Jo Ellen Bogart and Maja Kastelic

Jo Ellen Bogart and Maya Kastelic are the joint creators of the wordless picture book, Anthony and the Gargoyle. In this episode, they talk about their different roles in producing the book.

Jo Ellen Bogart is a US and Canadian writer of children's books living in Ontario.

Maja Kastelic was born in Slovenia, where she studied painting, philosophy and the theory of visual arts.

About Anthony and the Gargoyle
A boy befriends a baby gargoyle in this magical wordless story from award-winning creators Jo Ellen Bogart and Maja Kastelic. Anthony wakes up one morning to find his favorite rock has cracked open - and it's hollow! He discovers a strange-looking hatchling inside, and the two become fast friends. When Anthony asks his mother where the rock came from, she shows him photos from their trip to Paris, including of Notre-Dame cathedral, with its familiar-looking forms perched on top.

Could Anthony's new friend be a gargoyle?

This magical wordless story is brought to life in stunning, silent, hand-painted panels, and is a touching tale of true friendship and letting go.

Transcript

Nikki Gamble 

It's a very special edition of In The Reading Corner today, an international edition. I am so thrilled to be welcoming Jo Ellen Bogart and Mapa Kastelic. We will be talking about their joint creative projects, Anthony and the Gargoyle. It's a book that I fell in love with very quickly

So Jo Ellen I'm going to start with you because people might not realise that wordless books have writers.

Jo Ellen Bogart: 

I hadn't thought of that. They don't just grow like mushrooms. Yes. I wrote it in my head. I just didn't put the words down. 

Nikki Gamble

 Is it like a script that you put together? How much direction goes into creating and writing a wordless book? 

Jo Ellen Bogart: 

As most authors know, we try not to be too bossy or step on toes of illustrators, but in this case, since there was no text, I actually did write it out scene by scene, more specifically in some cases than in others.

And some, I basically left like a skeleton - like they became friends and played in his room. And Maja took it from there and it blossomed into a beautiful inside story to the story. 

Nikki Gamble: 

So we're going to come on and think about all of that, but for our listeners, we should give them a little bit of a clue as to what this story is about.

Jo Ellen Bogart: 

It started with a young couple in love in Paris, which seems very appropriate, and we see them dining at a restaurant. We see her pick up a stone. It's a little hard to see the stone. Everybody,  look for it. And she takes that stone home with her. She has a baby. The stone goes on the bedside table of the little boy as he grows up.

He loves that stone. And one morning, he awakens to find that it has broken open, and he doesn't know what was in it or what happened. But then we see peeking out of the closet. A lovely little face and that's how it begins. He later asks his mother some questions that allow him to understand that she brought the rock home and where it came from.

And so, we start wondering, what could this be? And so the adventure continues from there. 

Nikki Gamble: 

What inspired the story? ' Gargoyles are fascinating. But I'm guessing you don't have that many of them in Canada and the United States. 

Jo Ellen Bogart: 

A few. Once I came to Canada, I really did start looking up at what was happening up there on the top of the building, 

I remember many years ago, long before I thought of the story, I was reading about gargoyles and being fascinated by the artistic talents that went into making them. 

Nikki Gamble: 

We all know that Notre Dame, which is where this particular gargoyle comes from, was devastated a few years ago by fire.Were you able to go up and do that chimaera walk before that happened?

Jo Ellen Bogart: 

Yes. I did that in 2008. 

Nikki Gamble: 

That's quite a thing, isn't it? Walking along that walkway with all those amazing stone creatures. 

Jo Ellen Bogart: 

Yes. And apparently, they were installed at different times over a number of years.

And I even saw a picture once of Abraham Lincoln posing up there with a gargoyle. It's crazy amazing. 

And when you look at Notre Dame, From some distance, it's like they're little specks along the gallery. So, the whole thing is just beyond amazing. 

Nikki Gamble: 

Let's come to Maja. What do you get from the publisher when you are asked to illustrate a book like this? Do you have a lot more freedom with a wordless book? 

