An Interview on a Hot Summer Day with Polish Book Creators Ewa Kozyra-Pawlak and Paweł Pawlak

Abstract

An Interview on a Hot Summer Day with Polish Book Creators Ewa Kozyra-Pawlak and Paweł Pawlak Anita Wincencjusz-Patyna (bio), Ewa Kozyra-Pawlak, and Paweł Pawlak Ewa and Paweł Pawlak both graduated from the State Higher School of Fine Arts (at present the Eugeniusz Geppert Academy of Art and Design) in Wroclaw, Poland. They gained their MFA diplomas in 1985 in graphic design and printmaking. Ewa focuses on children’s book illustration, specializing in textile collage. She has worked on about thirty books and has provided illustrations for children’s magazines and school handbooks. She also writes poems, performs calligraphy, and translates from French and English. Paweł focuses on book illustration and graphic design, mostly for young readers. He has worked on over 100 books and is highly acclaimed in Poland and abroad. Click for larger view View full resolution AWP: You both graduated from a university of arts. How did you benefit from the five-year course of studies in graphic arts? PP: For me mental gymnastics was absolutely the most valuable of all the things we learnt, not so much technical aspects of the given tasks. Some sort of intellectual base, which was strongly related to our faculty in general, and in particular to our specialization, namely graphic design. Our professors paid special attention to everything that preceded the actual image. The processes of thinking and understanding was crucial. AWP: It means contents first, then form. PP: Precisely. All the thinking before creating a picture may be really diverse. Very analytic, nonstandard, paradoxical. It doesn’t matter. What counts is the thinking itself which precedes working on any project. Deciding the way of approach. But the very decision is essential. EKP: I would add that our department focused on posters at that time. For half of a year we would consider two words, cause and result for instance, and this was the core of the whole process. Combining words, i.e. a slogan, with images. First the slogan, then a long time of thinking, and eventually the work. Hence our huge appetite for picturebooks— for “handmade” picturebooks, I should stress—as we love to play with [End Page 92] words and pictures as with equally important means of expression. This is an ideal structure for us. And this is what we creatively strive for. PP: I agree. Like posters, a picturebook is a combination of words and pictures. AWP: Comparing both, it is worth noticing that a poster appears as an extreme synthesis, whereas a book has a complex narration… PP: …space and time. It is just a larger area for our work. AWP: You have both experienced different periods in the history of Polish book illustration: the difficult decades of the 1980s and 1990s, an interesting transformation at the turn of the millennium, and the last fifteen years, when children’s books from Poland have celebrated international successes and Polish illustrators have provided highly artistic realizations. Which of these periods has been the most favorable for you? PP: Certainly not the first one, although my books had huge circulation numbers at the time. Still, I think that my own experiences and personal development are far more important than the external circumstances. For me, it was definitely my first participation in a French book (Romain Drac’s Sauvons les sapins) in Bologna 2001, where Becky Bloom, an English publisher, found me and invited me to a collaboration. Then a Polish publisher, Muchomor, published the titles that came out of this collaboration in Polish as well (Emily Horn’s Excuse Me… Are You a Witch? and Bloom’s The Hare and the Tortoise). The collaboration with Muchomor resulted in other titles (e.g., A Cat That Wagged Its Tail), which gave me great energy, and proved that I can create various books that I can be proud of. Among them I would like to distinguish: Baj Is A-Walking on the Wall (with poems by Kazimiera Iłłakowiczówna), Angel’s Two Hearts (by Wojciech Widłak), and my own original works Magiships and Steamicians and Oscar Seeks a Friend. When you add the illustrations to Leszek Kołakowski’s Tales from the Kingdom of Lailonia and...