[ad_1]
With his lively picture book illustrations, visual artist and illustrator Marcus-Gunnar Pettersson has shown that he has a special eye for shaping the world from the smallest insects to space and existence as such. There are many animals and insects in its detailed pictorial worlds, but also emotional expressions, warmth, and bloody humor.
When he now deals with biblical stories, in the selection and processing of bishop and biblical scholar Sören Dalevi, who previously wrote a dissertation on the Bible for children, it is the emotions that are in focus.
Fear. Security. Comfort. Value. Panic.
– In the last few years, I have really embraced what I think is the most fun of taking pictures. That is, make people feel things, drawn. Get excited. Previously, I was more concerned with how things would look, that the image composition would be nice, what adult readers would think of my work. What would the critics think. I’ve only thought about children now, says Marcus-Gunnar, who graduated from Konstfack in 2013 and has been a frequently hired illustrator in the picture book genre ever since.
That was the tone of Sören Dalevis text that you stuck to. Especially the free choice of the biblical scholar to speak about creation; “In the beginning, before anything existed, it was dark and messy. It was all about noise! “
– It was precisely the expression “holes over noise” that made me say yes. And the childish perspective he had. Also humor, which I myself believed was lacking in the serious children’s Bibles that existed when I was a child. Of course, the seriousness remains, but we’ve also made a fun children’s bible, he says.
Joy has characterized the process of the image, more than historical precision.
– Instead of creating a distant history book, I have let the past, present and imagination slip into the images. I felt free to play with the expectations of what a children’s Bible should look like. I flirt with quantum physics and to some extent with contained fantasy.
In “The Best Bible for Children” 43 Bible stories are combined with a selection of hymns and prayers. In working with the texts, Bishop Sören Dalevi has reverted to the original Hebrew and Greek texts when he made his interpretations.
The book, of course, contains the story of the birth of Jesus and the encounter of Mary with the angel Gabriel, and the foresight of the three wise men. Like the flight of Joseph and Mary with a newborn Jesus into Egypt.
Baby Jesus is born in the stable.
Photo: Illustration by Marcus-Gunnar Pettersson
– When I designed the escape for King Herod’s troop, I deliberately chose to collect soldiers from different eras. Some have weapons. Many have shoes. I wanted to give the image a topicality and show how a small family escapes, as families still escape today. Let the emotions of the escape be at the center, says Pettersson.
That the biblical stories little by little he is violent, he has not scared him in his pictorial work. At the same time, he has reflected carefully when he portrayed, for example, the confrontation between David and Goliath, where the latter usually lacks a head.
– I don’t believe in automatically protecting children from all horrors. The world itself is pretty terrible. On the other hand, I chose to make a more contemporary rendering of Goliath’s defeat, says Pettersson.