Maja Kastelic: 

Yes, I had all the freedom and support I could ask for. So, this was really something great. But I have to say that this wasn't the first wordless book I worked on, but the process was very different because the first book was my own authored picture book. If the story is yours. It's a bit more intimate and subconscious. You create the content and the drawings very fluidly. This was a completely new experience for me when I got Joelle's text because the story wasn't mine. So, I have to dive into it and to feel it like she did.

And I really appreciated when she wrote these important scenes and details and clues. And also, what was very important for me is that I got her notebooks which helped me understand what she imagining or why is this story important to her. So it was very easy to for me to get into the same feeling.

Nikki Gamble: 

What did you pick up was important to her? 

Maja Kastelic: 

I really like when working on a book, not just to produce this immediate story, of what's happening but also some deeper message or something more eternal. So I understood this story is about magic, fantasy and generations, but also about compassion, friendship, and sacrifice. 

Nikki Gamble: 

As Maja has described it there, did she pick up what was important to you? 

Jo Ellen Bogart: 

I was stunned. She understood everything, if not taking it a little further, , I could tell it hit her very deeply and I thought, oh, this is amazing. She understands perfectly. 

Nikki Gamble: 

I want to talk about what I would call the tone of the book, the colouring of it the very tender way in which the characters connect with each other. This story could have felt very different with a different visual treatment. I wanted to know whether you settled on that quite quickly or whether there was some experimentation.

Maja Kastelic: 

Yeah, there was a lot of experimentation. I failed two times.  I had a very nostalgic feeling. I wished it to have a timelessness; that's why I used trains instead of planes, I asked Jo Ellen if that was okay. because. The colours and the setting in Paris are both old and timeless, and it was really important for me to convey that.

Nikki Gamble: 

You've used warm colours, not very saturated. So gives a feeling that it could be some time ago. The characters, even though they're not in France, they feel very French to me. There's something about their styling that's quite French.

I want to talk a little bit about the first few pages and how you've conveyed time in the narrative. And to compare what you have done with how Jo Ellen set up the timeframe and how Maya chose to show it in the illustrations because most of it is done through photographs rather than a narrative sequence.

I thought that was so clever. 

Jo Ellen Bogart:

 I had talked about them sharing a photo album, but it was amazing to put them on the wall because then, it showed how they felt about the photos, and also, they could be seen from time to time without necessarily focusing on them.  It wasn't like a book that was closed; it was on the wall. That was a major improvement over what I had said. And, of course, then we could circle around and see the photo at the end. It was wonderful artistic thinking. It was a visual thing that worked perfectly. 

Nikki Gamble: 

Almost like watching a film, you can imagine the camera panning around. I love the way that we didn't just focus on one photograph, that you have the things that are around it. It's leading you to the next photograph because we just catch the edges of a frame or the edges of another picture. What you're doing is being taken on a journey around this wall. 

Maja, there are quite a few numbers that crop up in this book. We've got a 26 and a 42. Are the numbers significant in any way? 

Maja Kastelic: 

Yes, these numbers are part of my personal hidden things. There are birthdays of my sons, or the people I love  Here is a robot painting, which is actually a painting from my painter friend from Slovenia, and these details are something from my ordinary life and in my home.

Nikki Gamble:

We’re getting a little glimpse of this family. The fact that they have got a toy Volkswagen van, you get the feeling that they've enjoyed their travels in the past.

Maja Kastelic: 

I love this feeling that each object can be more than just something empty. I love symbols because picture books can be read by different people, from children to older people.  it's nice when you include different things for each of them. So I love layering, 

Nikki Gamble: 

I've become very interested in how readers engage with a wordless text. Sometimes we want the children to put the story to it, but that's not necessarily what they want to do instinctively.

So, I tried to imagine myself in that position while reading this book, and I found that I didn't tell myself a story. What I found myself doing was asking lots of questions. As you have been sharing this book with readers, do you have any observations as to how they read the book?

