Attic Dreaming

Sun Herald

Sunday October 19, 2008

Daniel Herborn

A lonely childhood was the ideal preparation for author and illustrator Tohby Riddle, writes Daniel Herborn.

Tohby Riddle is something of a renaissance man. He writes and illustrates children's books, the latest of which is the remarkable collage-based Nobody Owns The Moon, has edited a magazine for schoolchildren, draws quirky cartoons (which appeared in Good Weekend) and has a young adult novel on the way.

Perched in the converted attic of his Blue Mountains home, which is intriguingly packed wall-to-wall with Jack Kerouac novels, a decade's worth of notebooks and scattered pages of sketches, Riddle, 43, explains his creative streak goes right back to his childhood.

"I've been drawing since I can remember," he says. "The first thing I remember doing is writing my name, really large, on the wall at home, and I probably remember that because I got in big trouble for it."

Having grown up in the Sydney suburb of Castle Cove, he attended a Steiner school where great emphasis was placed on creativity.

Riddle describes his childhood as "not unhappy, but probably quite lonely at times, just circumstantially really.

"There was only one kid my age who I spent a lot of time with in the neighbourhood, and he would go away for months at a time.

"So I think I learnt to develop a pretty rich interior world; I'd invent a lot of games that you could play on your own. We lived on the edge of bushland, so I'd sort of wander around the bush ... I guess in a way it was fairly introspective, which possibly prepares you for writing and drawing and things like that."

Quietly spoken, but thoughtful and clearly passionate about his work, Riddle has a whimsical quality and once apologised to an interviewer for being "too day-dreamy".

This tendency to whimsy is something he shares with Clive Prendergast, the city-dwelling fox in Nobody Owns The Moon, an outsider who takes solace in wandering the metropolis.

Riddle says he can also see himself in the book's other central character, Humphrey, a donkey who doesn't always have a fixed address and has "a clumsy, slightly sentimental quality" about him.

Having trained as an architect and attended art school, Riddle elected for a career in a creative industry because of the greater control it offered.

"I was approaching architecture more from an artist's point of view," he says. "I started to feel that if I wanted to practise in art, in whatever medium, I might get too frustrated with architecture. I think the architects [who] are able to succeed in having their artistic vision built have to be very driven, probably fairly thick-skinned."

However, Riddle credits architecture with teaching him how to organise his ideas and communicate them to others. It also instilled in him an interest in how people interact with their environment, and a real love of buildings, of the grand and elegant structures that provide the backdrop to many of the scenes in Nobody Owns The Moon, as well as the industrial complexes Riddle is sad to see disappearing from the city centre.

"I love to go to big cities, and I often feel like an outsider and sometimes that can make you feel a bit downbeat or something," he says. "You're kind of trudging the streets and you're a little bit lost and you're tired and all those things.

"But because they're such fantastic, complex places you often then have these enchanting surprises. You come around the corner and there's some amazing thing - an art gallery or a museum.

"I think sometimes cities are depicted in negative ways, as the concrete jungle, the terrible place after dark. I don't know if that's a particularly Australian thing or an international thing, but they're also fabulous places as well, and I wanted to show that they're not this dark, dystopian, nightmarish place all the time, that there's all sorts of serendipitous enchantments too."

This serious undercurrent means the appeal of Riddle's work, even the picture books ostensibly aimed at infants, extends to adults. One of his goals is to create books that can be a shared experience for both children and the adults who read to them. Nobody Owns The Moon is also multi-layered on a visual level, some of the collaged scenes involving up to 50 pieces of paper.

Riddle's creative process is often soundtracked by indie folk like Sufjan Stevens and Beirut, while the wistful Bon Iver has been a favourite in the attic workspace of late.

"With a long project I really try to scout around for what I'd call high rotation CDs" Riddle says.

Such CDs need to stand up to repeat listens, so he can play an album 10 times in a row if necessary and not be distracted by having to choose new music. "I find that if I get the right music it almost becomes the score for the book; it kind of drives it along and creates the right kind of emotional environment for the work."

When the environment is right, or when the mood takes, Riddle experiences times of feverish inspiration, feeling like the characters take over and write the story themselves.

Something of a night owl, Riddle enjoys working in the peace of the midnight hour, but tries to stick to business hours as much as possible: "Once I'm in the zone, [I] sort of just want to go for hours and hours on end ... it's like an adrenaline rush as well. I do my best to do that, but it's a little harder when you've got little kids around; they've got strict routines that it's in your best interest to stick to."

Now aged five, three, and six months, Riddle's children, two girls and a boy, view his work with the bemusement only infants can manage.

"I don't think they quite understand the whole book thing," he says. "I think they are trying to work out exactly what I do. But certainly, observing them, what they do and what they think about; it's given me a lot of insight actually.

"They're interested and they seem to like what I do. I don't think they feel like they have to say it's good or bad, but if I watch their response it seems pretty good. Although I did do a book for very young children and my daughter ... didn't like it because she was 'too old for it'. She was four."

Nobody Owns The Moon is published by Viking, $24.95.

© 2008 Sun Herald

Back to News Index | Back to Home