DRAWINGS OF THE PREPOSTEROUS
By Judd Palmer
Runs until October 31
Mezzanine Gallery
Once upon a time…
There was a young man named Judd who moved to a land far away. He went there to study but, instead of listening to his teachers, Judd passed the time by daydreaming and drawing. In doing so, he learned a very important lesson.
Local musician and artist Judd Palmer may have graduated from the University of Toronto with a degree in philosophy, but he is probably better known for his work with puppets. Palmer returned to Calgary and helped to create the Old Trout Puppet Workshop, a company that has toured across Canada and become noted for its original brand of professional puppet theatre. Springing from his work with Old Trouts, Palmer has gone on to write and illustrate four books of fairy tales. Drawings taken from those books are now on display in an exhibition titled Drawings of the Preposterous.
The illustration was an aside to the puppetry, Palmer says, and he, like a character from one of his own fairy tales, has gone from being a student without much direction to a best-selling author and illustrator whose books are being distributed throughout North America and the United Kingdom.
Palmer was approached by Dandi Productions, a Calgary-based company, to write a play based on a fairy tale. Although the project initially fell through, Old Trout later mounted it and that production was the inspiration for the first of what is now a four-book series including The Tooth Fairy, The Maestro, The Sorceror’s Last Words and Wolf.
Thirty drawings have escaped the confines of these books for inclusion in Drawings of the Preposterous. What is most satisfying about Palmer’s work is that each drawing is strong enough to engage the viewer without the context of the fairy tale from which it was born. Palmer spends up to one full day on each 9 inches by 12 inches illustration, and has created delightful and often humorous tableaux of characters that reach out from the paper.
One such figure is Abigail from Palmer’s first book, The Tooth Fairy. A girl who is gifted with a perfect smile, Abigail decides to take a stand against the Tooth Fairy.
"The Tooth fairy is after Abigail’s teeth," says Palmer. "She ends up pursuing the Tooth Fairy so that children will never have to lose their teeth again."
Whimsical, funny and often poignant, Palmer’s drawings are in keeping with a long tradition of fairy-tale illustrations that make observations about our world without becoming didactic.
These 30 drawings are successful because Palmer never takes the audience for granted. Children and adults will be drawn to this body of work because no matter what age the viewer, they are never pandered to or patronized.
Palmer believes the drawings will not only tell the viewer something about the world, but help him understand his place in it, like any good fairy tale should.
"The process of working on these drawings is a process of figuring out what it all means," he says. "Dealing with being a half-wit in a complicated world." |
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