First Light, First Life

Hot off the presses- here is First Light,First Life: A Worldwide Creation Story, written by Paul Fleischman, illustrated by me, and published by Henry Holt.

Paul wove together creation stories from 24 different countries. My job was to connect these stories visually. I did that with form and with color.
The book/ the world begins in darkness.

The story moves from land to land (and sea) as the world begins and becomes populated with people and animals. On each page I looked for the visual connections between the cultures. The paintings become lighter as the book progresses, and there are also gradations of light within each painting.

This book took a lot of research. Every page took me down a different path, and every page was worthy of a lifetime of study. These are not merely stories from different cultures: they are often sacred stories. I treated them with care, and I hope I did not blunder.
I drew on the folk art of the various cultures – including textiles, sculpture and painting. I tried to be as true and respectful to each culture as possible, while interpreting that inspiration and making the pictures my own.

For every page I gathered books; they piled up in my studio. I visited museums when it was possible. I also collected images from the internet  and compiled several pages of images for each painting. For example, this is one of the pages of reference for Peru.

I read about Peru and it seemed that Paul was referring to Inti, the sun god, along with Manco Cápac and Mama Ocllo.  Reading Greek myths, I realized that Paul was referring to Prometheus and Epimetheus, and I looked at Greek vases to figure out the style.

There are parts of the creation story that are joyful as life unfolds, and there are parts that are scary. The devastation reaches across cultures and takes many forms.

The style of the page from Mozambique is based on batiks and on Shetani carvings found there. The spider refers to the myth of Mulungu climbing to the moon on a spider web to escape the rampaging humans.The idea of faces in the lightning bolts was from a mask from the Kwele people of Gabon. The faces in the bolts are Kwele and Fang masks.

Here Coxcoxtli and Xochiquetzal are being warned by Titlacahuan (Tlaloc), and on the other side is Noah’s ark. The flood pours from one culture to another.

Redemption and rebirth also take many forms. Here is the aftermath of the flood in California and in Iraq.

I couldn’t tell if Condor was a person or a condor (bird) in the myth, so I contacted the Wiyot tribe and they told me that both ideas are true: Condor was a man but also a bird. So I drew Condor and his sister/wife with bird heads, but sitting like people. I referred to traditional Wiyot basket patterns and echoed them in the water. While researching Condor I also learned of the true and terrible massacre of many members of the Wiyot tribe in 1860.

Here are some images from Iraq.

As I delved into the research I was amazed by the richness in the stories, and the peculiarity of the details. I was impressed by Paul’s ability to create one unified tale out of so many sources, and by the way he compressed the myths without flattening them. I hope I was able to honor his text and the myriad stories within it. Just like the creation myths, life contains light and dark. This book celebrates the way those strands are woven together, within and between various cultures. I hope that when you look at this book you will be inspired to look further into all of the myths, stories and history that are included. I hope that we have planted some seeds.

…the back cover sums it up.

You can buy First Light, First Life at your local bookstore, or click here to order it from BooksInc., or here to order it from Amazon.

In The Study Rooms at the V & A (Part III)

When I wrote my last post, I had just left London for Seattle. I am over my jet-lag now and my cultural re-entry is underway. It is great to reconnect with friends and family on the same continent, but I DO miss London. What a richly laden place that is.

And the Victoria and Albert is a richly laden museum. As I mentioned in my first post about my visit to the V & A Museum’s Prints and Drawings Study Rooms, one of the objects I viewed that day was the original volume of Walter Crane’s designs for The Baby’s Bouquet, a companion to his earlier Baby’s Opera. Fifty-six pen and watercolour drawings in a bound, 7 1/4″ X 7 1/2″ booklet – created in the 1870s and published in 1877.

In my notes from that day I wrote,

OMG! This is the most beautiful thing ever!!! I can’t believe I am here touching this! I can’t believe it’s allowed!

Clearly, I was thrilled. It is truly exquisite. The illustrations appear to have been made contiguously in the bound book, with no correction fluid or paste-ins. There are some suggestions and notes for the engraver. Inside the cover there is a mini-mock up with a few endpaper ideas.

Preliminary pencil drawings can be seen under the watercolour. Crane’s touch with the brush (or pen) is light and confident. It is as though he never had a moment of doubt about any aspect of what he was doing.

I was curious to see a published edition of the book for comparison, but wasn’t able to until recently, when I joined Julie Paschkis and Jennifer Kennard on a book field trip to the University of Washington Rare Books Library. Jennifer made an advance appointment for us, and I requested to see their copy of an 1879 edition.

