.

Place was born in Ezanville, just outside Paris, in 1957 and charts his fascination with travel stories back to early childhood, where by the age of twelve he was already absorbed by classic literary adventures in books such as Moby Dick, the Tintin series and the works of Jules Verne. He eventually studied graphic arts at L’École supérieure des arts et industries graphiques (ESAIG) Estienne in Paris before entering advertising, where he started illustrating commercially. His first illustrations for children’s books were published in 1983 (a new edition of nineteenth century stories by the Countess of Ségur). However, the style for which Place is renowned evolved through his work in non-fiction publications such as The Book of World Discovery (1985) by Bernard Planche. In 1992, he finally put words to his images in the award-winning fictional picture book The Last Giants.

Françoise Place often gives his readers a generous birds-eye view, so that they can see the breadth of terrain they are travelling but also have an opportunity to get lost. That said, there are strong individual characters that emerge, making connections to accessible and intimate experiences—for example, Archibold Leopold Ruthmore, the tiny man in a top hat who finds himself alone in vast rocky terrains and forests and then finally ensconced by a community of peaceful tattooed giants he has been searching for. The visual contrasts in human scale seem to belie the friendship that evolves, and which unfortunately is later destroyed. Similarly, The Battles’ Daughter (2007) reveals how a mute brown-skinned girl, Garance, navigates her isolation and attempts to forge relationships in seventeenth century France after surviving a shipwreck. Her fate is uncertain. At times, her visible difference is the center of attention, and in other moments, she hides struggling to find her way.