Etienne Delessert

Today, it's my birthday!

I was hanging out in the library and I found this retrospective catalogue of a neat Swiss illustrator called Etienne Delessert. The cover seemed vaguely familiar, and I soon realized that I had seen a lot of these watercolors when I was a kid. I think I had a book of children's stories by the playright Ionesco that he made the pictures for.

It's this one, above, with the little girl hiding on the breakfast tray, that brought back a very old memory, from when I was four or five years old maybe. I think it was at my grandparent's house, the village inn, where we all flew in for a big family reunion one time at Christmas. I think that's where I saw the picture book... I might be making this up, of course — memory being very inventive — but, in any case, it's what I associate with these drawings: a sense of myself as quite a small child and the reassuring but slightly foreign warmth of my French grandparent's home in a country village.

I love the soft touch: the bright but delicate colors contrasting with muted tones to create a balance, a beautiful harmony. I'm affected by the mild charge of childish anxiety convayed by the eery scenes and naive drawing style... Contemplating these pictures, I feel reconnected to the small, sensitive, fearful, imaginative, well-loved boy I once was — the small boy I never stopped being.