You were up to your old tricks in Chapters Four, Five and Six

Bob, Jim & Mary playing "What's that building?", originally uploaded by your neighborhood librarian.

We were just in Cleveland this weekend for a family thing. I love Cleveland, and it's not a joke. I went to college there, lived on my own for the first time, met my husband there. I like that town's shape and history, the long straight avenues and the crooked filthy river.

We drove out from Baltimore, arriving at our downtown hotel at about 9pm on St. Patrick's Day. Now, St. Patrick's Day in Cleveland is an ugly affair. Even though Cleveland drinkers are far from amateurs, the poorly-considered dye jobs, plastic costume accessories, and truly epic all-day consumption makes everyone look like a stumbling frat-boy pledge.

But even at that moment - possibly the least charming one in Cleveland's drinking year - and even in that place, which, more so than most American downtowns, has been converted to a pedestrian mall of theme bars, the composed scale and dignified proportions of those buildings made the screeching drunks seem insignificant and temporary. Which, luckily, they were.

When I was in college, the mayor's daughter was one of my boyfriend's roommates. We had nascent urban-design conversations in her parents' kitchen about how on earth to get people to come back to downtown, which emptied utterly after the working day was done. Wasn't too bustling between 9 and 5, either, for that matter. Personally, I liked it that way. Any weekend day, you could run down the center line of any street and holler down the alleys, climb fire escapes and listen to the wind and nothing else.

We kept telling my friend's dad, "It's all about the drinking. Just keep inventing reasons to bring in beer trucks, and eventually people will open bars down there and stuff." We were no geniuses, believe me. It took at least two major sports venues and, I can imagine, tax concessions made to several large corporations in order to really stimulate development down there. But we weren't wrong about the drinking.

There's a great article in Cleveland's free weekly, Scene magazine, about bars that open before dawn. I used to go to at least one of them, but usually not until after dark. Which, granted, in Cleveland is about 3pm sometimes.

It was fun to read Scene again. I had forgotten how fast and loose that paper feels. With all the cussin' and the jokes and the pithy movie criticism ("In 1984, Neil Jordan's The Company of Wolves explored the Freudian psychosexual themes of the Red Riding Hood fairy tale. In 2011, Catherine Hardwicke's Red Riding Hood explores that story's capacity for cheesy CGI effects, fake exteriors, bad acting, and oafish dialogue"), it surely makes Baltimore's City Paper feel prim. Fucking prim, not to put too fine a point on it.

Bob and I were discussing this - how much we enjoyed reading Scene and how we sincerely do not enjoy reading City Paper - and one of us floated the idea that Scene writers are recent college grads and part-timers, while people who write for the City Paper actually have some ambition to get jobs in a major market or for a major news outlet or for whomever they imagine is actually going to be hiring writers in the future, which, frankly, hello look who's been writing almost exclusively for free since 2006. Give it up, man. Write for free, you get to swear more. True, you eat less, but this is why your parents warned you not to be a liberal arts major.

In general, it seems like Clevelanders are game to try things, in galleries and on stages, even in marketing campaigns (that's a joke, I know that), that people on the East coast are not.

Here, our willingness to start a Wang Chung cover band or make a musical based on The Wedding Singer is dampened by our desire to not to look stupid in front of New York. In Cleveland, they know New York is not looking at them. They are free to be the spitball table in the lunchroom.

They turn houses inside-out.

They construct the high school stoner's ultimate fantasy hangout:

couchbleachers, by Nate Page, Machine Project at SPACES Gallery, Cleveland

Baltimore has Stoop Stories, evenings of themed storytelling, but Cleveland has StorySlam!, hosted by a guy in a bear suit. Participants are invited to share their 'true until proven otherwise' Cleveland tales, and the audience is invited to create shoebox dioramas illustrating one of the stories they heard, or one of their own. Shoebox dioramas. The ultimate creative leveler.

Pittsburgh is like this too, to a lesser extent. Pittsburgh flies beneath the New York radar, luckily for them. Also St. Louis.

Minneapolis? Minneapolis knows New York is looking at them, and they will put on a musical based on the The Wedding Singer knowing full well that some New Yorker is going to steal the idea and charge Williamsburg hipsters thirty-five bucks a head to sing along to "Pass the Dutchie".

You know you know the words.

So cut out the morbid verse / I know you'll make it work

I love stormtroopers, originally uploaded by your neighborhood librarian.

Oh! Freedom!

A zig-zag knit sweater with a circle zipper pull. A piano that's busted, so you can paint it white and then draw all over it. A bread truck with no doors rattling along the highway at 80 miles an hour!

I recently turned in an article that had taken a lot longer to research and write than I'd anticipated. Before that, it seemed like every waking moment was spent painting this house and putting it back to rights. Remember that? Oh, those were FUN blog posts.

Now. Now, after I drop the kids off at day camp, I open all the windows and turn off the book on tape (although Tim Curry reading Lemony Snicket is pretty inspiring. I don't even hear the words, I'm so busy concentrating on the syrupy, hoarse, wet, dry, raspy, silky, papery lisping chortling VOCAL RANGE that's coming out of the speakers). I hurtle down the interstate like a flare shot out of a gun into humid summer sky. I let my mind wander.

