Illustration?!?

Type 'illustration definition' into Google and you'll be met with this lousy statement - "a picture illustrating a book, newspaper, etc." On the surface yes, illustration is picture, a visual language used to convey a message, but it extends to far more than simply books and newspapers. As cliche as it sounds, illustration exists in all corners of our lives, from the design on our tshirt, to the packaging of our food, to the album covers of our favourite bands, and those darn Emojis. 

The act of conveying ideas and concepts through image-making is something vitally important in our multi-language world. The illustration serves as a universally understood response to which all people connect to. For me, illustration is a way of documenting and sharing the things I experience in this world, and trying to make sense of it all by forming new visual perspectives. However illustration can serve whatever purpose you want or need it to, to inspire, to tell a story, to communicate, to educate, to instruct, to simplify, to complicate, to inform, to provoke, to introduce, to persuade, to market, to fill the human need to decorate, embellish and make the dull grey world into something all the more aesthetically pleasing.

I think the beauty of illustration lies in an almost childlike necessity to draw, illustrations carry with them the knowledge that this image was imagined and brought to life by a human, somebody who has not lost that innate obsession with mark-making we all  possess as children.

"Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognises before it can speak" John Berger, Ways of Thinking

Charlotte Ager