Pictures of Home

Colin Thompson (author/illustrator)

Random House, Australia: 1992, April 2011

ISBN: 9781742750903

Genre: picture book

Issues: belonging

What does 'home' mean to you? In Pictures of Home Colin Thompson uses images to explore the nature of a profound concept with which we all struggle at times.

This book pulls together a selection of pictures that Colin Thompson drew for the Leeds Building Society. Originally they were used for calendars but here they are combined with comments, verses and haiku by a group of 10-11 year old children. The children's contributions offer a range of views from the stolidly simple 'every home should have a roof and a door' to the deeply intuitive and philosophical 'home is a place where you can be free'. From ideal to idealised, homes vary as much as the way we think about them. What do you think of when someone says 'home'? Is it a place or a person?

Consisting of some of his earliest illustrative work, Pictures of Home shows Thompson at his playful, thought-provoking best. All the images could be considered surrealist – houses growing out of such eccentric contexts as a bathtub, between trees, emerging like a cushion out of a lounge, in a single brick, in the base of a fountain, the list goes on. Yet such is Thompson's skill that these creations seem logical; believable rather than dreamlike. Children (and the young at heart) will love the idea that anywhere and everywhere in their environment might be home to someone – often someone very, very small. There is a great opportunity here for readers to use a visual diary to explore their own ideas about the concept of home or to do as Thompson does – invent weird and totally wonderful places where a home might be found, if you only look at it the right way.

Pictures of Home is a nature walk for the imagination – a place to wander at will and find inspiration, comfort, amusement, things to observe and explore, stories to invent and Alice in Wonderland-like adventures to be had.

Same author: Falling Angels; Looking For Atlantis