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| photo: Shana Surek | |
Barbara McClintock is an award-winning illustrator and author of more than 40 books for children. Her picture book Tomfoolery!: Randolph Caldecott and the Rambunctious Coming-of-Age of Children's Books, written by Michelle Markel (Chronicle Books), was published in November.
Handsell readers your book in 25 words or less:
This is a picture book about the life of the man for whom the Caldecott medal is named, how he revolutionized picture books, and how he still influences illustrators today.
On your nightstand now:
I'm currently illustrating a graphic novel for Roaring Brook Press, so graphic novels have been in constant rotation on my reading queue.
I love the work of British author and illustrator Posy Simmonds. Her graphic novel Tamara Drewe is a contemporized satirical send-up of Thomas Hardy's Far from the Madding Crowd, with all the poignancy of class and drama of the original story. Simmonds has broken up her drawn images into panels and vignettes creating a combo platter of current and 19th-century comic-book styles, all refreshing and intuitive and brilliant.
I'm also reading Making Comics by Lynda Barry, which is a celebration of drawing as our first and native language. The book is entirely handwritten and drawn; it's passionate, playful, and rejoices in everyone's inherent ability to draw.
I read a review of North Woods by Daniel Mason and just had to read the book--I live in a house built in 1815, and I imagine stories of all the inhabitants that preceded our living here. (Hopefully no bones of long-dead sisters are under the floorboards!)
And on the far corner of my nightstand, I love the dark fantasy and charm of the tiny-in-size book Fairy Tales in Electri-City by Francesca Lia Block. It's something I pick up and read when I need a little blast of fear and beauty.
Favorite book when you were a child:
Little Bear by Else Holmelund Minarik, illustrated by Maurice Sendak. I would lay on my bedroom floor for hours reading and rereading this book! I especially loved Little Bear getting dressed to play in the snow, and his ever-patient and wise mother looping back to the fact that he was wearing a fur coat and needed nothing else. It was so wonderfully silly and sensical at the same time.
Your top five authors:
Amy Krouse Rosenthal, Charles Dickens, George Saunders, Jane Austen, and Tomie dePaola. I love all of them for their ability to write with clarity, charm, and an immediacy that goes right to the heart.
Book you've faked reading:
The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire by Barry Linton. It was on a bookshelf in our house, and when I was in the seventh grade, I felt a family duty to try to read it. There are themes in it that I felt drawn to, but it was a bit much for me at the time. Should I try reading it now? Let's see a show of hands!
Book you're an evangelist for:
Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life by Amy Krouse Rosenthal. Irreverent, funny, comforting, charming, delightful, surprising. What's not to love here?
Book you've bought for the cover:
In the Night Kitchen by Maurice Sendak. That confident little boy! The dough plane! Those Oliver Hardy bakers! (Well, they were inside and not on the cover. Nonetheless...) The city made of milk cartons, jars, and a strainer dome! And all this AT NIGHT! I still get that "what the heck is happening here?" feeling whenever I see the cover.
Book you hid from your parents:
The Fantastic Four comic book. My mom actually hid it from me! This was a long time ago when, in the minds of parents, comics had forbidden qualities unsuitable for impressionable children.
Book that changed your life:
When I was in my early 20s I discovered J.J. Grandville's Vie Privée et Publique des Animaux (The Private and Public Lives of the Animals) published in 1842. Grandville's artwork was fantastical--he's considered by some to be the father of the surrealists. The drawings of anthropomorphized animals characterizing people of all walks of life in this book blew my mind! I still reference the crazy exuberance and imagination of his drawings, especially of animals, in my own work.
Favorite line from a book:
"Donkeys!"
--Betsey Trotwood, from David Copperfield by Charles Dickens. Just the best well-timed outburst!
Five books you'll never part with:
In the Night Kitchen by Maurice Sendak, Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak, Hot Dog by Doug Salati, Little Bear by Else Holmelund Minarik, illustrated by Maurice Sendak, David Copperfield by Charles Dickens, Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. Okay, that's six. Forgive me!
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
David Copperfield by Charles Dickens. Every year I reread the book, perhaps recapturing some of the wonder of my first reading? But it doesn't matter. I'm transported by the journey of a young person's life, and I love every second of it.
So... just what is it that illustrators do?
We illustrators (chest puffed out!) are the visual translators of a written text. We provide a visual pathway for young children to feel confident in their growing ability to read written words by reinforcing a story through pictures. There is a dynamism between pictures and text that happens in picture books that is entirely unique as an art form.
Film and theater may be close cousins to what we do, but there is nothing else that supports literacy and encourages a joy of reading for young children outside of our wonderful, miraculous weaving together of text and art.