Jennifer Uman’s illustrations and paintings bask in their naivety, celebrate their status as outsider pictures, have room to describe all aspects of life from blowjobs to Victorian life and Call Centres to family meals. This quirky style has brought Uman much admiration not least from the film director Wes Anderson and The New York Times.
This year Uman finished her first book, Jeremy Button, a collaboration she did with the Italian illustrator, Valerio Vidali. It’s a beautiful work that tells the true story of Jemmy Button, a boy from a native tribe in Tierra del Fuego who was abducted by the crew of the HMS Beagle in 1830. The captain of the ship gave the boy’s family a mother-of-pearl button in exchange. Hence the name. Button was brought to England and mannered in the ways of the Victorian upper class and returned to his family a year later with the explorers hoping that he’d cultivate new land for the British. But Button dropped the things he learned and went back to living exactly as he had. Naked and primitive. The British plan failed.
It’s a story of homesickness and restlessness, of forced emigration and expatriation and draws parallels to my own departure from Hong Kong as a 12 year old to school in Ireland.
There is something so honest and endearing about these illustrations, their aesthetic rooted in the folk art of Margaret Kilgallen and Bill Traylor, each picture simple, direct and imbued with an innocence that often belies its subject matter. Unman’s illustrations are a reminder to all of us that art that springs from a well of truth will always shine. Here’s what Uman has to say about her work:
My life has been equally beautiful as it’s been brutal and I try to be fair to both sides. Pulling from the brutal part isn’t always necessary, so that’s when I lean on the beautiful. It goes both ways. [My pictures do not belong] in the beginning or the end but the middle where there’s that total connect. That’s the space I’m most comfortable painting.