Jeffers working on The Fate of Fausto, Idem Editions, Paris, 2018. © 2025 Oliver Jeffers
The Illustrators series, created in collaboration with Quentin Blake, introduces the work of the great illustrators, from Dick Bruna and Ludwig Bemelmans to Tove Jansson and Raymond Briggs. By highlighting the careers and contributions of these remarkable artists, the series presents a vibrant celebration of illustration as an art form.
The latest addition to the series is Oliver Jeffers, focusing on the work of the Belfast-raised illustrator, bookmaker and painter behind an array of hugely popular books. Jeffers is something of a phenomenon of 21st-century bookmaking as he tirelessly pushes the boundaries of what a picturebook can be.
In this extract, Martin Salisbury examines Jeffers’s ambitions to carve out an extraordinary career both as illustrator and artist.
Original artwork, How to Catch a Star, 2004. © 2025 Oliver Jeffers
‘My picturebooks are about storytelling, and my art is generally about question-asking, though they are both about my trying to make sense of the world around me,’ Jeffers responded when asked about these two aspects of his work in a 2015 interview for Brooklyn Magazine. The somewhat lazy idea that ‘fine’ or ‘pure’ artists are ‘selling out’ and risk tarnishing their careers if they engage with the so-called commercial or applied arts has remained stubbornly persistent in some quarters.
Protracted Landscape No. 6, from the ‘Measuring Land and Sea’ series, Lazarides Gallery, London 2015. © 2025 Oliver Jeffers
Many of the great Renaissance masterpieces were commissioned to order by the wealthy nobility of the day, and there are examples throughout history of artists who were primarily known for their painting trying their hand at illustration and design (notably 20th-century British artists Paul Nash and John Piper, and American artist Ben Shahn). However, it is less common for artists to take the opposite route – to have a background in illustration and move into fine art – and historically, there was often a stigma attached to having worked as an illustrator.
Interior illustrations, The Incredible Book Eating Boy, 2006. © 2025 Oliver Jeffers
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Jeffers encountered these prejudices in his early days as an artist and often distanced himself from the labels ‘illustrator’ and ‘illustration’, which he felt might hinder his efforts to establish himself in both worlds simultaneously. While the publishing world had no such qualms – indeed, versatility was seen as an asset – galleries were less open to an artist whose practice embraced illustration, a stance that Jeffers found somewhat belittling. At one stage, he considered adopting a pseudonym for his painting practice, although he swiftly changed his mind after discussing it with a friend. ‘Don’t do it,’ his friend told him. ‘Good work speaks for itself.’
Despite attempts to keep the two practices separate at the beginning of his career, there was some overlap, as Jeffers explains: ‘There were a lot of paintings I was making that were just interested in the night sky, and in the visual language of the stars. And a lot of the landscapes I was painting were large empty landscapes… with rowing boats… the North Pole and South Pole, and that inevitably fed through into the “boy” books.’
From left to right: Understanding Everything, oil on canvas, 2004. © 2025 Oliver Jeffers / Interior pages, Stuck, 2011. © 2025 Oliver Jeffers
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The cross-fertilization that can be detected throughout Jeffers’s work has become more marked in recent years. As his star has risen, extending his reach as an artist, the lines that once divided his painting and his picturebook-making have increasingly merged, not just for him but also for others working in the same fields. As Jeffers stated in his 2018 interview with Steven Heller, the motivations for all these works are similar, ‘in so much as I am trying to satisfy my own sense of curiosity rather than make work with a particular audience in mind. This is as true of figurative oil painting as it is for picturebooks.’
Words by Martin Salisbury
Discover Oliver Jeffers and the full Illustrators series.
