In KUSAMA: POLKA DOT QUEEN, SIMON ELLIOTT Brings a Life of Exhibitions to the Page

Interviews Editor Andrew Irvin is joined by Simon Elliott to discuss his biographical graphic novel released through SelfMadeHero; Kusama: Polka Dot Queen explores the life of Yayoi Kusama, a global luminary in the world of visual art.

---

COMIC BOOK YETI: Welcome to the Yeti Cave, Simon! 

SIMON ELLIOTT:  It’s a pleasure to be here, thank you for having me!  

CBY: This interview is timely, as I've stopped into the National Gallery Victoria’s recently featured exhibition of Kusama’s work - the largest collection displayed in Australia’s history, apparently - and the grandeur of scale on display here in Melbourne was impressive. Kusama's visual meditations on the idea of infinity and unique perspective have garnered worldwide attention from the general public (including both of us) and institutions of all scales. How did you first learn of Yayoi Kusama’s art, and what did the journey towards creating this graphic novel entail before you were in a position to bring it to the public?

SE: I first saw some of Kusama’s work many years ago on a trip to Japan.  This was before the big Tate exhibition put her on the map in the UK, and before her wonderful museum was built in Tokyo.  I remember immediately falling in love – the colours, the patterns, the fascinating faces and the organic, almost biological quality to a lot of it.  My love for her work has only grown over the years.  There have been some superb exhibitions of her work at Victoria Miro in London, but I have also traveled to see her work – the mirror room at the Louisiana in Copenhagen, the huge retrospective in Portugal, a repeat trip to Japan (complete with her fabulous museum in Tokyo), seeing infinity at her exhibition at M+ in Hong Kong, and visiting her famous pumpkin and other installations on Naoshima, the Japanese art island. The next Kusama adventure will be to Basel, Switzerland, for the latest retrospective. So, the journey to making the book was actually a long one, which also involved seeing ‘Kusama: Infinity’ (the superb documentary made by Heather Lenz) many, many times, reading Kusama’s autobiography and studying every book about her work that I could find.  

CBY: That is an admirable level of background research - now all the aspiring biographers amongst our readership know where to set the bar. Also, Naoshima sounds like a delightful place to visit, if the opportunity to get back to Japan presents itself. Now, the publisher of Kusama: Polka Dot Queen is SelfMadeHero, which recently featured a Q&A around this title. I’ll make sure we don’t tread well-worn turf with the rest of this interview. You mentioned, “there was no drafting, no redrawing and no editing as I went along.” I know you’re working entirely digitally on your comics – can you walk through the technical process you employ for your illustrations?

SE: One of the many amazing things about Kusama’s work and process is that there is no drafting or redrawing.  She has an idea, and she puts it down on canvas immediately, perfectly.  I think that gives her work urgency and such a beautiful, natural quality.  I decided that I would try to emulate that in my process, so the scenes which are depicting ‘Kusama-vision’ were drawn only once and I didn’t let myself go back.  I wanted to convey a really primal creative state, where she is totally lost in the automatic process of making her art – totally immersed in the patterns.

In terms of my technical approach, I would have to say that I am just a baby in this process, so I am still finding my feet.  Everything I draw is on the iPad, using Procreate.  I am not a very competitive person, but I just try to improve a little every day – I want every book to be more ambitious than the last, and I am proud of the fact that they represent my growth and development as an artist.  At the moment, I draw everything in an acid green, then a new layer of finished lines over the top.  I will always like bold lines, bright colours and a sketchy style.  I am not very interested in backgrounds.  I am endlessly fascinated by faces.   

CBY: Hearing your method, knowing I have a copy of Procreate, I feel as though I have no excuses not to be cranking out my own graphic novel. Kusama broadened her horizons and solidified her art career following advice from correspondence with Georgia O’Keeffe encouraging her to move to the US to pursue her aspirations. What conversation in your life has proven most pivotal in redirecting your career towards finding success as an artist?

SE: I still struggle to identify myself as an artist, but I am someone who has totally fallen in love with making art.  I started drawing and painting during the first Covid-19 lockdown in the UK.  I had a lot of time to kill suddenly, and I am used to being busy.  So, I bought paper, pens and paint, and I started making things from morning until night.  I was making 20 paintings on some days!  This was all inspired by two key things – firstly David Hockney released some beautiful iPad drawings with the message ‘Spring cannot be cancelled’ and Grayson Perry (another favourite artist) made a show called Grayson’s Art Club which was all about finding hope and connecting through art at what was a challenging and isolated time for everyone.  These drawings eventually became my first book (following a Dylan-esque move to electric) – an illustrated bio of David Hockney.  