I love humans. Humans think, and make things, and, as far as I know, they are the only species that consciously tells jokes. I love the different things humans do when they have time between the eating and sleeping and shitting and daily-bread-earning. They play guitar, or they build a treehouse. They read science fiction novels until their brains run out their ears. My girlie Constance looks at all the beautiful beads and scraps of paper and stuff she's collected, and lets her brain tell her hands how to put them together into something gorgeous and unexpected.

Tim Curry probably sits around and experiments with all the different ways you can say the word 'speculum'.

Penn Jillette and genius juggler Michael Moschen grew up together. Penn once said they they "practiced juggling with the focus that can only be attained by young boys who have not yet discovered masturbation." I paraphrase. I can't find the interview. I think it was in Smithsonian, and whatever else you think of Penn, you have got to give the man props for getting a masturbation reference into the official organ of our national museum system.

I don't juggle. When I read books aloud I cannot muster the spit and gravel that Tim Curry can. And I'm not much of a maker of objects.

I like looking at a vine surging slothlike up a telephone pole and thinking about the future. I like remembering the day they brought a giant squid into the museum of natural history, and how in that instant I saw a cryptid switch teams.

There's a corn truck up by camp, manned by a milky-eyed old farmer with square fingers and a stoop. The truck always parks at a bend in the road that makes me think of the one in Close Encounters of the Third Kind: there's a drop-off and a tremendous view on the other side. Just corn fields and sky, but maybe I'll go early and sit with him for a while, watch the weather.

Wo der Unbekannte thronet

I've been thinking about Andy Goldsworthy today. It started when I admired my friend Aleph's pants and we started talking about outlet malls that we have known and loved. You see? The banal has its place. When I sang my paean to the Woodberry outlet mall in New York and said we used to stop there on the way back from Storm King, I then had to explain Storm King, which led to pulling up a picture of one of the coolest things I have ever seen: Andy's wall. I explained that it was dry-stone masonry, and so not only is it visually and compositionally spectacular, but a technical masterpiece as well.



Looking at the picture, Aleph said: "It's funny to think that if people two hundred years ago saw this thing, they'd be baffled that someone would build something so pointless." I looked again and tried to figure out what I wanted to say. I told Aleph that... I THINK that anyone looking at that wall - from space, from history, from childhood, from a position of utter ignorance about art - IF they understood that it was made by the hand of man (and the Goldsworthy stuff does have kind of an unfortunate possibly-constructed-by-fairies thing to it), that viewer would understand that the person who built that wall wanted to see a stone wall snaking through the woods and disappearing into the pond, and there was no stone wall snaking through the woods and disappearing into the pond, and so that person built that stone wall. So that he could see it.

I've been in a position to explain art too many times. (Not that Aleph needed me to explain anything - no. It's just that it's so difficult to do, I have to start from scratch and explain art to myself every now and then.) I don't like trying to explain art, because I have very little faith in my ability to do it, and because it's likely that I am wrong. But sometimes it's unavoidable. Sometimes I have to review a book about art for kids, and I have to compare the author's explanation to the way I understand art. Makes my head hurt.



Or sometimes somebody will ask something like, "Magdalena Abakanowicz what? How Magdalena Abakanowicz? And why?" and I kind of get sucked into answering. I'm a librarian - we answer questions. And I really do understand not understanding. Like, it took me a while to understand the composition of music. In fact, it basically took Immortal Beloved for me to understand the composition of music. I never understood that these crazy music-writing fuckers hear music in their heads, and would like to hear that music with their ears, so they write the music. Philip Glass also helped me understand that. You never heard anything like Philip Glass before Philip Glass started writing music, and apparently Philip Glass never did either, and he wanted to. And Koyaanisqatsi. Watching that movie, you can imagine the filmmaker looking at traffic and imagining what it would look like sped up, slowed down, pulsed, given rhythm and meaning. So then he did it. So that he could see it.

In other examples: Frank Miller and Geof Darrow wanted to see a picture of a man stopping a car with his foot:



This guy wanted to see a woman's head turned into a flower:



Yinka Shonibare needs to see Africa's relationship to European culture expressed through the medium of my dining room curtains. I love Yinka Shonibare.


How to Blow up Two Heads at Once (Ladies), 2006

Here's another one, because I love Yinka Shonibare so much:


Three Graces, 2001

But I would really like to meet the person who needed to see this chair:



I would like to kick him in the shin.

... and it will be called... "This Land"...

Zhou World, originally uploaded by your neighborhood librarian.

That's Penguin World down in the corner, with a piece of ice for them to stand on, and that's Mommy Love World with all the hearts. My land has a Target, and my land has a church. My land has a park, and my land has a river.

You see that X on the doorknob of the church? That's for "NO THIEVES" and also "NO CEREMONIES". You know why there's no ceremonies?

[No, no I don't]

Because see, here there's a PARK next door, and people might go swimming in the river from the park, and they don't want to bump into the bodies, and swim in all the blood, cause then they'd be like, "Ew, blood, I don't want to swim here!"

[And - why would there be bodies and blood?]

From the church! See, these lines are where they get thrown out!

[From - the ceremonies.]

Yeah! You know...

[I really really don't.]

When they do the ceremonies with the dead bodies? And they burn them, and then they're on fire, and where would they go? they'd throw them in the river!

[Well... SOME ceremonies in churches are funerals, where we say goodbye to people who have died... and SOME people's bodies are... burned... after they die, but they aren't just burned, like on a campfire or something, they are burned in a... well, an oven.]

Yeah, I know, in a kind of cup thing on stilts over a fire...

[... a what...?]

But MY town doesn't have to be like REAL LIFE because it's all (whispers) IN MY IMAGINATION!

Museum of Failure

Getting a little work done, originally uploaded by your neighborhood librarian.

We were in New York City this weekend. It was action-packed, and practically everything we did is going to make it onto this blog by the time I'm through. But first up must be our visit to the Whitney Museum of American Art.

I have a little history with the Whitney. I worked there when I first moved to New York. They hired me to be webmaster, which even I thought was ludicrous, as I didn't even know how to write html. I was fired without explanation four half-days later, and, my head spinning, went back home and crawled into bed.

A few years later, I got to know the Whitney much better, when I worked for their software provider. I got to know the collection and some of the staff, and I figured out just what the eff happened when I got hired/fired. Got rid of the chip on my shoulder. But I still never went there very often - the permanent collection is kind of small and you can get to know it pretty quickly. It's an artists' museum, and I'm no artist. Always tried to get to the Biennial though. There was always something interesting that I wanted to see.

Like this year. This year I wanted to see the Fritz Haeg Animal Estates, animal homes installed at the museum. So our first stop this weekend was The Whitney Museum of American Art.

Waiting in line to get in, we saw the gigantic eagle's nest above the entrance. It's not that easy to get kids pumped up about visiting a contemporary art museum, but a two-ton, nine-foot eagle's nest just might do it. I thought, "This is going to be great!".

And then, as we hunkered down to regard the first piece we came to inside the museum, a crazy/fabulous Jason Rhoads factory/laboratory/tribute to Marilyn Chambers (and may I say, with regard to Jason Rhoads, it helps to have a six-year-old explain it to you), a guard came up to us.

"You can't do that," he says to Big Man.
"What can't he do?" I ask.
"The wall. He can't do that."
Big Man was standing against the wall so as to be out of the way. There were a lot of people there. I myself was actually leaning against the wall, to steady myself as I squatted.
"He can't touch the wall?"
"He can't do that."
"He can't touch THE WALL."
"No."
"Can he touch the floor? Would you like him to levitate?"

It was, as I said, crowded. But we were the stars of the museum. As soon as we entered each gallery, we had the undivided attention of each guard. Every time one of the children got within THREE FEET of an object, the guards started walking toward us purposefully.

I recognize that children can be unpredictable, badly behaved, spazzy. I recognize that the guards can't tell the difference between MY children, who know what "museum manners" are, and who walk around with their hands in their pockets, and OTHER PEOPLE's children, rabid little droolers who try to climb on everything.

BUT I have been in a LOT of museums in my time, and I have taken my children to a LOT of museums, and there are ways to do it and ways not to do it. See my next post, about the Guggenheim, also not my favorite museum but a joint which has finally figured out how to reconcile the presence of people with the presence of art.

"Museum of Failure," by the way, is an installation piece in the show by Ellen Harvey, which my children were warned away from.

Robert's Snow Illustrator profile - Mary Haverfield

"Snow Tasting" by Mary Haverfield

What is inspiring?

Well, I'll tell you that communicating with all these illustrators has been inspiring. I've been participating in 7 Impossible Things Before Breakfast's effort to publicize and drive traffic to Robert's Snow, the Internet auction of original works of art donated by children's book illustrators to benefit the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.

The women I've communicated with (and in my case, it's all been women) have not had all that much in common besides talent and generosity. They always wanted to be illustrators, or they went into illustration after something else went kaflooey. They use a computer, they use watercolors. They're just starting out, they've been at it for decades. They're from Texas, New England, Virginia.

But something that comes up time after time is space to work in: finding it, appropriating it, building it, defending it. Julie Fortenberry camps out in her bedroom. Linda Graves has a big studio by a pond. And Mary Haverfield, who painted the blissed-out snowflake up above, waxes rhapsodic about the space she and her husband just built to accommodate both of their creative careers. Listen to this:

We have been working toward our current living situation for 6 years, and we just moved in this week. My husband is a food and still life photographer for advertising, www.pathaverfield.com. We own the building that houses his studio and a plot of land next door, in a warehouse district of Dallas. The area is rapidly changing, and a few photographers and artists have renovated some of the buildings into loft style homes and studios.

We built a new loft style building behind Pat's studio. My new studio and the garage are on the first floor, and our living space is upstairs. From the 2nd and third floors we have the most amazing views of the city, and my studio is the best I have ever had. Big enough for my illustration work and also the large acrylic paintings I like to do.

Oh, man. That sounds so cool.

After hearing firsthand about some of these struggles to carve out space to work, I enlisted the kids to help me re-fit the playroom/guestroom with a tiny desk and a lamp so that Big Man can do his homework without Mr. Four bugging the crap out of him. There's a CD player and a window, the only window in the house that doesn't have a radiator or a toilet in front of it. Bob and I took one look at the new setup and now we're just jealous as hell - we do our work on the dining room table. If we're lucky.

So today I carried my laptop up to the playroom. Now I can type while I look out at the rain and the willow in the back yard. Beats the heck out of looking at the mess in the dining room.


copyright Mary Haverfield

Paging through Mary Haverfield's books, especially Mocha the Real Doctor, I got the sense that Mary is inspired by what's outside her window as well. The book's about a cat, Mocha, who is drawn with great personality yet always looks like a real cat; however, the natural settings that Mocha sings about to his patients are the masterpieces. Bluebonnets, ferns, buttercups and mesquite trees put the Texas landscape square at the center of the sweet story.