The published version is beautiful as well, but very different from the original. Engraving was the technique that allowed illustrations to be printed with the press technology of the time. Each colour was cut into a different plate, then inked and printed separately.

Watercolour washes have variations in value and tone that are made when the paintbrush moves across the surface of the paper with varying amounts of pigment. Wood engraving is a form of relief printing from a wood block. What isn’t meant to print is cut away. A thin layer of ink is then rolled across the surface of raised lines. The image is transferred to paper through the use of pressure. Watercolour and wood engraving are extremely different techniques.

The engraver, Edmund Evans, based his prints on Crane’s drawings, but made many artistic additions of his own. I don’t know if Edmunds was someone Crane knew personally and worked with repeatedly, but one would think so. Crane must have been able to trust him to take his creation and transform it so dramatically. Either way, both books exemplify two artists and masters of their craft. I will show photos of Crane’s originals along with the prints so you can compare for yourself.

Some images are more different than others. Who do you think decided to add the target and turn the boy’s head?

This image appeared in the original version, but was eliminated in the final.

This image was changed in format to become a two-page spread with a full-page image. Crane’s handwritten notes show below the drawing.

 

Some colours deepen from the original sketches.

Some palettes change more dramatically.

In this piece, you can see how a fairly simple painted background…

…becomes more complex when transformed into an engraving. There are four blocks cut and printed – yellow, red, blue and black. Notice how finely the lines are carved.

I think you will agree that both the drawn and painted sketches and the cut and printed final illustrations are beautiful. I leave it to you to decide which you prefer. You can dance Looby Light while you think about it.

 

Is There a Pattern Here?

Rob Gonsalves

Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern.
Alfred North Whitehead

I collect images of books in art. And, just as philosopher Alfred North Whitehead noted, I love to find patterns and motifs among them. I imagine that’s the pleasure of most collections.

Recently I was looking at some of my images and noticed a type of illustration that is relatively unusual. I think of it as the surreal image.

There are tons of images focused on books and reading that are fanciful and unreal. They might be charming:

Illustration by Beatrix Potter

Or metaphorical:

Illustration by Rafal Olbinski

Or startling.

Illustration by Jacek Yerka

But they don’t quite have the quality I’m talking about. I can’t put my finger on it. Maybe the word is “unsettling.”

Perhaps the forest is a little too encroaching, a little too dark.

Illustration by Rob Gonsalves

Or the vines too silently creeping.

Illustration by Chris Van Allsburg

Illustration by Nom Kinnear King

With this one, I keep finding myself waiting uneasily for those eyes to open.

Illustration by Frances Cochiacchio

Although not all that is out of place is ominous.

Illustration by Michael Sowa

The  most classically surreal image I have (echoes of Magritte for sure) is mostly just amusing.

Illustration by Patrick Desmet

Maybe what’s holding these together for me is the thing unnoticed. Something’s odd. Something’s off, but it’s only we, the observers, who are noticing.

Illustration by Rob Gonsalves

In fantasy literature, there’s a type of story that fantasy writer and academic Farah Mendelsohn calls liminal. It’s a type of fantasy that’s a little hard to define, but basically it involves a protagonist who doesn’t quite cross through the portal into fantasy, but stays on the border between the real world and the world of the fantastic. Perhaps these images aren’t so much surreal, as “liminal.”

To pull this post back into the world of writing children’s books, I’ll just add a couple links here. One of the questions that almost invariably comes up when I teach classes in writing fantasy and science fiction is where someone’s story “fits.” Like most of children’s literature, there are defined categories in fantasy that are good to at least be familiar with. As a writer you may choose to match those characteristics or violate them, but it’s good to know what rules you’re breaking.

Here’s a list of 10 good terms to be familiar with if you read or write fantasy. And the other is a link to a little information about Mendelsohn and her books. She’s good to know about if you’re going to go deeply into fantasy writing.

In the meantime, don’t turn too quickly to find out about the rustling from that bookshelf behind you. Perhaps it’s best not to know.

Once Again, In Praise of Pencils

My sister just came home from her two-week vacation in London. She had what sounds like a glorious time while there –  went to the British Museum, the Tate, the Courtauld Gallery, the Old Bailey, the British Library, searched for Newby’s elderflower and lemon tea, saw a play at the Globe theater, went on a sunset field trip out to Stonehenge, heard a small choir sing in the crypt (all songs about birds!) at St.-Martin-in-the-Fields, ate at a few lovely restaurants (as well as a few lovely food booths at the Tachbrook Market.)  I imagine she also did her share of buying souvenir do-dads for family and friends here at home. On her 10+hour flight home, she carried a present for me in her carry-on:

A NEW PENCIL BOX AND FOUR BRAND NEW PENCILS!!!!!!!!!!