Maja Kastelic: 

Wordless books are, on one hand, very challenging for parents and on the other they can be more playful and open. There are no boundaries or instructions as to what to do with them. So, this freedom, is also something that children like 

Nikki Gamble: 

Jo Ellen, I don’t know if you've had the opportunity to share the book yet?

Jo Ellen Bogart: 

No, I haven't been able to share it. Oh, the questions I would have asked children in schools, I would like their reaction. I actually wrote to my daughter and said, listen, can you read this to Astrid please and ask her these questions because I have not had a child to discuss it with because of the pandemic? 

Nikki Gamble: 

I wanted to come onto the pictures of Paris. When I saw these pictures of Paris, I was blown away. We've had lots of spreads with closeups of characters and quite a few images on each spread, and then we open up to this double- page spread of the Gare du Nord with this wonderful architectural detail. And I was blown away by this. 

Jo Ellen Bogart: 

Oh, I had the same reaction. I can feel that it's stone, the colour is beautiful. I can't imagine how much care it took to create this image. 

An interesting thing as I remember when I first con conceived of the book as a wordless book I wanted to have a lot of variation in the size. I had read some other wordless books some years ago that had more of a graphic novel style with small pictures and large pictures. And first of all, you can have more images because you can fit them in. But this changes the mood, and as you said, Suddenly the screen goes in colour, like a Wizard of Oz moment. I was thrilled.

Nikki Gamble 

Tell us about the technicality of creating these images, particularly how you rendered the stone.

Maja Kastelic: 

I tried to paint these scenes in three different ways. The first and second didn't work well for all the environments. It would work well for the interiors and maybe characters, but not for these architectural scenes.

So what I did eventually was to just paint black and white, only using black gouache. And it worked well because it has kind of stone quality. It feels like. I could sculpt with these black and white illustrations.

And it was easy once I found that medium. It worked well for all the environments, especially for this sense of architectural details. 

Nikki Gamble: 

I am fascinated by what you were saying there that some things work for one part and not for another part of the book, but you had to work to get this unified feel 

Maja Kastelic: 

I think that's really very important. One of the earliest things I learned as an illustrator is to work all the scenes at once. One stage for all, and the second stage and so on. So everything at the same time. When you begin to work, you don't feel it so much; you're not technically able to do the same as you are at the end of the process. So if you generate everything in steps, then you have this unified book. I tend to sacrifice a really big amount of time to this search for the thing that really feels right to me at that moment. Of course, it's not perfect. In the end, I'm always sorry because I just see mistakes and what can be done better, but at that moment, it should be the optimum of what you are capable. 

Nikki Gamble: 

I want to contrast those big iconic architectural places that you have in the book with something closer and more intimate. And the spread that looking at is in scene in the hospital.

What kinds of choices did you have to make this scene work? 

Maja Kastelic: 

It was very intimate. I felt it when I was reading Jo Ellen's story, which is very tender and rich with this emotion, and I also understood it's very important to convey these feelings. I tend to re-feel it inside and then capture it in the illustration. So for this scene, for example, I always use the same gestures or I do with my body what I'm supposed to draw or feel. 

Jo Ellen Bogart: 

What Maya said about doing the gestures. When I saw the mom read the letter saying that the aunt was ill and she put her hand on her chest. I thought, oh, I feel that. I really feel that. And I knew that Maya had felt it too. So that's why everything works so perfectly. The bodies are doing what shows how they feel. 

Nikki Gamble: 

What are you most pleased about with the way that this book has turned out? 

Jo Ellen Bogart:

 I would say that everything that I felt when I was writing it is there, and there's an extra layer of Maya's reaction. She understood it so well. So, I can only say that I'm very happy with how it turned out.

Maja Kastelic: 

Thank you, Jo Ellen.

Jo Ellen Bogart:

 It was a gift. You gave me an amazing gift and our readers,

Nikki Gamble: