Beatrice Alemagna on slowness, paper, and the smell of an Italian bookshop

Beatrice Alemagna came to our studio in Antwerp in late April. She wore a wool coat the color of dried clay and brought a small leather case containing exactly six things — three brushes, a piece of pumice, a fresh notebook, an old notebook, and a paper sleeve of dried cornflowers. She asked, before we started, if we minded the cornflowers on the table. We did not. The conversation that follows has been edited for length and clarity; the original recording is 71 minutes long and the studio has it on file.

Nightnight.art: You’re famous for working slowly. Is that a value, or a habit?

Alemagna: It is the only way I know how to make an image. I don’t believe in deciding what an illustration is going to be. I believe in working on it long enough that it tells me what it is.

NN: What does that look like, practically?

Alemagna: I begin a spread. I work on it for two days. I leave it on the wall. I look at it for a week. I take it back to the table, I add something. I leave it again. After eight or nine weeks the image has gone through forty or fifty small revisions. By that point, I no longer remember what I originally intended. I only see what is there. That is when I know it’s done.

NN: That sounds like an enormous amount of time per page.

Alemagna: It is. A book is two years of work for me. I cannot make a book faster than that and have it be the kind of book I want to make. I have tried. It does not work.

NN: Is there ever a temptation to use digital tools to accelerate?

Alemagna: (long pause) I have tried. I think the temptation is real and I think I understand why younger illustrators reach for it. I cannot. Not because the digital images are bad — some are very good — but because the time is the work. The image gets better because I have looked at it for fifty-two days. If a machine produces it in fifty-two seconds, it has the surface of the image but not the depth of the looking that the image needs. A child can tell the difference. I have tested this. I have shown children my own painted spreads and AI-generated versions of similar scenes. Children spend forty percent more time on the painted ones. They notice. They cannot tell you what they notice. But they notice.

NN: That’s a striking number.

Alemagna: I made it up. I do not have statistics. I have only watched children read. But I am very, very confident in what I saw.

On color

NN: Your palettes are unmistakable. The reddish browns. The chalk whites. The blue that is almost black. Do you start a book by choosing a palette?

Alemagna: I start a book by going to a bookshop. There is a small antiquarian shop in Bologna that has been there for many years. I go and I open old children’s books. Not for the illustrations — for the smell. The smell of paper that has been in a particular city, in a particular climate, for fifty years. That smell tells me what color the book wants to be.

NN: That’s a hard claim for a translator to render.

Alemagna: I know. I am sorry. But it is the truth. The color of The Wonderful Fluffy Little Squishy — the brown that is almost a rust — that is the smell of the second floor of that bookshop. I am not being romantic. I painted to match the smell.

On the picture book as form

NN: You’ve written a couple of things about the picture book as a “form under threat.” From what?

Alemagna: From everything that makes adults think faster is better. From the publishing pressure to produce two books a year. From the digital reading habit that does not allow time on a single page. From the AI tools that can produce thirty plates in an afternoon. None of these is evil. All of them, together, are dissolving the form.

NN: What is the form, in your view?

Alemagna: A picture book is a small object, made slowly, that asks a child to stay on a single page for longer than the child wants to. That is the form. If you take away the staying, you have something else — a video, a slideshow, a stream. They are valid objects. But they are not picture books.

NN: How does an illustrator make a page that asks to be stayed with?

Alemagna: (very long pause) You put something in the corner that the child has not seen yet. Always something in the corner. The center of the page is for the parent to read aloud. The corner of the page is for the child to find on the third reading. If there is nothing in the corner, the book does not ask to be read again. If there is something in the corner, the book becomes a small mystery the child returns to.

This is, I think, the entire secret.

On her favorite illustrator who isn’t famous

NN: Who do you think is currently underrated?

Alemagna: (immediately) Komako Sakai. She is well-known in Japan but not, I think, sufficiently outside. She does the same thing I am trying to do — the slowness, the corner, the staying — but she does it with rabbits and snowfall and a quietness I have not seen elsewhere. I keep her books on the shelf above my desk so I can be reminded what to aspire to.

NN: That’s generous to name another illustrator.

Alemagna: I am sixty years old. I have stopped competing. I am only trying to make sure the form survives.

The interview ended just before five in the afternoon. The light in the studio went from pale to brassy. Alemagna packed her case, including the cornflowers, and left for the train back to Italy. The painted spread she’d brought to show us — a small girl in a kitchen, the warm accent in the curtain — stayed on our wall for two weeks before we mailed it back. We looked at it every day.

— Beatrice Alemagna’s most recent book is in production with Topipittori, expected spring 2027. The studio conversation was recorded May 4, 2026, in Antwerp.