Sweet, sweet, sweet! I have a little collection of pencil boxes- some you might call elegant, others plain, others tattered, but all functional – some are wooden, some are old Bakelite boxes from the 30’s., some cardboard, and one (now!) metal.  The first pencil box I ever owned — I was a seven-year-old who loved school supplies, what can I say?– was one I bought with my own hard-earned money the first time I visited San Francisco’s Chinatown. Wish I still had it – it had a bird in flight on it, above an arched bridge. I treasured it; even so, it’s gone – how does that happen? Well,  here’s a poem of mine about it. The poem was first published in the Threepenny Review (go there and subscribe as soon as you’re done reading this post):

PENCIL BOX

I put four bits on the counter
and the box was mine.
Six yellow pencils fit there
side by side, I was perfectly addled,
I was a goner – even before I knew
the alphabet, I knew its cedar perfume –
I flew over the high-humped bridge
painted on the top, over the willow,
the m-stroke for a bird, everything
was suggestion then, before
the putting on of too fine a point.
People expected me to come
to my senses, save the change
in my burning pockets, after all
the box was wooden, cheap
Chinatown, but half a dollar
went a long way toward heaven
when heaven was closer.

So my new pencil box from London has no bridge, no willow tree – it lists stations on the London Underground. I remember riding the Tube line up to Hampstead – past Camden Town, Chalk Farm, Belsize Park – when I was there as a college student, caring for the daughters of a professor from Berkeley. I did a lot of walking around  when I was there – London is a great walking-around town (see Margaret Chodos-Irvine’s recent posts on this blog from her 2-year stay in London!) Charles Dickens would agree with me, as would Virginia Woolf, whose essay titled “Street Haunting: A London Adventure” (you can read it here) I printed up and gave to my sister before she left. It starts like this:

“No one perhaps has ever felt passionately towards a lead pencil. But there are circumstances in which it can become supremely desirable to possess one; moments when we are set upon having an object, an excuse for walking half across London between tea and dinner. As the foxhunter hunts in order to preserve the breed of foxes, and the golfer plays in order that open spaces may be preserved from the builders, so when the desire comes upon us to go street rambling the pencil does for a pretext, and getting up we say: “Really I must buy a pencil,” as if under cover of this excuse we could indulge safely in the greatest pleasure of town life in winter—rambling the streets of London.”

Of course, Woolf was wrong about no one feeling passionate about a lead pencil.  I  could go on for quite awhile about the swoon-inducing quality of a Staedtler Norica # 2 pencils, my current favorite. Once upon a time I was passionate about (and wrote a prose poem about) my Dixon Ticonderoga 1388 #2 pencils….

Ode to My Dixon Ticonderoga 1388 No. 2

The first pleasure is the deep pleasure of delay: the plain form waiting straight and yellow, lying perpendicular to the edge of my cleared desk. I sit listening to its Quaker moment, its old soul not set to any purpose. Just how long should I wait to take it in my hand for the second pleasure which is the pleasure of its sharpening? That cedar shaft, dried at a white-hot heat, forced by my dome sharpener to make a fine point under pressure – yielding to the third pleasure, the strange joy of exposing its resin-fused core, that stick used to carbonize the brains of poets and the manifesto of the common man who mines the graphite near Los Pozos, Guanajuato. The fourth pleasure, the physical word, like Jehovah’s name, should not be written here. So right to the fifth and final pleasure, the one allowing for my hand’s unplanned errors: the most amazing pink eraser sitting firmly crowned, crimped into the green and gold ferule. This brand new pink eraser – oh, has God ever made anything more pure?

I also remember Julie Paschkis’s post a couple of years ago about how pencils, pens and brushes feel in the hands of an artist. And the poet Marianne Boruch wrote a poem titled “Pencil” which, like my poem tried to do, senses something quasi-religious about them (“…its secret life / is charcoal, the wood already burnt, / a sacrifice.”)

This week kids across the country headed for their first day of a new school year. My grandson down in Oregon filled his backpack with school supplies – I hope there were some pencils and a pencil box in there. It would be nice to think I passed on to him, via my daughter, an appreciation of pencils/pencil boxes, hidden somewhere in the double helix of our DNA.

