THERE are some books which cannot be summoned to mind without their accompanying images The Wind In The Willows and Winnie The Pooh, of course, forever captured in pen and ink by Ernest Shepherd's endearing drawings, Dickens's novels with their original etchings by "Phiz", or anything by Beatrix Potter, Tolkien or the endlessly inventive Mervyn Peake all of whom illustrated their own work.
In the current flowering of children's publishing with its emphasis on zappy, eye catching design, text and illustration are becoming increasingly interdependent. Yet, P.J. Lynch, the Belfast born winner of this year's Kate Greenaway Medal for children's book illustration, talks somewhat accusingly about the over valuing of the word in our culture in general, and in the publishing world in particular. Too often, he thinks, the role of the illustrator goes unacknowledged and is subsumed to that of the author an approach which, in the case of large format picture books with one sentence per page, is undeniably lopsided.
Still, his own work has certainly been recognised. As well as the Mother Goose award for his first book, A Bag of Moonshine by Alan Garner, he was short listed for the prestigious Greenaway medal for his illustrations of the Norwegian fairy tale, East O' The Sun And West O The Moon. This year the judges selected his illustrations of The Christmas Miracle Of Jonathan Toomey, by Susan Wojciechowski, from a strong short list including Christina Balit, Patrick Benson, Quentin Blake, Ken Brown, Mick Ingpen and Colin McNaughton which demonstrates the diversity and wealth of talent among artists in this field.
"I still think of myself as the new boy, even though I have been working at this for 11 years," the 34 year old Lynch says, on a coffee break away from his Dublin studio. "Winning the medal should help to change that."
Coinciding with last week's award of the medal by the Library Association in Britain, a number of events will take place to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the birth of Kate Greenaway, whose work P.J. Lynch acknowledges as important, although he is not a particular fan. Her watercolour illustrations of flowers, gardens and children in quaint Regency costume, accompanied by her own verses (see illustration), became a publishing phenomenon in Victorian England, giving, rise to a rash of merchandising of greeting cards, dolls, toiletries and tea towels, but they seem pallid and sentimental to late 20th century eyes.
"It's easy to patronise kids," Lynch says. "Anyone who wants to write or draw for children must really immerse themselves in children's books. You see so many people falling into the trap of using alliterative names for characters, for example, which is just so twee." Illustrators he admires from the past are Arthur Rackham and Edmund Dulac and he is particularly taken with the singular vision of Mervyn Peake.
As a student of illustration and graphics at Brighton College of Art, where he went after his school years in Belfast, Lynch had no particular interest in children's books. "I didn't know any children then, but Raymond Briggs was one of our tutors and I could see that there were possibilities, that here was an opportunity to make the kind of pictures I was interested in fantasy based work and be paid for it. I still don't draw with kids in mind, though, just people. I'm not aiming to please kids just please myself."
Up to now, pleasing himself has meant creating a fantasy world of enchanted landscapes, of caverns and lakes, palaces flooded with light and glittering with jewelled colours. In Catkin, by Antonia Barber, princes and ladies with flowing locks waft through mists, dressed in fine velvet and satin gowns, and embrace against star spattered skies. In East O The Sun, West O The Moon, a mysterious, Nordic version of Cupid and Psyche or Beauty And The Beast, the north wind is personified in a swirl of smoky cloud as he whips up a storm for a shipwreck.
The Christmas Miracle of Jonathan Toomey marks a departure from fantasy for Lynch, which he was initially unsure about taking on. The story of a morose widower (Mr Gloomy) in a New England town who lets love steal back into his heart through the persistence of a friendly widow and her son, it has strong echoes of A Christmas Carol.
To create a sense of the late 19th century period, Lynch visited a museum of social history in Vermont, where he sketched and photographed furniture and reconstructed homesteads and farms, to create the painterly, candle lit interiors of the book, with their rich, deep colours.
Back in Dublin, he took hundreds of photographs of models in costume, which then became the basis of his gouache and watercolour drawings of the three main characters. This, increasingly, is how he likes to work, slowly and painstakingly, and the studio he shares on Baggot Street is strewn with costumes from theatrical suppliers, and photographs and drawings in various stages of completion. He started off taking polaroid snaps of his friends draped in sheets, but now does it all more carefully, with attention to lighting and detail.
In some ways this meticulous method is more akin to the work of a film designer than most people's idea of a book illustrator, and Lynch describes himself not just as a draughtsman but as "a maker of pictures". Another, even more historically accurate book is on the way, recreating a Polish emigrant's first impressions of New York at the turn of the century, before Lynch turns back to fantasy based work.
After 11 years in Brighton, he enjoys being back in Ireland though Dublin, rather than Belfast, is his preferred base. In the future he plans to tackle Irish mythology, perhaps a small section of the Fianna cycle, but does not feel ready yet. In the meantime, he is signed up with Walker books and the commissions keep coming, leaving him little time for all the other things sculpture, portraiture, playing his neglected fiddle that he wants to do. Not a bad complaint, for a mere illustrator .