Illustrator Nominee: Australia

Shaun Tan
Australia, Illustrator

[In picturebooks] the essence of a subject needs to be captured in a way that is quite simple, but potentially very complex and able to be openly interpreted by any reader.

- Shaun Tan

Any child or adult who picks up one of Shaun Tan's books will appreciate the subtle talent that evokes this concept. Tan is arguably Australia's premier picturebook illustrator and one of the world's most inventive illustrators for print and multimedia texts.

Born in Fremantle in 1974, Tan graduated from the University of Western Australia in 1995 with joint honours in fine arts and English literature. Currently he works full-time as a freelance artist and author, concentrating mostly on writing and illustrating picturebooks.

Most of Tan's picturebooks take about a year to complete. Often his work starts as rough line drawings which he might make up into a dummy to show to his editor and publisher. His work is then completed in acrylic paint and eventually in oil paint, which he likes using as he considers it suits his speed as a painter. But he also employs many other media, including pastels, coloured pencils, gouache, pen and ink, linocuts and collage and assemblages of found objects applied to paper, canvas or plywood, and he may combine these using digital media. His most recent publication, The Arrival, is a wordless book, substantial and complex in presentation and theme. He has used pencil on paper as his basic medium, but the sepiatone of the whole imparts a feeling of distance, temporal and spatial, matching the theme of a book which explores displacement. In it, the viewer is invited into an imaginative landscape (Tan used New York in the early 1900s as a reference point) in which a migrant grapples with the difficulties of a strange officialdom, language and social structure.

In the last decade, Tan has become one of the most sought-after speakers at national and international conferences and exhibitions. Tan attributes his own interest in writing and illustrating books to 'an attraction to short fable-like tales which defy straight-forward resolutions'. As a brilliant creator, Tan has become a cultural reference point for many Australian and international illustrators, producers and publishing houses.