I love to draw and paint plants and flowers. I use a lot of reference material and I have gardened a lot over the years. In the case of Mocha the author mentioned so many plants in the text and I enjoyed working all of them into the illustrations.

It's kind of funny that Mary has just moved to the warehouse district - the first book that she wrote as well as illustrated is Harriet, the Homeless Raccoon, the story of a raccoon who makes herself at home first in a family's attic and then in their backyard studio. It's an adorable book, and the raccoon lore and fact pages at the end are welcome, but I have a suspicion that the event wasn't so cute at the time. My neighbors have squirrels in the eaves and it's driven them completely mental. I might be tempted to move downtown too!

It feels like the our best illustrators are always inspired by what they see every day. Every time I open a book illustrated by my friend Pat O'Brien (Captain Raptor, Gigantic!, Megatooth), I see his own face atop the body of a medieval knight, an astronaut, Fletcher Christian. He uses himself or his brothers as models for most of his male characters. (Gets a professional model for most of the females though... his wife is like, "Hey!") Pets, children, houses, and plenty of family members stand in for everyday characters and even famous figures: when Mary illustrated Mister Bones: Dinosaur Hunter, a Ready-to-Read biography of Barnum Brown...

...my husband posed for me for Mr. Bones. He has been Jack in the Beanstalk, and the Giant in that story, a character in Pinnochio, and many other characters over the years. As have countless neighbors and friends. My son did his share of "modeling" for me as well.

That would be kind of awesome, to open a book and see yourself as The Giant. Pat's wife at least got to be Anne Bonney before she got too busy to stand around his studio and pose.

Another thing I've noticed about these illustrators is that they're never satisfied with what they can already do. They want to learn more about computers, they want to learn Photoshop, or oil painting. They read books and take classes about their computers. When I asked Mary about her favorite medium to work in, she said:

Watercolor and colored pencils. I love the lightness and expressiveness of watercolor. I do sometimes long to be working in a more forgiving medium, like acrylics. I'm really trying to learn Photoshop now, to speed things up and help with mistakes and corrections.

Also, Mary's not the first illustrator I've surveyed to say that she listens to spoken word as well as music when she's working. Books on tape, podcasts, and NPR - it all reinforces my impression that children's book illustrators don't necessarily work in splendid isolation, but rather in the world, participating, observing, soaking it all up... not to mention, answering emails with the speed of a Blackberry-totin' cubicle jockey. Don't you love that in a person?

It's been my privilege to have been afforded a peep into these women's lives. The fact that it's come about as a result of their creativity and generosity just adds to my admiration. I'd buy any of their snowflakes in a heartbeat, and order their books for my library as well.

As I stare out the only window in the house not blocked by a toilet or a radiator, at a crescent moon in the night sky over Baltimore, I wonder if it's going to snow before the end of the year. I'm also wishing for a big new live/work loft downtown, but, you know, that's kind of a given.

Robert's Snow illustrator profile - Linda Graves

Katerina's Dove by Linda Graves

This... THIS is a Christmas present. Isn't it stunning? And it could be yours if you place the winning bid in the Robert's Snow auction starting December 3.

I'll confess that on first blush, Linda Graves' style doesn't appear to be my cup of fair-trade locally-roasted organic half-decaf. I generally go for the cartoony, the collage-y, the fast and spiky. Let's face it, I read 17 picture books at a sitting. My attention span is so short I've given up on all adult fiction other than serial killer thrillers and Christopher Moore. The only movies we go see are based on comic books, series fiction, or amusement park rides.

So, for dazzled idiots like me, there are plenty of artists who have mastered the gestural line and the hot color injection, plenty of artists whose bold strokes can snag even my fractured attention.

But, luckily for the world of children's lit, not everybody is an idiot like me.

I have these darling girls and boys that come through the library who can sit with a book and just fall into the illustrations. I love those kids. I remember being one of those kids, before boys and the Clash and work and Buffy the Vampire Slayer and motherhood spoiled me for anything not fast and spicy.

For these kids we make sure to buy everything illustrated by any Pinkney, everything by Paul O. Zelinsky, and we keep artists like Sylvia Long and Floyd Cooper bookmarked in our heads.

And I am telling you, after sitting down and spending quality time with The Wise Woman and Her Secret, The Enchanted Gardening Book, The Story of Hanukkah, and a couple issues of The Katie Lynn Cookie Company (seriously!), Linda Graves belongs on that short list of illustrators who have mastered the slow hand, the considered, naturalistic color palette, the precise shading that gives even the smallest details volume and weight.

Looking at this snowflake, you can feel the dedication and discipline that she brings to her work. Equally at home with pastels, colored pencils, and watercolor, she switches mediums, building up layers until she achieves the desired result, "a light and rather dreamlike palette," in her words.

These days, in her "little house with a big studio in the woods on a pond" in the Berkshires, she is trying to master a new medium: oil on canvas or paper.

I caught up with Linda for a few questions this week.

Did you start out in illustration? If not, what brought you to it?

I've always drawn and painted, and was, as a child surrounded by books which were illustrated, so I've always been drawn to illustration. I studied it in art school (San Jose State University).

