‘Electric Mouse’ – Graeme Base – bid is at $600

Born in England Graeme moved to Australia when he was eight.

Having spent his early childhood in England, Graeme was brought up on such definitive children’s literature as ‘Winnie The Pooh’, ‘Wind in The Willows’ and the works of Lewis Carroll. Though these were definite sources of inspiration, what he recalls most vividly from bedtimes, was his father bringing in the old mono record player.

Little Graeme would lay in bed, listening to the bubbling, sprawling piano parts of Saint-Saën’s ‘Carnival of The Animals’. The orchestra would travel around his room, taking on the form of stately tortoises, dreamy fish with mesmerising, floaty frills, wild donkeys kicking off the walls and little birds fluttering and swooping low over head.

Graeme centres his work mostly around animals, doing so with the imaginative freedom present in this suite. His family’s love of music and support of his general artistic spirit, allowed Graeme to explore his creativity with little regard to form. He has a great love for music and visual art and so, over the years he has continued to dip in and out of both.

For Graeme, creativity takes little notice of boundaries, often moving fluidly between crafts. 

‘The thing I love most about being an artist is the freedom to do what I want when I want – I’ve never had a regular job with defined hours. The need to create is always with me – the outlet could have been almost anything – it could have been music – it just happened to be picture books.’

To Graeme artistic expression appears to be about as avoidable as the need to eat or sleep: ‘What is art to me? An outlet for the never-ending need to create.’

Graeme initially directed his career path efforts towards finding a footing as a rock musician in the Melbourne music scene. Over this period he also studied a Diploma in Art and gained a position at an advertising agency. Having little patience or interest in commercialised art, Graeme soon reached the conclusion that he disliked the industry and so found himself swiftly ushered from his third post.

He and his employers clearly agreed on one thing: Graeme was not meant to find success in  commercial art. 

Graeme’s first real taste of success came with the much anticipated release of an alphabet book titled ‘Animalia’. He states that the project took 3 years and very nearly could have been an end to his career, since during this time there was no certainty of triumph. However, his unwavering sense of self and trust in his own artistic instincts lead to a unique interplay of elements that has captured generations of readers.

Based on Graeme’s attitude to his artistry it seems quite clear a commercial path would never have worked. His philosophy hinges on creating for himself first and foremost and he has remained steadfast and pure in this approach.

‘Animalia’ is a feat of human ingenuity, each page containing highly intricate visual representations of an alliterated rhyming verse. For example the line that began it all: ‘Horrible hairy hogs hurrying homeward on heavily harnessed horses’ was inspired by the Jethro Tull ‘Heavy Horses’ album cover. In this image you can not only find a visual of this fantastical sentence but it also boasts many other words beginning with ‘H’.

One of my personal favourites is a page housing four regal pink cats: ‘Crafty Crimson Cats Carefully Catching Crusty Crayfish’. A castle hides in the background, a furry cactus peaks from behind a sleepy feline, and a dizzying array of other ‘C’ objects are scattered around their soft paws. Graeme has a clear tie to the surrealists, with his animals often in bizarre and comedic scenarios. He says he is drawn particularly to the humour of artists like Dalí and Magritte.

Graeme’s work is hard to overstate, as it has many entry points and layers to unpeel. He tackles the page as a musician does a score, with layers of instruments and tonality intrinsically in mind. Each book is designed so that the reader will always come away with something new. As both writer and illustrator he is able to construct and spread puzzle pieces between the words and the visuals. A book like ‘The Eleventh Hour’ is an impressive example of this. Graeme threads clues to the unravelling mystery throughout the images, developing an interactive experience. The reader is encouraged to piece clues together in order to uncover the perpetrator of a theft.

To achieve the lush and detail-oriented artworks, Graeme uses mediums that work best for his finicky process. He uses a combination of transparent inks, gouache, watercolours, watercolour pencils and occasionally whips out a scalpel. In recent years he has transitioned into digital art. Another showcase of his versatility, and ability to charm a publisher, is his all black and white Albrecht Durer inspired book ‘The Curse of The Vampire Robot’. 

By looking at any of the aforementioned work, one will note its fantastical world building and imagery, which are a merging of Graeme’s real world travels and his expansive imagination:

‘The most beautiful things I’ve ever seen: the Taj Mahal at dawn – Uluru at dusk.’

‘The Sign of The Seahorse’, with its powerful ecological message, was produced after diving in the Caribbean. ’The Waterhole’ with its wonderful tactile disappearing aquamarine waterhole, achieved with cut-outs on each page, was inspired by a safari trip.’

Graeme considers his visual art to have a stronger practical foundation than his music, however this hasn’t stopped him from creating complex pairings of music and art, for example with ’The Worst Band in the Universe’. This project combines one of his brilliantly packed picture books and a soundtrack which, sold as a CD tucked into a sleeve inside the books cover. This was still quite uncommon practice at the time and Graeme didn’t risk probing any further once the publishers gave him the go-ahead. Graeme is very animated when he talks, bursting with real enthusiasm for his work, so I imagine he has a knack at exciting any potential investors with his genuine creative ebullience.

With all the elaborate work Graeme produces, one might wonder at the scope of his mind. What must someone like this have dreamed of as a child? However, when he expresses his main childhood desire, it is amusingly plain and relatable: ‘What did I long for as a child? dinner! I’ve always had a thing for food.’

For the kite project Graeme sticks to his favoured subject: animals.

‘My kite grew from scribbling a diamond shape with a tail and deciding it looked like a mouse. I’ve always been drawn to the idea of organic/machine hybrids (e.g. my book ‘TruckDogs’) and it just went from there.’

 Of his own kite adventures he says:

‘I once had a big two-string kite that you could control to make it do loops and other acrobatics. Great fun. I eventually crashed it and that was that.’

At the moment, Graeme is channeling his energy less through pencils onto the page and more into the tools.‘These days it’s bolting together big steel girders to make a big steel verandah and pergola for our doer-upper house in St Kilda.’

by Adelaide Stolba