There were some emails back and forth with Hockney about the book.  Firstly, he personally approved it (totally unbelievable!). Then he provided some really useful, surprisingly detailed feedback on events in his life.  One drawing I had put his hands in his pockets, because I didn’t want to depict him always smoking – but he insisted that he had been smoking in real life and must be doing so in the drawing!  These exchanges changed my life, because I am now in the process of drawing a fourth book! I would never have imagined this possible a few years ago.

CBY: Getting the opportunity to build rapport with artists you admire is always an enriching experience (and part of why this role at Comic Book Yeti proves so gratifying). With your other role as a barrister, I imagine, being relatively reading- and writing-intensive, what sort of balancing act do you find works best within your schedule to manage your legal and artistic workloads? What does your average day look like, over the course of your weeks, to get what you want out of your applied efforts?

SE: I get up early and I work late.  I don’t sleep much.  This is very antisocial for my wife, and our little dog.  I couldn’t do all this without their support and patience.  In a way, the books and my day job are similar – they are both about presenting a certain perspective, being creative and trying to persuade people of a point of view – whether that’s simply someone’s emotion or motivation in a scene / panel or more widely to try to encourage readers to get interested in the artist’s life and to look at more of their work in the future.  I make biographies, but I am not very good at being objective – I write about the artists that I love, and I can’t help but convey that.  I set out to write the kind of books that we would have bought in a gallery gift shop.   

CBY: A perceived lack of objectivity shouldn't worry you. It's an ideal which isn't possible to achieve - all we can do is define our position and the perspective from which we frame our world and the topics we select. Kusama's exploratory perspective included many visual meditations upon the idea of infinity. The sense of delight you mention from experiencing her Infinity Mirror Room designs – the dimensional envelopment and topological architecture helps bend the viewer’s perspective. There’s a lot of negative space in the gutters, with almost no conventional panel design. When you set out, in homage to Kusama, working with only two dimensions available through comics as a medium, how did you seek to translate that experience?

SE: I think Kusama’s mirror rooms are some of the best places on earth.  Getting lost in them is a wonderful, and as you say, an inherently 3D experience!  I rather enjoyed the challenge of trying to depict that on paper.  In terms of the book, I wanted to give a sense of Kusama’s life and work through the style and format of the book, so I didn’t want a conventional grid structure – that’s not the way she draws – and I wanted to convey a sense of growing in confidence as an artist and as a person – the book gets more and more colourful as it goes along, as she grows in success and recognition.  I love her My Eternal Soul paintings, so they were my starting point and inspiration.  There are other things thrown in – we share a love of Alice in Wonderland, so I put in a few visual references to that along the way. The style was also a reflection of trying to tell the complete(ish) life story of a remarkable woman in her 90s – it immediately lent itself to a scene-to-scene transition rather than too much happening moment by moment. 

CBY: A recurring element of consideration in Kusama’s creative journey is her struggle with mental health. You mention art as a means of working through challenges (both external and internal). From my experience, compulsion is clearly an underlying element of the creative process. For Kusama, obsession was clearly associated with her patience and resultant capacity for repetition at a scale a neurotypical person, perhaps, may not have the unilateral focus to complete, particularly at such a fevered pace. We’ve talked a bit about balancing your daily schedule, but at a grander scale, you’ve released three graphic novels in three years, with your fourth on the way – how do you relate to the idea of obsession and compulsion? What do you find is most useful for creating healthy feedback loops in your creative process? 

SE: For me, art is a great release. I work hard day to day, and the work can be emotionally and physically draining (try standing and talking all day, it’s surprisingly exhausting!). Art is something quite different. I can sit and draw for a day without noticing that any time has gone by. I won’t have remembered to eat lunch. It doesn’t matter, because I get totally lost in it.  I think that it’s a welcome thing in this digital age, where it’s hard not to be watching TV, messaging and scrolling Instagram all at the same time.  I could only dream of being as productive and limitlessly creative as Kusama, but I do think that one of the inspirations to take from the great artists is that they have all been hard workers – they are prolific, productive, and they keep making – not everything is a masterpiece, but it doesn’t have to be – they are enriched by the process. I try to share that.   

CBY: One of my favourite lines from Polka Dot Queen that builds upon this idea of obsession as a rapturous experience is directed from Kusama to a pumpkin; “I will spend a month painting you. I will regret every moment of sleep. You are so beautiful.” 

SE: Isn’t it a wonderful sentiment?  I can totally relate! 

