Artist Profile: Joel Nakamura

NEA-NM: To start, can you share a little bit about the book with us. We know that you wrote and illustrated the book and it's just so beautiful and intricate. Can you talk about the idea and the process you used? 

JN: Well, the idea was just to create a circle dream, about things that lead one into another. It's about imagination, it's about possibilities. It's a pretty typical children's book formula to do it in a circle structure. And it was mainly an excuse for me to paint certain images, so that helped dictate the story.

It's kind of backwards, working from what I wanted to paint versus the text, so I had to adjust the story to fit what I thought would be fun to paint or fun to look at. And then, as some of the young readers discovered, there are little pieces of information in the patterns, so that there's always something new to discover about the story. So that makes it fun on multiple readings, that they may see something that they didn't see before. And then at the end of the story, you see that the little person was surrounded by a lot of stuffed animals that ended up in the dream. And so how what you see in your subconscious can influence a dream, and dreams drift around and change places, and it all seems so plausible, and then people wake up and think, "Well, how did I get from outer space to the ocean?" 

NEA-NM: I would love for you to talk some more about the art process, and how you went from the illustrations to create the book because that's just such an interesting and different method from most authors. 

JN: First of all, it’s all hand-painted. There's no digital art here. So first I draw it with a sharpie. I figure out how I want to lay out the pages and develop the characters, and then I do a more precise drawing of that, and then the painting starts. That’s kind of backwards too, I paint the whole surface black and then I make stickers out of shelf paper. It has sticky backing that can cover up my figurative elements, and then I paint the backgrounds. Then I peel off the sticker and so it creates a silhouette.

When you see a road sign, it's just a silhouette, right? But it reads really well because our brains are programmed for gestalt. So that's why I start with a silhouette of my main figure, so that communicates visually right away. And then I start to go in and bring the details out. I use all acrylic paint.

It was definitely a project of love.

NEA-NM: You made a comment before, and I don't have the whole quote, but you talked about “always and never.” Can you talk a bit about that?

JN: I teach a martial art called Aikido, and so as I was coming up, I noticed that my teachers had all these “always” and “nevers.” And same with my art school teachers. You always do this, you never do that. Unless it's about safety, I don't believe there are always and never. I've disproved them all. I drove all my teachers crazy. They would say, never do that, and so I'm immediately doing that. That's the important thing I'd like to teach kids is that when it comes to creativity, there shouldn't be always and there shouldn’t be never. There are possibilities that exist beyond this box, and if you don't think there are, then you're really limiting yourself. Imagination gets us out of that box, not only for visual arts, but for Aikido, I do everything completely opposite of anyone else who teaches it.

NEA-NM: Theo, the young man who read this book with us for Read Across New Mexico, he couldn't wait to show me the different pictures on the pages. And he had written notes that he took. And then he picked up the book and showed us: “look, there's a hidden bone on every page!” and was showing me the bones. And then went through and talked about the other pictures. It had a great impact. And he really paid attention.

JN: Well, that was kind of the idea - that kids get to have fun and the parents have fun reading it to them. You know, whoever was going to enjoy the book, that every time they pick it up, they can notice something they hadn’t before. I try to give the same feeling as I get when I visit the Santa Fe Museum of International Folk Art. Even though I've been there a hundred times, I always notice something new. It's all in the details.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Joel Nakamura is the author and illustrator of three children’s books: Go West, I Dreamed I was a Dog, and the Imaginary Creatures Coloring Book. www.joelnakamura.com