Yulu will be painted, there is no doubt about that. Her father decided it for her, he who always dreamed “to be an artist”. Tall as three apples, standing in front of the window of a plastic arts store or sitting on a pile of cushions, she always has a paintbrush in her hand. Yulu appears hesitant then happy with this destiny. She scrutinizes her cat and the fabrics around her to sketch them in her notebooks. Head tilted, eyebrows furrowed, she concentrates beside her father and her teachers, determined. And it shows in Suzy Lee’s pictorial expressiveness.
Suzy Lee stood out from her first illustrations in the album the black bird (Lirabelle, 2007). followed among others the wave (Kaleidoscope, 2008), poetic and monochrome, then Lines (Grown Ups, 2017) with the story of a young girl on ice skates and Vivaldi’s Summer (Street of the world, 2022). Rewarded this year for all of her work by the Hans-Christian-Andersen prize, nicknamed the Nobel Prize for children’s literature, Suzy Lee continues to reveal her virtuosity in this ode to perseverance, imagined by Cao Wenxuan, also winner of the prize. Andersen in 2016. Very often, the illustrator does not collaborate. His line dispenses with writing. But for la Peinture de Yulu, she had no other choice. How to narrate the tribulations of this young artist in the making?
matter of magic
Admittedly, the black pastel outlines forge the expressiveness of the cat and of Yulu, this little girl with a sometimes misleading resemblance to Kiki’s Delivery Service by Hayao Miyazaki. There is also magic here. No flying broomsticks or delivery service in the air, but his painting destroys itself every night in unexplained ways. “Then she rubs her eyes again to make sure she’s not dreaming: her self-portrait has become totally blurry, as if the paint had melted overnight, dripping, erasing her face!” The offending ? The Yulu linen canvas purchased from a specialist. It was meant for Xi Chuang, “one of the greatest masters of oil painting” died a few days earlier. The heroine starts again and again. Seven times. And, on the eighth attempt, she and Xi Chuang’s soul finally tame each other. “Being an artist is not a choice or a conviction. It is a state!” confided the visual artist Nataly Goubet in the pages of a magazine. Indeed, la Peinture de Yulu by Cao Wenxuan and Suzy Lee tells how art takes hold of you, never leaves you alone until you get your (potential) masterpiece – this one from“a luminous little girl who peacefully smiles”.