CBY: Finding the flow in creation and attaining that state of rapture is as worthwhile a pursuit as any. You published your first two graphic novels; Hockney: A Graphic Life, and Vincent: A Graphic Biography, through Frances Lincoln (a Quarto subsidiary), but Kusama: Polka Dot Queen found its home at SelfMadeHero. Can you tell us a bit about the initial querying process for your first graphic novel, how your second title came together, and why you’ve elected to switch it up for this third release?

SE: I have been very lucky in this process.  I knew nothing about books and the world of publishing, but I drew David Hockney so much that it became a biography.  I sent it to one publisher, Frances Lincoln, and they very kindly agreed to publish it within a few days.  The only condition was that Hockney would have to approve it. We duly sent it off to his studio, and quite understandably it took perhaps six months to work its way to the top of his to-do list, and then we got the approval – and the wonderful email exchange with him that I mentioned earlier happened.  

The van Gogh book came about because I fell in love with his sister-in-law, Jo – I read a biography about her and I was totally blown away by this largely unknown but totally remarkable woman having been instrumental in Vincent (as he preferred to be called, never van Gogh) achieving posthumous fame. I wanted to tell Vincent’s story, but through Jo’s eyes – because I hope that anyone who doesn’t know the full story will look her up.  She deserves to be celebrated, and for everyone to appreciate her efforts.  

I decided to publish book #3 with SelfMadeHero for two reasons – one prosaic, and one cool. My commissioning editor at Frances Lincoln had worked on a Kusama book before, and wasn’t keen to do another- but I love Kusama so much that I didn’t want to wait any longer to draw her life!  The cool reason is that I have loved SelfMadeHero for years – their art masters series is amazing. They have a beautiful book that presents a very different take on Vincent’s life, which is a real visual treat, and so many books about so many of my favourite artists. I have been reading them for years, so it was just a totally natural fit.        

CBY: It sounds like a certain amount of selective submission and serendipity led to your work fitting neatly into its niche. Looking forward, you’ve announced your next title is focused on the life of Marc Chagall. What do you have in mind for your future work, and how do you decide which project is prioritized hereafter? Looking back on the last few years of your creative endeavors, what advice do you have for others embarking on their careers in the comics industry?

SE: Good question. I read My Life by Chagall, and I found it to be one of the most beautiful and inspiring books that I had ever seen. The writing is slightly surreal, utterly poetic and evocative. I immediately started drawing things inspired by it. This book is going to be more of a classic graphic novel – fewer words, a grid system. I always like a new challenge and the next one is telling the story primarily through the illustrations. After that, I would love to do Basquiat or Dali. Both had fascinating lives and I connect with their style – that’s an important factor for me.  I would love to cover Michelangelo, for example, but I really can’t think (yet!) what I could bring to the party!  

CBY: Those would all be monumental! I can see the step from Polka Dot Queen to a Basquiat comic, but the depth of both Dali and Michelangelo's work would be an entirely different undertaking. As we finish things today, let’s take an opportunity to discuss some of the creative work beyond the realm of Yayoi Kusama that has been inspiring you lately. What other comics, art, film, music, literature, etc. has caught your attention recently that our readers should check out after they give Polka Dot Queen a read?

SE: Great question!  Here is a selection of some things that I love:

Kusama-related: Kusama: Infinity, Infinity Net: The Autobiography 

Comics: One Piece, Maus, Calvin & Hobbes, Persepolis

Art: Hockey 25 at Fondation Louis Vuitton, Yoshitomo Nara at Southbank Centre

Film: The Fall, The Castle, Amelie, Run Lola Run, The Dish, Kenny, Starbuck, Booksmart, Goodbye Lenin, Le Diner de Cons, The Lives of Others, Perfect Days  

Music: Cowboy Carter (we are seeing Beyonce in concert tonight), Velvet Underground, CW Stoneking, Otis Blue, Coloring Book (Chance the Rapper), Flight of the Conchords  

Books: My Life (Chagall), Butter (Yuzuki), Catch 22 (Heller), Ask the Dust (Fante), anything by Bukowski

CBY: Simon, thanks for the extensive list of recommendations, and making time to stop by the Yeti Cave to discuss your work exploring the legacy of one of the planet’s most celebrated visual artists. If you’ve got portfolio, publication, and social media links you’d like to share with our audience, now is the time!

SE: Thank you for having me!  Readers can find me on Insta: @totalartshole.  I also post art and book content on TikTok: @simonpeterelliott.  I love connecting over art, so everyone should feel free to stop by and say hello!  I also do some freelance illustration work, so I am always open to approaches for that too.   

---

Like what you've just read? Help us keep the Yeti Cave warm! Comic Book Yeti has a Patreon page for anyone who wants to contribute: https://www.patreon.com/comicbookyeti