Affair of the art
Illustrator Henrik Drescher and his Hong Kong wife, Wu Wing-yee, tell Clare Morin about their life in Yunnan province and expelling 'the anti-muse'
Henrik Drescher is standing in front of a class of illustration students at the Maine College of Art, in Portland, in the United States. It's 9am and the Dane - one of the most revered illustrators in the world - wastes no time in offering what may be the best advice the students will ever hear.
"I want you to cultivate the muse," he barks at them. "You're on a dead-line but you need to loosen up. You need to learn how to counteract the anti-muse. All of you are talented but some of you will not be able to let go of the anti-muse, perhaps for your entire lives. Focus on the muse. If you do something interesting to you, it will shine."
Drescher and his artist wife, Wu Wing-yee, have landed in Maine as part of their US tour teaching at art colleges and publicising Drescher's new book, China Days: A Visual Journal From China's Wild West.
A regular illustrator for The New York Times, The Washington Post, Time and Rolling Stone, and until last year a weekly contributor to Post Magazine - his books are also housed in the collections of New York's Museum of Modern Art and London's Victoria and Albert Museum - Drescher is venerated in illustration circles.
His children's books, known for their imaginative power, have topped The New York Times' Best Illustrated Children's Books of the Year list four times. His artistic books attract a cult-like following. In Turbulence: A Log Book he mixes Hindu creation myths with the mind-warping narrative of a traveller on a steamship sailing into "an ocean of bliss". China Days is the artistic embodiment of the 11 years Drescher and Wu have spent living in the country.
"We met in Hong Kong," says Wu, over coffee in the college's downstairs cafeteria, once the students have been inspired, and terrified, into action.