My sister, who knows me well and who is often instrumental in providing me with pencils, gave me several packets of Dixon Ticonderoga’s as a gift when I went back to college to get my MFA. Now she’s brought me a set of Tube pencils from London. She carried them across the Atlantic Ocean, all the way across the wide North American continent, she made sure they survived the nearly 5000 mile journey  tucked safely inside my new pencil box. And they’re on my desk in Seattle now, newly sharpened. I may have shaved off some Tube stations when I put their points on them. But here they are, calling to me. And what do you do when a pencil calls to you? You write.

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By the way, if you’re a follower of Poetry Friday, it’s being hosted this week by Amy Ludwig VanDerwater at her blog, The Poem Farm. You can head over there (after you first follow my suggestion to subscribe to the Threepenny Review) to see what other people have posted.

 

Community, Connection, Creativity

The floweristas convene in a big workroom at the back of Orcas Center on the morning of the concert. Fresh from their gardens, they bring magenta hollyhocks, bright blue hydrangeas, fat white roses, squiggly branches and phlox. The workroom buzzes as they create huge arrangements to grace the sides of the stage and the lobby.

Planning up to a year ahead, volunteers plant their gardens with an eye toward creating flower arrangements inspired by each of the concert programs. 

In the nearby kitchen, other volunteers plate cheeses and appetizers for the post-concert reception. Still others prepare the post-reception dinner for the performers. And in the lobby, volunteers settle ticket sales, having already set up an art show of local work.

It is all in anticipation of the 19^th annual Orcas Island Chamber Music Festival, and it truly takes a village.

We were there for the opening last month, in the island’s 200-seat community theatre. Framed by vats of hydrangeas, a trio named Time for Three – two violinists and a bassist – took the stage. They did not look like classical musicians, rather mid-thirties-aged hipsters dressed in dark t-shirts and torn jeans, like in their student days at Curtis Institute.

Time for Three: Nikki Chooi, Nick Kendall and Ranaan Meyer

They took us by storm: with dazzling violin runs in exact duet, with bowing so fierce the horsehairs hung ragged on Nick Kendall’s bow. They offered up a whirlwind called Ecuador composed by bassist Ranaan Meyer, and a mash up of Purcell and Stairway to Heaven complete with guitar solo ripped from Kendall’s violin. Then, sweet and pure, violinist Nikki Chooi introduced the melody of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah. They passed it back and forth, layering the harmonies, as tears welled in my eyes.

Time for Three impressed not just by their virtuosity, but by their joy in the music. Could it get any better?

The next morning we were part of one of the festival’s three “hamlet” concerts. For these, the musicians travel to outlying communities on Orcas. My friend Betsy, a head flowerista, did the flowers for this one, and I got to assist. We helped set up early at the Olga Energetics Club in what is essentially a large living room, pushing the old couches to the walls and lining up mismatched chairs. A spot was saved for a neighbor who is unsteady on her feet, with extra space for her service dog.

Then the audience began to arrive. Each carried a covered dish, sweets and savories for the after-concert reception: veggie spreads, crab in pate choux, butter cookies. One neighbor provides champagne each year. Another brings her famous apple cake.

We filled up the straight chairs and the folding chairs. Three generations of the Friedmann family squeezed into a couch along the wall: Aloysia Friedmann, violist, the artistic director of the festival; Aloysia’s father Martin, a violinist who played with the Seattle Symphony for 25 years; her mother Laila Storch, oboeist, who taught at UW, and her daughter Sophie.

And the music started.

It had been stunning to hear Time for Three play in the theatre, but was even better in this simple room where we were 10 feet from the musicians. They played without amplification. Raw, pure stuff. Heaven should sound so good.

Then they had a little Q and A.

Someone asked, “What inspires you?”

Bassist Ranaan turned to the Friedmanns on the couch, then reached toward Laila Storch, matriarch of the family, who had studied oboe at Curtis at least 40 years before the trio members.

“You inspire me,” he told her, “I see how music sustains a life.”

So what does all this have to do with creating picture books? Maybe it’s more about the general idea of creating. Maybe all those Orcas islanders: the ladies growing and arranging the flowers, the volunteers selling tickets and passing out programs and setting up chairs and bringing covered dishes; maybe those musicians, too, that Time for Three trio, putting their bright and brilliant music out into the fresh Orcas morning, maybe as they participate in the thing they are creating they get the same feeling I get when I work on a picture book. That feeling of how good it is to be alive.

It sustains me.

With Betsy, my friend of 40-plus years. Betsy and and her husband John retired to Orcas ten years ago and invite us up each summer for the chamber music festival.