The Color of Emotions in Isabelle Arsenault's Illustrations

The Color of Emotions in Isabelle Arsenault's Illustrations Perry Nodelman (bio) Isabelle Arsenault—born in Sept-Îles, Quebec, in 1978, a graphic design graduate from the Université du Québec à Montréal, and still a resident of that city—has illustrated a wide variety of books for publishers in Canada and, increasingly, elsewhere, in ways that successfully represent their author's diverse intentions but are nevertheless instantly recognizable as hers. Arsenault's images tend to be minimal and mostly monochromatic—simplified but assured outlines of people and their environments. But despite their simplicity, these images convey complex emotions in ways that both express and extend the implications of the texts they accompany. Arsenault is often more interested in depicting the thoughts and emotions of characters than in showing them in the places and situations that engender the emotions—more interested in interior events than in the physical circumstances that lead to them. In her images for Maxine Trottier's Migrant, for instance, she accompanies the minimal details of young Anna's environment as the child of migrant Mennonite farmworkers with literal depictions of how Anna imagines herself and others—as a jackrabbit or as kittens or as themselves floating over the tomatoes they are picking but with the wings of bees. Click for larger view View full resolution In Fanny Britt's Jane, the Fox & Me, similarly, when young Hélène imagines that the bathing suit she is trying on makes her look like a sausage, Arsenault depicts her as an actual sausage in a bathing suit but with human arms and legs, and when Vanessa's sister Virginia wakes up "feeling wolfish" in Kyo Maclear's Virginia Wolf, Arsenault depicts her as an actual wolf in a human bedroom. Then, as Vanessa encourages Virginia to join her in imagining the utopian place she calls Bloomsberry, Virginia's resistance to moving beyond her depression is signaled by her continuing to appear as a wolf-shaped black silhouette—until a final picture in full color reveals that the two points that have been representing her wolf ears have become the edges of the jaunty bow she wears on top of her newly happy human head. This transformation is an example of [End Page 59] the economy of Arsenault's work—the ways in which a few simple brushstrokes can convey not only a change in a character's state of mind but also the nature of that state of mind, the complex thoughts and emotions that it consists of. While most of her images are primarily monochromatic—usually black and/or brown—Arsenault often includes just one or two figures in another color. In her pictures for Jean Pendziwol's Once Upon a Northern Light, for instance, Arsenault not only highlights the aurora borealis with vivid greens and purples in otherwise primarily black-and-white depictions of snowy nights, but she also offers just a few green branches in otherwise black-and-white pine trees and depicts the red cheeks of rabbits and the red fur of a fox emerging from dark shadows. These few colorful details both create a focus for viewers' attention and offer a sense of a lively world obscured by the night but still visible to attentive viewers. More symbolically, paying attention to the presence of yellow and blue objects in Arsenault's otherwise brown and black illustrations for her own text in Collette's Lost Pet, about an imaginative child making friends in Arsenault's own Montreal neighborhood, reveals how Colette's imagination works: it seems to be the things in her environment that contribute to her creation of a blue and yellow parakeet. The "Fragile" label on the box Collette angrily kicks after her mother denies her wish for a pet is the first appearance of yellow in the book after her own yellow coat, thus implying a connection between the girl and fragility, so that her transformation of the drab bird that flies out of the box into an imaginary blue parakeet with a bit of yellow on its neck represents its connection to Colette herself. The yellow spot shares its shape with the yellow-cloaked Colette, the blue its color with...

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