Picture This: Christopher Corr on Colour and Emotion
This post continues my conversation with Christopher Corr, illustrator of my picture book about the first ascent of Mount Everest, Two at the Top: A Shared Dream of Everest.
[Uma] Tell me more about the landscape and images you recall of Ladakh and how it translated into expressing emotions on the page.
[Chris] The landscape is like a desert: ochre rocky earth, just a few trees and some cultivated green valleys where barley is grown and harvested in the brief summer months.
Summer is also a time for Buddhist festivals that are held in monasteries all across Ladakh and people travel great distances to attend these events.
Masked dancers perform and sing with deep and booming voices and musicians play horns and bang drums and it feels ancient and timeless and it’s so colourful against a backdrop of Himalayan peaks and painted cloths.
I stayed in monasteries and painted the daily rituals of the monks and acolytes. Every monastery had amazing wall art and woven thangkas. I watched monks making yak butter sculptures that when completed were left on a mountainside for the crows to devour.
I wandered through quiet villages and met yaks grazing on the hill tracks. It was a great introduction to Buddhist life and I think it informed me for the book.
Top: Houses in Leh, Monk and Stupa; Bottom: Monks at Thikse, Stupa on hillside.
Images © Christopher Corr, used by permission of the artist
[Uma] What an amazing backdrop, Chris, for your work on this book. These experiences and this practice clearly provide all kinds of texture for this story of the ascent of Everest. Talk about colour—what does it mean to you?
[Chris] I discovered colour on my first visit to India.
It sounds glib to say this but I became immersed in colour while I travelled in India and I’d never been anywhere so gloriously colourful before.
My runner beans
[Uma] Oh, I understand that completely. When I first left India for the US, it felt as if my world had suddenly turned grey! I plant scarlet runner beans now in my Canadian garden because I still long for bright, eye-popping colour!
Chris’s roof garden flowers
[Chris] Your runner beans look splendid! And against the blue sky! I've got a colourful roof garden and it brings me joy.
In India, for the first time in my life I understood the power of colour and how we all respond so instinctively to it.
It’s like an unspoken language that we all use and that we are affected by on an emotional level.
[Uma] Unspoken language. What a wonderful way of thinking about it!
[Chris] I think about colour all the time and I work with it every day.
In my work I try to use it in an emotive and a descriptive way to tell a story.
Just this weekend I went to the Tate Gallery in London to look at paintings by Rothko and by Turner and both artists use colour in such very different ways to evoke an emotional response, and with such power and feeling.
In painting the pictures for Two At The Top I remembered how I felt as I walked in the Himalayas. You are always aware of the incredible power of the mountains, the harshness of the landscape and the light and how it can all change dramatically in a single moment.
[Uma] Thank you, Chris! And thank you for the glorious colour and emotional resonance that your art brings to Two at the Top.