I love the detail you bring to plants - I'm guessing you draw from life. Do you garden?
I do garden, and do sometimes draw from life. I've always loved the world of nature, both plants and animals, so it gives me great pleasure to be able to paint them.

Do you listen to music while you work? If so, what?
Another one of my loves is music. I really love all sorts, but Classical, Celtic, some New Age, Choral, some old Rock, and yes, I almost always listen to music while I work. The violin is my favorite instrument.

What kind of books do you like best?

My favorite books are picture books. Fairytales, Folklore, and Fantasy are my preferences.

Favorite candy?
Chocolate

What non-art area are you most qualified to give advice on? i.e. car repair, dog training, baking, dealing with contractors, planning a vacation, that kind of thing.

I guess I'm a pretty good cook--at least that's what my fellow Western Massachusetts Illustrators Guild members think.

I really wish I could draw. What do you wish you could do but can't (if anything :)?
I wish I could oil paint first, and play the violin second.

Bad habits?
There are really too many bad habits to list, but I guess eating too much chocolate is one.

Is there a story behind "Katerina's Dove" that you'd like to share?
"Katerina's Dove" was created just to promote the feeling of peace.

The last thing I asked Linda was whether she had a "dream date" author she'd like to work with.

As a matter of fact I am currently working with my "Dream Date" writer. Jane Yolen has written a wonderful Scandinavian folktale based on an old Nordic tale. She is also part of WMIG, and a really fantastic storyteller, as you must know.

If that's not a fairy-tale ending, I don't know what is. Bid on "Katerina's Dove" starting December 3, and watch for the forthcoming Jane Yolen picture book illustrated by the disciplined but never heavy Linda Graves.

Robert's Snow Illustrator profile - Susan Miller

I'm in my backyard right now, sitting on the green grass, surrounded by what should be a late-summer garden: green tomatos, zinnias, nasturtiums, clematis, and I think that's another pumpkin turning orange over there near the fence. I'm keeping one eye on the squad of kids swarming over the stump and under the pine trees, playing some amalgam of George of the Jungle and Ponce de Leon (what's worse? brainless or bloody? they choose both.).

Right this second, such topics as snow - and cancer - seem very far away.

But bad news is never far away. In fact, here's Mr. Four with a thorn in his shirt. And earlier someone got a jumprope to the face. It's a dangerous world, no doubt about it.

Sometimes it only takes a mom to fix something, sometimes you need to go to the doctor, and then there are some things - the things you don't think about, or try not to think about, or think about obsessively - that can't be fixed, not by battalions of doctors and generations of researchers.

Cancer is one of those things, of course. It feels odd to think that generations of dedicated people have lived their lives through and died and been replaced by the next cohort of grad students - without finding a cure. Not to say that work has been in vain: fighting cancer is exactly like fighting war, and these generations of scientists and doctors have come up with ever-better weapons, intelligence strategies, and defensive postures, all of which have made this war a lot less bloody.

But I would like this war to end. Just like the war that the United States has been fighting since ten days after my oldest child was born. I don't want to see any of these screaming backyard urchins grow up to wear a uniform, whether that uniform be camouflage or whether it be a white hospital gown.

So. Go to the website of Robert's Snow: For Cancer's Cure. Bookmark it, and go back on November 19. Buy a snowflake. Also, you might want to read more about the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and the work that they've been doing. There are other ways to help.

In fact, see that snowflake up at the top? It was created and donated by the talented Susan Miller. Click on it - look at it big. There are terrific details in the two lovely little scenes she painted. Susan Miller has illustrated a bunch of Rookie Reader titles, including Nana's Hog and Nana's Fiddle, which we have on our 1st grader's book stack at this very minute. The work on her web site is even nicer, I think - charming humans and great colors.

I "interviewed" her for this feature. I'm totally a crap interviewer, but she did her best with what she had to work with.

Do you listen to music while you're working? If so, what?
No I don't . I listen to my favorite Pod-casts, I like the speaking.

What distracts you from working?
Phone calls.

Whose art changed your life?
Elise Primavera. I think she is amazing, I love her work. I would love to have her talent.

Did you go to art school?
Yes, Butera School of Art in Boston

Did you start in illustration? and if not what turned you toward it?
Yes, fashion illustration, which turned into a dying market due to great photography, so I switched over to childrens educational/ book illustration.

Favorite candy?
I suppose M&Ms with peanuts. I figure the peanuts are good for you right?

What would be really cool to see built from Lego?
The stuff they build in Lego in Florida at Downtown Disney. Fun stuff down there.

What do you like to read?
Biographies and books on art and my computer, a Mac that I call Max.

How long have you lived in Connecticut?
51 years, and with a move planned to Florida in 2008 I will dearly miss it, its a beautiful state.

See, and now there's another thing to worry about. It's 70 degrees out here in the back yard, and it's November. Susan Miller's moving to Florida, which is apparently going to be under water within the century... I'm at a loss here. Ok, go support cancer research, and I'll be back next month with what we can do to keep the glaciers where they're supposed to be and not floating up the East River.

Robert's Snow illustrator profile: Julie Fromme Fortenberry

"First Snow" by Julie Fromme Fortenberry

It is again my privilege to profile one of the generous artists who have donated original works of art to the Robert's Snow online auction benefiting the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.

