Cover, book design, map and ten illustrations for A Rural Idyll by Geoff Squire, published 2024 by The Branscombe Project. Edited by Barbara Farquharson and Patrick Dillon.
When Geoff grew up, he became a professional geographer, but his memoirs of his early years in Branscombe, Devon, show that his affinity for landscape and the natural world took root in childhood. Describing his experiences in terms of “mental maps” and “personal geography", he situates his stories in space and place. Portraying the way in which his world expanded as he grew, he understands that this happened not only because he was growing older, but because the village of Branscombe - and English country life - was changing.
Being one-half geographer myself, I welcomed the opportunity to illustrate this text. Being other-half artist, I visualised Geoff’s descriptions of his Branscombe childhood as many-layered. Geoff the country lad, playing freely outdoors with his brother, was shaped by the rural landscape and environment that they roamed, but also reveals his academic side: the thoughtful, observant, stamp-collecting son of the schoolmaster, forming an understanding of the countryside through books, school charts and ex-army binoculars. In the natural way of things, Geoff’s memories are filtered and coloured by what came next. The child within the man is a geographer in the making; he remembers the things that geographers remember.
In Devon, I was able to collaborate with Geoff in person and conceived my response to his text as layers of experience and landscape. My process was to gather material from a variety of places relating to Geoff's childhood and use these to create textured collages.
I sought out old maps, new maps and geological maps and was given access to to work with old photographs from Geoff’s family collection. I experimented with hand-tracing images and text with pencils and tracing paper and worked with scans of real-world phenomena, such as the pattern of coffee grounds in my sink. Books were scarce in Geoff's childhood but the few books he had greatly influenced the development of his naturalist's eye. Happily, I was able to track down Dudley Stamp’s wonderful Britain’s Structure & Scenery and a vintage Observer Book of British Birds. However, when I asked Geoff about fiction he might have read as a child, he looked faintly disgusted. This made sense given the studious, non-imaginative nature of Geoff's outdoor play; the absence of treasure-hunters, pirates and explorers. Later, as if recalling something long-forgotten, he produced his old copy of Bevis, the Story of a Boy and I was able to study EH Shepherd's marvellous illustrations. The texture used to depict Geoff's bottle collection was taken from Shepherd's cross-hatched depiction of a field at night.
With many thanks to Geoff, Barbara and Patrick.
