Oliver Jeffers Decks the Halls of Rockefeller Center

What type of creator were you as a child? Was there anything your parents did, in particular, to encourage your creativity?

My parents always were very encouraging. That wasn’t that usual. My book “Once Upon An Alphabet” is dedicated to my dad for never making me get a real job. We weren’t really ever encouraged to go down an expected career path. I grew up in Belfast, which was a politically violent city, but I grew up with three brothers and a very loving family and humor and storytelling were very, very important. Not that I knew it at the time, but those lessons and the atmosphere of our house played a very important part in my work. 

How do you see the connection between curiosity, art and storytelling?

They’re three peas in a pod, really. Art is associated with everything. I really believe that. Even science has huge overlaps with art. Science might be the what and art often times is the why. And with curiosity, we were always taught to be curious, sort of a favorite quote of my dad’s was, “The surest sign of intelligence in another human being is curiosity.” Just because you know a lot of facts doesn’t prove you’re intelligent, it just proves you’ve got a good memory. So we were always taught to uncover things ourselves and to get to the bottom of things and make up our own minds.

How has this particular moment we are living through affected your work and your sense of humor?

Well, I don’t think there’s anyone who can say the year went according to plan. We’re definitely in that camp. We were halfway through a year of traveling when the pandemic hit. We were in Japan and we started to make our way back to New York. We got as far as the West Coast when it looked like there was going to be a European travel ban and we got word that my father was given a cancer diagnosis. We decided to relocate to Belfast temporarily and we are still here. As far as that goes, my studio is 3,000 miles away. I’ve been slowly trying to set up a studio here just to get back to doing a little bit of work. This year has really been about slowing down, it’s been about family, and I think that’s probably the case for a lot of people. If you had asked people to guess what they would miss most in a global lockdown, I don’t know if it’s the things that people actually did miss the most. It became pretty clear pretty quickly that how we had prioritized everything in our lives might have been a little skewed. So I do hope there’s some holistic good that will come of this and just remembering what it is that we actually want and what it is that makes us happy. 

In terms of your process and getting to that moment where you are able to create, has it been more difficult or has it been something that’s an escape for you?

It’s been technically difficult just because I have nowhere proper to work yet but that doesn’t stop me from having ideas and writing notes in sketchbooks. I’ve had no problem being inspired. I feel like it’s been a real call to arms for me because it’s so obvious that there’s so much that needs to change and that needs to happen. People are saying that it’s a pity that COVID has come along and knocked climate change off the agenda for everybody, but I actually think they’re very intricately linked because the point is that humanity is not superior to nature at all, as we’ve been kidding ourselves, but that we are indelibly linked with it and that this is what nature can do to us when we are not prepared for it and we are not respectful of it. 

Your book "Here We Are: Notes for Living on Planet Earth" was inspired by the birth of your first child and the responsibility you felt to explain the world. How else did becoming a father shift your understanding of your role as an artist and storyteller?

It really underlined the importance in my opinion of using art as a voice. I’ve always loved that Kurt Vonnegut quote that artists are the canary in the coal mine. That is something that changed. I think my opinions and my beliefs and things were galvanized and underlined. Previously on social media, I never really thought it was my place to speak out about anything that was not directly about my work which at that point I just thought of myself as entertaining, but that all changed when we were expecting our first kid because the world seemed to be becoming a darkly frightening place and I didn’t want that to be. I wanted to be able to look my kids in the eyes in the future and say that I tried to do what was right. And what I didn’t realize quite so much is that because I am a visual person trying to show things rather than say things, that I was giving voice or feeling to how a lot of people were finding themselves without the ability to articulate that. So I think that that's an important role for artists to play. To hold a mirror up to society. 

You are this year’s commissioned holiday artist at Rockefeller Center. Can you tell us about the murals you created?

New York at Christmas is epitomized by Rockefeller Center and I have always loved maps. I think whenever the request came in, it was pretty obvious how I was going to do it, which is the way that I always love to do maps which is bits of paper and pencil, and it looks like they were made on the desktop there and then. There is a looseness and a spontaneity to them, that feels quite of the moment. There’s a different energy to that, almost like it’s straight out of a journal or a diary. And then I’ve used those bits of paper as the city blocks to lay out the map. It was fun. I was making the drawings from my kitchen table in our apartment in Belfast at the end of the summer putting on Christmas carols to get myself in the mood. I had to make a few amendments as it became obvious that all of the characters needed to be wearing masks and things like that. But it was an awful lot of fun and almost broke my laptop because it’s not used to trying to scan objects that are that big. It's fantastic to finally start seeing the photographs coming in. It’s absolutely killing me that I’m not going to be there to see it. And then I was reading all of the stories about the tree, and there is something very 2020 about this whole thing. It’s like the tree in A Charlie Brown Christmas, you want to root for the underdog. It needs a little bit of extra love and I think that’s very true of society right now. We are like a scraggly tree that needs a little extra love.

I have one from my four-year-old daughter who loves your books, especially "The Day the Crayons Quit": how did you draw the crayons?

Well, I would like to be able to say with crayons, but everything in that book is drawn with crayon except for the actual crayons themselves, because they needed to stand out from the drawings to show that they were the characters and not the drawings. So the crayons themselves are painted with gouache and everything else is either a photograph of a piece of paper or a drawing with a crayon. 

Finally, is there anything else you think about as an artist and a parent, for children, getting them curious and getting them interested in art?

I do think that the same piece of advice for this is the same for most parenting things which is to lead by example. These are little human beings that we are not fully in control of, nor should we be. They have to learn how to do things themselves and the best way to get a kid excited about something is to be enthusiastic about it yourself. But I’m quite wary of it. I don’t want to make my kids sick of art, creativity, or books, so I don’t actually ram it down their throats, but they just see me being excited about it and I think that extends to them.