Webster clearly draws from many different references to produce a vast body of interchangeable styles. Establishing himself as a flexible practitioner, he is able to take ownership over all of the different styles he can create. He is explorative and inquisitive of the world, and having travelled a great deal and lived in many different countries as a child, he has a wealth of cultural references to draw from. As Barthes writes, 'We know now that a text is...a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotation drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.' It could be that Webster's success is derived from his openness to experiences in the world, allowing all of these ideas and references to 'blend and clash'. This is reflected in the choices that he makes about the creative work that he produces.
Although his work is very varied, he is of course still the author and creator of it all. It is possible that perhaps each of his pieces of work do reflect something about him personally, even just that he is well travelled as mentioned previously, but arguably, it's completely irrelevant. Webster is moulding his work to fit numerous briefs, all the time producing solutions to problems. His work should be taken at face value and shouldn't spark a great investigation into the man behind it and his reasons for making it. Barthes stresses that the work should be viewed isolation from the author, criticising the idea that 'The image of literature to be found in ordinary culture is tyrannically centred on the author, his person, his life, his tastes, his passions...'' It seems obvious that the author should be acknowledged for the creation of the piece, but as Barthes said '...there is one place where this multiplicity is focused and that place is the reader, not, as was hitherto said, the author' he states 'a text's unity lies not in its origin but its destination'. His argument explains that it is down to the reader to interpret the work, and after it's creation the authors intentions become less relevant.
In Michael Rock's essay 'The designer as author', he takes from Wimsatt and Beardsley’s seminal essay ‘The Intention Fallacy’, stating '...[it] was one of the first to drive a wedge between the author and the text with its claim that a reader could never really ‘know’ the author through his or her writing.' This again, supports the idea that the work itself may not actually be particularly relevant to the author, beyond the fact that they authored it. Moving away from solely looking at Kyle T Webster, but considering the practice of illustration in general, it is in it's nature to become removed from the author. For example, in editorial illustration accompanying an article, it's not about the author of the image and much more about the text that it is paired with. The Illustrator may not share the same opinion as the one that he or she is illustrating because they possibly have different motives for creating the work.
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