Born in Australia, brought up in Belfast and now a Brooklyn resident, Oliver Jeffers is an acclaimed illustrator and writer whose work has been translated into more than 30 languages. His award-winning debut, How to Catch a Star, was released in 2004, followed in 2005 by Lost and Found and in 2006 by The Incredible Book Eating Boy. Drew Daywalt’s The Day the Crayons Quit (2013), which Jeffers illustrated, reached the top spot on the New York Times bestseller list; Jeffers’s books Stuck (2011) and This Moose Belongs to Me (2012) also made the list. His latest, A Child of Books co-created with typographic artist Sam Winston, is out on 1 September.
1 | Sculpture
Prune Nourry, Terracotta Daughters
Prune Nourry is a French sculptor and a lot of her work is based on gender inequality. This one was about the one-child policy they had in China and how parents would quietly give girls up for adoption – there are orphanages populated with little girls across China. Prune recreated the terracotta army, basing 116 life-size sculptures on some of the girls given up for adoption. She has travelled around with the project – I saw it in Paris and New York – and now it has gone back to China to be buried, where in 15 years she’s going to do a fake excavation. Stunning.
2 | Nonfiction
Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth by R Buckminster Fuller (1968)
This is the book that has had the most impact on me recently. It treats Earth as a spaceship that has finite fuel that can’t be restocked, and it’s about how we survive as a species without spiralling into oblivion. It’s surprisingly apt for today, and also slightly depressing because all these predictions based on scientific thinking that seem obvious when they’re written have not happened. People are fallible and compelled to make the same mistakes over and over. It’s a fascinating read, especially as I’m trying to explain this planet to my one-year-old son and it was a really interesting take on the whole thing. There are so many pearls of wisdom in it.
3 | Sport
I went to see the title fight for the featherweight championship a few weeks ago. There was this boxer from Belfast, Carl Frampton: the place was rammed to the rafters and I think almost two-thirds were from Northern Ireland. The bar staff were going, “We’ve never seen anything like this. Normally when people come for a concert or basketball you don’t get crowds singing songs in the bar.” It was a great fight and Frampton won, so he’s the new champion. The atmosphere was electric and it was a fantastic evening: Belfast in Brooklyn.
4 | Place
County Antrim, Northern Ireland
I try to go back to Belfast as often as I can, a couple of times a year. Last time I took no phone, no radio, and went for a drive up the north coast of Antrim. It’s a beautiful piece of coastline: rugged and wild and also quite barren. There aren’t really any trees, it’s mostly heath and rock. I’ve used photographs I’ve taken there as the basis for several landscape paintings. I had fish and chips just outside Ballymena and then went to Ballintoy, where my wife and I were married – they film Game of Thrones there now – and I went for a walk along the pier. It was absolutely stunning and one of the best days I’ve had in a while.
5 | Music
Chris won the MacArthur prize, or “genius grant”, for a musical project he’s doing. He figured out that Bach concertos and partitas were better played on a mandolin than a violin, because of the subtlety: to hit the particular chords that use the top and bottom string, you have to play the violin quite aggressively, to physically get the bow to do that. But with the mandolin you can pluck very gently, so you can play these pieces quite differently to how they’ve been played before. He came by the studio and played me some, and my jaw nearly hit the floor. It was just incredible.
6 | Performance
Duke Riley is an artist who did this project at the start of the summer. Over a couple of years he trained 2,000 pigeons to fly a little bit later each evening, and then did this half-hour performance where he flew them from a boat in the Brooklyn navy yard. They all had LED lights attached to them, and just as dusk was settling, and the city is starting to disappear, all these pigeons took off – it was pretty surreal. It looked like you were under water watching a shoal of fish. It was one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen: bizarre, abstract and completely arresting.
7 | Restaurant
This is a bar/restaurant in Red Hook, which is an area that’s sort of cut off from the rest of Brooklyn; it’s very nautical, because that’s historically where all the ships came in. It’s mostly classic American fare, but there’s this one Mexican dish, huevos rancheros – the greatest thing I’ve ever eaten. I asked them about the dish and they said that the chefs are all Mexican, and the owner came in one day and that’s what they were cooking for themselves for breakfast. It was their mother’s recipe. The owner had some and insisted on putting it on the menu.
8 | Exhibition
Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible, Met Breuer, New York
This is a collection of paintings throughout the years, from the Renaissance right through to the modern day, that for one reason or another were left unfinished, and there are little stories beside them as to why. There are Picassos in there, a Rembrandt, and I think a Caravaggio. There’s one contemporary portrait painter whose sitter never came back, and she has no idea why. Then there’s a beautifully rendered Renaissance portrait of a woman painted in such detail, and then the face is painted out – she obviously wasn’t happy with it. As you look at it today, hundreds of years later, it looks like a collage, just flat blocks of colour.
A Child of Books by Oliver Jeffers is published by Walker (£12.99). Click here to order a copy for £10.65