Julie Fromme Fortenberry claims she has "a weird resume". I smell ya, sis - I guess we all do at this point. And how did we all end up online together? I want to know!

Anyway, I'll give it to her: any career path that includes exhibiting abstract art at the Whitney Museum for American Art and illustrations in Highlights High 5 magazine, well ok, that's a little unusual to say the least.

Her snowflake for Robert's Snow depicts her friendly little dog Lucy out in the snow for the first time. I like this illustration, and all her work, for its real feeling of down-to-earth sweetness. Her point of view is direct and intimate, and her figures are happy and expressive. Plus she uses a lot of fine strong-but-not-overpowering color. The work is endearing but never cutesy.

Julie's illustrations look like watercolor, but she actually creates them on the computer in her bedroom, when she's not distracted by laundry, permission slips, and the whole "big ball of domestic fun." Yep, that sounds a little familiar, too. Her computer is in the bedroom, mine is in the dining room. When I asked her what she'd like to see made out of Lego (I kind of suck at the interviewing part of this process), she answered, "A detached studio/office a few yards from my house, complete with plumbing and heating."

Here you go, Julie - this is what I've had my eye on:



Not Lego, but oh my god. Or this one, by Shigeru Ban. And hey, while I'm speaking of online and random and covetable, I have to plug Julie's blog. She samples illustration, design, kitsch, culture, and whatever strikes her fancy. She has the coolest taste - I find something interesting every time I stop by.



Last but not least, Julie is a New York museum person. I had an inkling when I saw this illustration. It looks one heck of a lot like the display of Pacific Island masks at The Brooklyn Museum, although it could be my old workplace too. On the other hand, Julie's probably spent more time in the hall of African, Asian and Oceanic Art at the Metropolitan Museum - she worked there a while ago, and her husband works there now.

You can see Julie Fromme Fortenberry's work online, and in various Harcourt Education publications, Highlights High 5, and in a forthcoming preschool book yet to be titled. She also did the cover of the Baltimore's Child Parents Pages, a directory of parent and child service providers here in Smalltimore.

Be sure to check back on the Robert's Snow site as the auction date approaches. These marvelous wooden snowflakes are a great opportunity to own original art by published artists. They are sure to be well-priced, just in time for the holidays, and benefit a good cause.

Mr. Four draws and tells a story

captain america annotated, originally uploaded by your neighborhood librarian.

There's Captain America, and a monkey, and they are in the jungle, and that's a tree that fell in the jungle. It's raining, and the rain blocks the sun out and makes it a different color. Here's a lake, and that's the ground, and then ping-pong balls start bouncing all over the place like crazy!

And this down here is a tunnel that a mole made under the earth.

Paige Keiser, illustrator, Robert's Snow participant

There's this lovely fundraiser going on in the world of children's literature. Short version goes like this: illustrator Grace Lin lost her husband to cancer after a tough fight. Before he died, the two of them cooked up a way to raise money for cancer research - based on her book Robert's Snow, they recruited children's book artists to paint wooden snowflakes to be auctioned off.

So far, this project has raised over $200,000 for the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.

This year's auction is underway, and this year, dozens of kidlit bloggers are doing our small part to draw attention to the auction by highlighting some of the contributing artists. Go have a look at these snowflakes, they are inventive, adorable, beautiful, and pretty damn reasonable!

Paige Keiser's is particularly sweet, I think. Paige is the lovely and talented, gracious and hardworking illustrator of Moon Ladder and My Eight Book, although her lively characters and clear colors show up in magazines and in her fine art work as well.

I asked Paige about her history in art, and she told me there was pretty much NO chance she would have become anything else - at seven years old, she knew she wanted to be a Disney animator. Paige took extra art classes throughout grade, middle and high school, winning many school art awards along the way. Her interests moved to fine art and still life painting in college, and after discovering a book about N.C. Wyeth at a book store, fell in love with illustration. "I loved the magical interplay between words and pictures."

After graduating college, Paige sent off samples to children's publishers and some to an agent, Cornell and McCarthy. Along with positive feedback from publishers, she was taken on by Cornell and has been drawing for books, magazines and educational materials ever since.

Bid on Paige Keiser's snowflake here. Bookmark it - the auction starts November 19.

This is mod

Two words. Miroslav Sasek.

I had a lady today looking for this series of really great children's books from the 1960's? each one was about a different city? and the illustrations were really neat?

Well, first of all, I earned my librarian wings today by discovering the author's name and locating copies of the books at the city library. Based on that description.

And second of all, how come I've never seen these books? Not only are they exactly my taste, but they are exactly the kind of thing my parents were into in the '60's. They are the coolest composed salad at the barbecue.

Miroslav Sasek. This is London. This is Paris. This is New York. This is Israel. This is one old Czech who really got around! Some of them were made into films and are available on the website. Rizzoli's Universe imprint has reprinted many of the books in facsimile editions. They're pretty reasonable on Amazon. But I'm going on the bookfinder to find copies of the originals.

"Schvinger? Vat is a schvinger?"

I would argue that you cannot be a parent of small children, and thus an ancillary consumer of the culture aimed at them, without becoming something of a connoisseur of animation, old and new.

