Twelfth Night: At the very heart of artistic creation.

Résumé :

At the very heart of artistic creation.

This paper examines the birth of a series of drawings I produced as an illustrator for Shakespeare's 1601 comedy, Twelfth Night. The word « birth », although somewhat unusual in this context, reflects the methodological perspective adopted here. Rather than presenting finished images and subsequently commenting on them, as is commonly done, I propose to retrace the successive stages involved in the creation of these illustrations. My aim is to foreground a process: the transition from the dramatic text and the mental images it generates to the visual forms into which these illusions are ultimately transformed. The creative process begins with a series of indistinct visions conjured up by the playwright's words. These gradually evolve into concrete images shaped by my hand, which operates with a certain degree of autonomy, before returning to the mind, which in turn passes judgment on the resulting drawings executed exclusively in coloured pencil. The relation between my mind and hand proves to be dynamic and at times unpredictable. While the former attempts to guide the interpretation of the play, the latter occasionally asserts its independence and occasionally produces unexpected visual solutions. At times, these decisions are readily intelligible; at others, they remain puzzling, prompting an attempt to find the concord of this apparent discord. As for the impulse toward the image, it may arise from a precise scene -for example, the opening encounter with the melancholy Duke Orsino expounding on the nature of love or the final gathering around the identical creatures in 5.4 1or from the evocative density of Shakespeare's poetic language. Accordingly, the present study moves from one illustration to another in a sequence of analytical commentaries that broadly follow the chronological development of the play, before turning to a more focused examination of several individual characters.