Naomi Cook, The Story of Flying Robert
Rebecca Rosen, The Story of Flying Robert
Der Struwwelpeter (1845) may not be a popular choice of children’s book among parents these days, but Dr. Heinrich Hoffman’s do-bad-and-you’ll-pay stories have long piqued the historical and literary interests of adults. Perhaps it’s because they’re so peculiar. For the fan of the absurd, they’re great: rebellious kids (question authority, boys and girls!) meet with ridiculously violent ends.
In one of the tales, The Story of Flying Robert, however, the titular character’s end is more ambiguous. Robert is “never seen again.” Montreal artists Naomi Cook and Rebecca Rosen have taken that as a license to play. Keeping in mind that words may stay the same while visuals shape their meaning, the two artists each produced a cycle of images based on the story for exhibit at the Mile End artist-run center, Red Bird Gallery.
Each artist brings a very different mood to Robert’s (mis)adventure, yet both are savvy contemporary illustrators, which highlights that the way people string lines and colours together has changed just as much as the way they string words. At the same time, The Story of Flying Robert, with its clunky and image-rich poetry, is of the kind of thing that seems to have inspired a whole generation of illustrators today. (Read the whole poem here.)
Cook’s blue, white and red mural spins Robert along from left to right through an elegantly drawn Alice in Wonnderland-like world of swans and other fairytale creatures. In black and white, Rosen’s cycle is more akin to comic strips like Spiderman, evidently set in Montreal. There are dynamic cuts from frame to frame and crazy leaps between tall buildings. In the end, the authorities come in, here in the form of a hovering helicopter.