ON FAIRYTALES The O’Hara Sisters
Be they echoes of tales from long ago, retellings, or twisted and fractured mash-ups – fairytales never lose their appeal. In the first of a new series, Deputy Editor Françoise Price talks to Natalia and Lauren O’Hara.
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Sisters Natalia (top) and Lauren O'Hara |
Natalia and Lauren O'Hara are the author and illustrator respectively of the magical fairytale-esque picture books, Hortense and the Shadow and Frindleswylde.
NO'H: Our grandma told gorgeous stories about her childhood – picnics in the forest, fancy-dress parties and skating on frozen lakes. But there was this unsettling, unspoken menace in the stories, which all happened in and around Warsaw in the last years before World War Two. Our story didn't come from our grandma, Hortense and the Shadow is a little psychological fable I made up, but the atmosphere and landscape is all her.
FP: Frindleswylde (published 2021) has "echoes of Russian fairytales and Hans Christian Andersen". Which fairytales inspired you in the making of this book?
NO'H: Our villain, Frindleswylde, has some things in common with Vodník, a sinister little man in Czech folklore who lives at the bottom of a fishpond collecting the souls of drowned children and singing merrily as he sews new shoes. And I think of Cora as a little sister to those Russian fairytale princesses who go on adventures to rescue their beloved. As children we loved a Naomi Lewis/Errol le Cain retelling of The Snow Queen, and there are echoes of that book too.
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| Front covers of Hortense and the Shadow |
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| and Frindleswylde |
LO'H: Yes, we were raised here and our dad is English, but we're Czech and Polish on our mum's side, I’ve lived in Prague and we have family there. Something that really made a big impact on us is that as children we had a small dog-eared collection of Eastern European mid-century picture books from our mum’s childhood. And that was really a golden era – Jiří Trnka, Mirko Hanák, Zdeněk Miler etc. Those books were an enormous influence on us.
FP: The language and illustrations have a wonderful folkloric quality – you’re both clearly in love with the genre. What were your favourite folk and fairytales as children and growing up?
NO'H: As children we loved Hans Christian Andersen, Oscar Wilde and Alexander Afansyev, and we had some nice anthologies of folklore and mythology. We do love fairytales, partly because of the kind of stories it lets you tell. Emily Dickinson said "tell all the truth but tell it slant", and that's a fairytale isn’t it? So you can be dark and honest and weird in a fairytale, and still get published.
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Wintry scenes from Hortense and the Shadow
LO'H: We’ve been told we work more like "an author-illustrator" than an author and an illustrator. Although I don’t write and Natalia doesn’t draw, the process is a real collaboration and both the words and picture develop in tandem. At the beginning of every project we make a joint board on Pinterest where we pin tons of visual references – a mix of reference photos for locations, old paintings, costume references, the work of other illustrators: anything that helps us establish a mood and sense of the book really. That’s how we find a shared vision for the books.
FP: Lauren: what technique and materials did you use for creating your lovely icy, snowy landscapes? How did the textual framework influence your artwork?
LO'H: I work using traditional media – inks and gouache with some digital finishing. I knew I wanted Frindleswylde to have a frosty feel and I started playing with the colour palette. The obvious choice was blue tones. The funny thing about blue though is that it can be quite an oddly warm colour – so I ended up switching to a lot of greens which gave a weird, icy, magical feel. I also used more digital manipulation for this book than I normally do – tweaking the colours and layering elements to get a slightly unreal feel. That’s how I created the slightly odd, mystical feel of Frindleswylde’s world. We wanted the world of Cora and Granny to feel like the opposite of that, so I used a lot of warm earthy browns and reds to show the warmth at the heart of their story.
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Our first book, Hortense and the Shadow, is only 300 words. Follow the rules until they let you in. Then find out where the rules bend.
FP: What’s next? What are you working on (or is it a secret?!).
Natalia O'Hara teaches at Goldsmiths (MA Children's Book Illustration).
Lauren O'Hara has mentored with Picture Hooks.
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| Shadow child: illustration from Hortense and the Shadow |
NO'H: I’m working on a book back at our first publisher, Puffin, with a fantastic illustrator whose work I’ve admired for years. It's not been announced yet so I can't say more, but I think it's going to be fun and surprising and delightful and it’s out this year.
LO'H: I have a book out in Autumn with Walker Books, and I’m also back at Penguin Random House working on a non-fiction which is slated for release in 2024. But they’re still top secret at the moment!
Thank you Natalia and Lauren!
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Lauren O'Hara has mentored with Picture Hooks.
Read more about the sisters here.
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Françoise Price is Deputy Editor of Words & Pictures magazine. Contact deputyeditor@britishscwbi.org.
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