I can't stand the crappy pre-Pixar Disney movie animation of, for example, The Rescuers or Fox and Hound. The way Mowgli's feet don't appear to make contact with the ground in Jungle Book makes me crazy. And spectacularly uneven films such as Bedknobs and Broomsticks, with the inventive undersea scenes balanced by the relatively mediocre jungle soccer match, just leave me shaking my head.

Now that animation is once again held to a higher standard, I feel like the phenomenal art geeks that make movies such as The Incredibles and Ratatouille throw in super-stylized credit sequences that are entirely superfluous but totally appreciated by the grownups who have sat through these movies for the sake of a couple hours' peace.

Yesterday's brief look at Too Many Cooks, illustrated by Nate Wragg, the Pixar guy who did the end credits for Ratatouille, led to a short exploration of the world of vintage cartoons and animation. Interesting stuff.

I know a lot about "comic book artists" like Peter Kuper and Charles Burns, the Pander Brothers, etc., but the cutie little hepcat illustrations like the ones that adorned my mom's late-1950's cookbooks and jazz albums never registered as art to me. You put them all together, though, as Amid Amidi, the author of book and blog Cartoon Modern, has, and by god you've got an oeuvre!

I remember these images and cartoons from my childhood, but I kind of can't remember where. Logos on Milton Bradley board games? Cartoon shorts on PBS? In any case, they absolutely stick out in my memory. Even as an idiot child, they somehow felt to me smarter, more avant garde... they were the Ernie Kovacs to the Flintstones' Milton Berle. Nowadays, I tend to snap up books featuring them when I spot them at Salvation Army or Goodwill. And at the drive-in movie theater, the intermission shorts are ALL "Brush-a brush-a brush-a / Try the new Ipana," so much so that they have again become trite.



As I scroll through Amidi's blog, I am not too surprised to learn that Mr. Magoo is "modern". The colors in 101 Dalmatians are. That owl from our niece's hand-me-down "Disney Sing-along Songs". Tom & Jerry, Scooby Doo, and the Flintstones are basically not.

Here's to more Bullwinkle, less Hunchback.

Must I paint you a picture?

Mom sends this along.



Someone has loaded a batch of canonical images of women from art history (i.e. Botticelli's Birth of Venus, Ingres's Princesse de Broglie, Rubens's wife) into an animation program and done morphing transitions between each. It's pretty neat.

From the midnight sun where the hot springs... blow

Token Boy Librarian surveys the Internet today and sighs, "Nothing interesting. Except they're gonna make a movie of Elric."

Elric! Red-eyed, pointy-eared, white-skinned Elric! He of the REEELY big, er, broadsword! and the huge hair! and he's, like 428th Emperor of BøyswhöreadElric Névergëtląid! And the guy who writes him is apparently honestly named Michael Moorcock.

Elric has inspired MORE fan art than perhaps even Dawnstar (speaking of tokenism) (although not as many people seem to have named their pets after him). Please for me click these few things:

• REALLY big broadsword (and, my husband points out, a really rockin' man-panty)


• not a girl!


• not gay porn!


• not Edgar Winter!


• (Edgar Winter)


• ok maybe kind of a girl!


• COSPLAY!!

I never read Elric. I had a boyfriend once who read Elric, a C++ programmer from New Jersey who also liked King Crimson and called his goals list (i.e. lose 30 pounds, learn Chinese, get a cat) "Apotheosis".

Good luck with that!

Smarsh

Adages, inkjet, 6 in. x 6 in., 2005. Sarah Marshall. Used with permission. No stealing!

Taking a break from buying $2500 worth of school library books (harder than it sounds) to say hey it looks like my friend Sarah got a new press! She's a master of printmaking (mistress?) - you should go soothe your Friday eyes with her nice art. She has a verging-on-unhealthy interest in Houdini and insects and body parts, but what printmaker isn't obsessed with these?

I don't think I'm violating her privacy any by saying she lives in Alabama - although judge for yourself, this story illustrates the tininess of the world. So you probably know her already. Anyway, Sarah lives in Alabama. Teaches at University of Alabama.

Birmingham Museum of Art (in Alabama, are you getting this?) was a client of mine once, and I went there to meet with them. Really nice folks, really interesting collection. Big fucking statue of Vulcan.


Vulcan at 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis.

When I got to Birmingham, I asked the museum registrar where the University was - I mean, I don't know Alabama from my ass - and mentioned that "a friend of mine" was teaching printmaking there. The registrar said, "Well, the university's not in Birmingham, it's in Tuscaloosa, but you should give her a call. I bet she'd drive here for dinner with you - she's pretty homesick."

Ok, maybe there's only one printmaking professor at 'Bama, but still! And maybe the Alabama arts community is relatively wee, but still! Oh, well actually that's probably my point. We never did get together that trip, but she's still my favorite printmaker friend. And her ma's a librarian, you know, quality comes from quality.

Like a Pietà, but happy

I got boys, originally uploaded by pwilnyc.

And that's not a pacifier in his mouth, that's one of those "zzzZZ-WHEE!" whistles. Whatever you callem.

Maybe I should elaborate. Looking at this picture, I was reminded of Michelango's Pietà because the angle makes me look like I have a huge lap, massive legs and narrow shoulders. Apparently, if you measure Mary in the Pietà, proportionally, she would be like seven feet tall, with super-long legs. She's like Barbie in a hoodie.

Double self-portrait (Thinking about The Arnolfini Marriage)

arnolfini

I am not a "maker of objects," as they say.

