A virtually unknown illustrator

When my grand-daughter, Damini, returned from a short break abroad, she told me of an interesting exchange she had with a minor functionary, someone like an usher or a bell-hop, of a hotel in which she was staying. She happened to see the man sketching something and, intrigued, she fell into a brief conversation with him, at the end of which he handed her, as a gift, a small 16-page printed booklet of his works, each page with an illustration in full colour, but no text, none at all; not even a caption. The only words, superimposed upon the image of a tall, historic looking building, were on the cover: “Alain Glomo: Illustrator”, they read .

Damini showed me the booklet, and, like her, I was intrigued: a hotel functionary as an illustrator? I asked her if she got to know anything more about Alain Glomo, but she had not. All I got was that the gentleman seemed to be in his sixties.

Browsing through this attractive booklet of illustrations, and not knowing anything about the artist, I found myself slipping into the ‘investigative’ mode of an art historian. I had done some of that in earlier years — tracking Pahari painters down in the pilgrims’ records kept at centres of pilgrimage, for instance; deciphering complex inscriptions in the Takri script on paintings; identifying the exact texts on which some series of paintings were based; reconstructing the circumstances in which copies of European prints might have been made in Kutch in the 18th century; and so on — but this was something of a challenge, an invitation perhaps. Could I, from just seeing these images, reconstruct, piece together, something of the career, the background, the belief-set of the illustrator?

It was not going to be easy, but was worth making the effort, I thought, even if it did not fall within the range of my current interests. One thing became effortlessly clear: one of the illustrations carried a brief text in French, the calligraphy in a style resembling handwriting. The man obviously knows French, is perhaps even of French origin, I thought. This was confirmed by another illustration that must have been contributed by him to some magazine — the word SCENE was blazoned at the top — with a brief printed note at the bottom, reading “The Montreal Star 1976” referring obviously to where it was first published some 40 years ago. So, a French-knowing man who came from or was settled in the French-speaking province of Quebec. This, however, was not half as interesting as an image of an attractive young woman standing, clutching a photograph of a man, possibly an American soldier. The young woman had what appeared to be southeast-Asian features, possibly Vietnamese, and she was wearing a figure-hugging dress that was made up of the map of a part of Asia, on which one could read printed words like China, Indo-China, Thailand, Vietnam. Clearly, there was meaning in the dress that the illustrator had clad the young woman in. My interest in the image kept growing, and I looked even more intently than before. My eyes landed rather quickly then on a part of the Seal of the President of the United States which loomed at top right of the sheet and there, in very minute characters, were the words ‘IN WAR WE TRUST’, the illustrator having cleverly replaced the usual epigraph there, ‘IN GOD WE TRUST’. It was clear now that the work was meant to be an anti-war poster, made with reference to the infamous Vietnam War. Things fell into place for me now: the young woman was meant to be seen as a Vietnamese; the photograph she was clutching on to was possibly that of some American soldier that she had formed a relationship with; the cynically replaced “God” with “War” on the Presidential Seal made complete sense. Did the illustrator, or someone really close to him, serve in Vietnam, one wonders. There was still more in the image, of course: the fine striped columns in the wall paper at the back were filled with tiny images of falling bombs and the Nuclear Disarmament symbol, also sometimes called the Peace Symbol, often associated with Bertrand Russell; the chair by which the young woman was standing had a threatening aspect. And then, in that booklet of images, there was that other poster/illustration in which a young couple can be seen reclining comfortably in their bed with the word ‘PEACE’ boldly written behind them and a dove taking to wing at a distance.

But I realise that I have, at least here, got carried away in my ‘investigative’ role, and neglected to speak of the quality of the works of this unknown — unknown at least to me — illustrator. In the booklet there were other delightful images: a Titanic-like ship with a man in his night-dress standing on the prow with a candle in hand; an aerial view of a garden city; newsboys, one of them with a crutch, standing in a freezing landscape, with sheaves of papers to sell. Each of these kept asking for a closer, more intent look.