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Ethan & Vita Murrow
United States
Ethan and Vita Murrow work collaboratively on a variety of artistic projects including writing, video, film, drawing and photography. In addition, Ethan exhibits his drawings, paintings and sculptures internationally, and Vita is the director of a literacy project in Massachusetts. They live in Boston with their two children.
In this post, Ethan and Vita talk about the creation of their debut picturebook, ‘The Whale’. This epic, wordless adventure is published in the United Kindom by Big Picture Press (Templar) and in the United States by Candlewick Press.
Ethan: We started working together over ten years ago in a small holiday cottage in western Ireland where we first met. It was there around our kitchen table that we began writing stories, collaborating on drawing and generally making things up.
In the years that followed, we continued to step in and out of one another’s work as artists. Vita as a video artist and me as an artist working across drawing, painting and sculpture.
Vita: In 2007, we made a short film in the desert outside of Los Angeles – working in collaboration with Harvest Films of Santa Monica. The story followed a community mining for dust, ostensibly the last valuable resource on earth.
‘Dust’ was a massive effort, involving hundreds of creative minds and generous souls working together to tell a story about environmental concern and the ingenuity and absurdity of humans. This project brought together two of our favourite things: crafting tales about people who go above and beyond, and collaborating with other creative professionals. The latter often requires the former and we love how much we thrive in a group and learn from a team.
When Rachel Williams, our first editor at Big Picture Press, encouraged us to consider a kids’ book, we knew we wanted to go about it in the same way as our prior work, and we approached the book as if it was a film project. We are indebted to Rachel’s support of our method and ideas. Her advice, along with Mike Jolley, who was the Art Director for the book, had a huge impact on the story. Our goal all along was to tell a wordless or semi-wordless story about kid inventors and, ultimately, friends.
Ethan: We drew upon a narrative we had explored in earlier work: a hoax concerning a whale. After a few false starts, we built a treatment (or synopsis) for a story about two kids who were shipwrecked and trying to reach one another. We built a dummy for this story, constructed props, organised wardrobe, then hired two young actors and professional photographers to act out and capture the narrative.
After reviewing the images with Big Picture Press, we realised that the story was missing something. We reshuffled the narrative entirely and conceived a tale about two kids who began as competitors but ended as friends. Our actors, Brandon and Alexandra, came back into the studio and we shot new imagery with our photographers. As you’ll see in the mockups we built after the shoots, the landscape and settings were added later, so our actors functioned like they were in front of a green screen as we said things like, “pretend like there’s a whale jumping over your head”. It takes a real professional to make that kind of thing feel real, and these two young talents were extraordinary, bringing real vitality and subtlety to the project.
Our next step was to create collages for each page by combining our recorded imagery with found photographs, paintings, film stills and more. This was an exciting part of the process: a time to sort, plan and debate every little thing in the images, from point of view, tone, gesture, composition and pace (to name a few).
Vita: Through all of these stages, we work as partners, co-creators, directors, editors and critics. After some healthy culling and reformatting, our roles switch. The drawing starts, and here, Ethan becomes the illustrator and I become the critic and producer. Again, the best corollary is a film set, with a producer monitoring the whole project while a director or cinematographer collects the imagery. As drawings were built, we would view them as a team and discuss strengths, weaknesses and changes.
We are both artists, and after many years of working together, we bitch and moan, exclaim, question and praise with real honesty, directness and humour. These moments, in the end, are a big reason we make the work. As a team, we discover much about our own abilities and limitations, and it is always exciting to see how different attributes combine to form a whole. It is this spirit that we imbue in our characters, our work and our story. We hope readers find in ‘The Whale’: play, creativity, drama, inspiration, friendships and art.
Illustrations © Ethan & Vita Murrow.
The Whale
Ethan & Vita Murrow
Big Picture Press, United Kingdom, 2015
There is a legend that a Great Spotted Whale lives in the ocean, although a sighting fifty years ago was never corroborated. Now, two young whale watchers each set out to find the whale. When their boats collide, they pool their resources to capture proof that the mythical whale exists. This wordless adventure conveys the drama and haunting beauty of the ocean and captures the majesty of the awe-inspiring whale.
