Here’s a taster!
Kirsten: Who are your major artistic influences?
Lois: My major artistic influence has been children’s illustrator Jan Pienkowski (born 1936, in Warsaw), in whose West London studio I have worked part-time as an artist’s assistant since the days of my GCSE art reference project (1999). Jan is best known for his Meg and Mog series, and for his pioneering pop-up books, including Haunted House, but he has also created many volumes of silhouette illustrations with a strong fairy-tale emphasis. His intricate silhouettes were originally hand-drawn, until I began cutting them out for him, based on his drawings, using a scalpel.
The most valuable thing I have absorbed from working so closely with Jan all these years is not the knowledge of art techniques, but rather his eccentric, sometimes completely ‘crazy’ approach towards art, and more generally towards life.
Most refreshing of all is his attitude towards so-called ‘mistakes’: Jan does not believe in mistakes. When something has just gone horribly ‘wrong’, he exclaims: “Wait! Maybe it’s better like that!”
You can read the rest of the interview here on Lois’s site.
