The Art of Stephen Savage

Stephen Savage

If you look at the artwork for Polar Bear Night by Lauren Thompson, illustrated by Stephen Savage, you might think that it seems fairly simple--geometric shapes, pretty shades of blue, green and lavender, some interesting textures. 

But how does Savage create emotion with these fairly straightforward colors and shapes? The uncomplicated compositions allow young children to see themselves standing in for the polar bear cub. And Stephen Savage's technique is anything but simple. 

We got a chance to interview him about his book The Fathers Are Coming Home by Margaret Wise Brown, and he shared with us the multi-step process he uses every time he makes a print for one of his books. He draws on the linoleum, cuts the linoleum to create a relief print, then carefully builds up the inks on the raised areas to give a sense of depth, perspective and, in the case of Polar Bear Night, a nighttime setting.

He demonstrates his process here. It makes you think about how nothing is ever as easy as it looks.

Endurance

Sandra Boynton did what seems to be the impossible: She moved fluidly from greeting cards to board books for youngest children. The Going to Bed Book turns 30 this month, and it’s just as fresh and pleasingly surprising to toddlers today as it was when she first published it in 1982. Another of my favorites of hers, Moo, Baa, La La La! is like a song. Children come in on the title refrain and lose themselves to the music of the animal (and human) sounds.

This week I’ve been rereading Awakened by the Moon, Leonard Marcus’s biography of Margaret Wise Brown, well known for her book Goodnight Moon, illustrated by Clement Hurd. But she is perhaps little known for her innovative work with Lucy Sprague Mitchell at Bank Street, the progressive school that came to be known by its street address, at that time, in Greenwich Village. (The Bank Street College of Education is now located uptown on West 112th Street in New York City.) Together they founded the Writers' Lab where Mitchell, Brown and other writers began to share their observations of youngest children. They watched how youngsters began to play with and acquire language, more attracted to sound and rhythm than to actual words, which didn’t yet hold meaning for many of them.

We take their trailblazing efforts for granted now. Goodnight Moon is a nursery necessity. But at that time, in the late 1930s and early 1940s, Mitchell and Brown, along with Edith “Posey” Thacher, Esphyr Slobodkina (Caps for Sale) and Ruth Krauss (A Hole Is to Dig, Maurice Sendak’s first picture book), were all influenced by the research they did with the nursery school students at Bank Street and the observations they shared in the Writers' Lab there. According to Marcus, it was Brown who realized that small children “did not place books in a special category of culturally exalted objects,” and therefore needed a more rugged format. William Scott, a parent at Bank Street who published many of the projects that resulted from its Writers' Lab, began printing books on durable cardboard stock “strong enough to withstand the onslaught of toddlers’ bites and tugs,” Marcus reports.

Because Boynton illustrates her own work, she smoothly moves between making a statement, such as “they hang their towels on the wall and find pajamas, big and small,” and creating images of a tall elephant hanging his towel high, and a lion placing his on a low hook, while dog busts out of bunny’s too-tight nightclothes and bunny gets lost in dog’s, to make the contrast and the joke. Margaret Wise Brown observed this is one of the contrasts toddlers enjoyed most—the playful juxtaposition of large and little, in a world where toddlers may be small in stature but stand at the center of their universe. Boynton gets all that and makes it look effortless, as the best authors of board books do. Her books are, in content and form, built to last.

A Birthday Party for Jesus

Who knew that the story of the birth of Jesus could be told so simply yet so completely? In The Child in the Manger, Liesbet Slegers distills the events related in the Gospel of Luke to their barest elements. Mary and Joseph are on a journey: “They knocked on many doors. But nobody would take them in.” They are grateful to find a stable “because Mary wanted to lie down. She felt that her child would be born soon.” Slegers’s version is an example of superb storytelling because she never loses sight of her audience.

In a recent interview, Liesbet Slegers talked about her approach to The Child in the Manger, and she said that she took her story into the schools as she was working on it (from the link to the interview, you may also read the book throughout the month of December online free). She said she read it over and over again to “test my ‘book to be,’ ” to make sure it was connecting with her audience. Margaret Wise Brown, author of Goodnight Moon, did the same thing. She went into New York City classrooms and tried out her stories with the students.

Slegers captures the sense of wonder at the birth of Jesus, with the angel, the shepherds, and the three kings all playing their parts in the story. And then she brings that sense of wonder into a context that’s familiar to children. The idea of Christmas as a birthday party for Jesus, at which we all get presents, is one that nearly every child can comprehend—and celebrate!