Man, I had a professor at NYU who got so excited when one of my fellow students described himself as such that I thought the chopsticks would vibrate right out of her tight little bun. What a stupid term. You're an artist, you're a carpenter, you're whatever, but god knows you can be more specific than "maker of objects." Pffft.

Anyway, I'm no artist. But I sort of always wanted to give something a title like MMPI (Self Portrait in Yellow). Artists. Lord love 'em but they can be pretentious.

So I was making banana chocolate chip pancakes this morning and staring idly into this pot lid, and I found myself thinking of the convex mirror in Jan van Eyck's The Arnolfini Marriage...

Zero point energy

When I first saw a thumbnail picture of this art installation in Germany, called SPACE INVADERS by the artists Sebastian Hungerer and Rainer Kehres, I thought it was a Dale Chihuly thing, like the ceiling at the V&A. But it is a huge (14 x 11 meter) curtain of light fixtures strung in the foyer of a building in Karlsruhe.

The site has big gorgeous pictures and video too. I was looking through it with my young men, who totally responded to it. Mr. Three yelled out, "It's the solar system!" while Big Man pretended the lamps were cherries and made to snatch them off the screen and gobble them up. Well worth the click.

Reverse engineering

I'm experimenting with a blog for the Big Man's school library. I thought, for a start, we'd ask parents to write about their favorite children's book (oh so original but if it worked for RIF it can work for us).

I kicked it off by doing the exercise myself, and it turned out that I had a lot to say about From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler by E. L. Konigsberg. Goddamn book changed my life. So here's a less expurgated version of what will go in the school library's blog (if we decide to do it).
This is my favorite book of all time. In it, two kids, Jamie and Claudia, decide to run away from home. Since they're smart and practical (not to mention snobbish and greedy) and don't want to end up on a curb in Times Square, they plan to run away to a place that's indoors and has some of the comforts of home. They pick the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Isn't that great? That's a thought process that basically makes sense. And you can tell right off that this is not going to be your hijinky plot-driven pratfall novel - they don't run away to the circus, they run away to an art museum. E. L. Konigsberg writes great books, with sharp characters, but this is her genius work. An unpleasant, geeky girl with a violin case and an annoying little brother goes into an art museum - and that's the premise for a successful, beloved kids book? Dag.

What keeps this book going, and what fascinated me as a kid, is the view of the off-hours museum through Claudia's eyes. Claudia is a pretty dissatisfied kid, and in the peace and beauty and mystery of the museum, she has a chance to get out of her crabby self and become absorbed in the beautiful, weird, storied objects that surround her. She gets to touch and examine precious things that are usually off-limits, and in the process, one object stops her in her tracks - a small sculpture of an angel.

When it was my turn, my object was Cupid and Psyche by Jacques Louis David.

I came around a corner in the Cleveland Museum of Art, looking for something to write a paper on for ARTH103, and this baby popped me right in the eye. It's enormous, for one thing, and very detailed, almost realistic. Cupid is climbing out of bed, smirking - yeah, he tapped that - and now he's trying to get out of there without waking her. I believe I met this painting before I met Bob, but this is kind of what Bob looked like when he was 19, when we met (minus the smirk, he would insist I point out).

Claudia wants to learn everything there is to know about "her" angel, and in the process discovers something that only the titular Mrs. Frankweiler knows (looking back, Mrs. Frankweiler had to be a registrar - registrars are consistently the coolest, geekiest people in all art museums I've come across). Though the angel isn't really Claudia's, this secret knowledge is. The process of discovery, the possession of knowledge, and her intimacy with the object change her, showing her what is best and noblest in her nature.

When I had my Art History classes in the basement of the Cleveland Museum, I would leave through a set of very high, very heavy double doors. I'd run down the wide marble steps that led to the Lagoon. I was usually the only person there, and at those moments, I always felt like Claudia - I felt like I lived in that museum, and that all the treasures inside of it were mine. Eventually, I spent so much time with those objects that, like Claudia, I did own them in a way. I sat in front of paintings and tapestries and Japanese woodcuts for hours, desperately hoping to find enough to say about each object to fill a ten-page paper.

I am not a spiritual person. Maybe I'm the antithesis of spiritual - I'm a physical person. I believe in the transformative power of knowledge, and I believe that firsthand observation is the best way to gain that knowledge.

When you can take time to absorb the textures and smells of an object, you can absorb its language, feel the actions that made it, and figure out which questions to ask. You can meet its maker.

Me, I know the political climate that Jacques Louis David painted in - I know why there are laurel leaves on Psyche's bed. I know what the missing letters in the Byzantine tapestry were, and I know what happened when the weaver was running out of room on the right side.

Don't get me wrong - it's not the trivia itself that I groove on. What I like is the way you can decode details of the artist's world backwards from the details of the work.

When I finally had a chance to decide what to do with my life, I chose to live in museums, like Claudia. That book showed me a place filled with intrigue and stories, a place where you could figure out things that nobody else knew.

I have spent a lot of time in Claudia's museum, both as a student and working there, and she was right -- knowing that place feels like having a big cool famous friend. It was a privilege every single time I went into the workrooms of any museum I worked in, from Birmingham to Brooklyn to Baltimore.

Maybe if I'd read a different book, a good book about a scientist kid, for example, I might have been a botanist (except I still would have flunked Calculus). But I read From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, and it changed my life.