In my search to rediscover what it was that originally made me want to become an illustrator, I revisited a number of the children's books I enjoyed so much way back in the day, and the illustrations that really sparked my imagination and held me in such thrall. I was an avid reader back then, and my literary diet was comprised largely of selections from the Weekly Reader Book Club and some of the novels of Roald Dahl. I remember being so familiar with James and the Giant Peach that I could rip through the book in less than two hours by the time I was eight years old.

Until the 1990s, when Quentin Blake was given the boon of re-illustrating Dahl's entire bibliography for Puffin Books, two of Dahl's most popular books (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and its sequel) were illustrated by Joseph Schindelman, and he was one of the first I wanted to study on this journey.

It's not easy to find information about Schindelman online; he illustrated a handful of books from the 60s through the 90s; he appears to be alive and well and pushing 90 in New York. There doesn't seem to be a central repository of his artwork anywhere online, or even a comprehensive bibliography, which is disappointing. I'd love to be able to study more of his work, which seems to be sadly almost entirely out of print.

What I do remember really picking up from his work was the way he used shadow explicitly. Characters in his illustrations were not defined by their contours, as they are in comics, and in most of my work, in fact, but rather they were defined by their shadows. Even on this cover image from his work on Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, the character of Willy Wonka is shown as a grouping of dark shapes made of hatched lines; a tall block for the top hat, a wavy block for the jacket, the shadows on his pants and face, his shoes, his cane, all without any contour lines whatsoever, separated and defined only by changes in their value. Even the face of Charlie Bucket is shown without contour lines to define his eyes, nose, cheek, or hair. Even the 'line' defining Charlie's mouth is actually a series of short stippled lines marking the shadow of his upper lip.

This technique gave a softness to Schindleman's work in Charlie, and it forced in my imagination a kind of gauzy quality to the story, where it felt as if I were reading the book through a haze of someone else's memory. It was a technique that found its way into my own work, for a time at least, until I started working more in color than in black & white, but it's something I want to bring back into my ink work when the subject matter allows it.

I'll be continuing to re-evaluate the illustrators who first inspired me, and trying to examine to which aspects of their work I felt most connected.

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