Lasting Color

Marla Frazee is not shy about using colors. Just look at All the World (written by Liz Ganlon) and A Couple of Boys Have the Best Week Ever (which she wrote as well as illustrated), both Caldecott Honor books. But in her latest book, The Farmer and the Clown, the absence of words and her sparing use of color highlight the shift a little clown makes in a farmer's life. The clown introduces not only color, but also a new perspective--even a sense of joy--to the farmer's seemingly ceaseless routine.

Interiors from The Farmer and the Clown

The colors of the train traveling on the tracks at the edge of the farmer's property telegraph "circus": fun, entertainment, escape from the daily grind. The little treasure the train inadvertently leaves behind ripples through the farmer's world, disrupting his daily rhythms in the best possible way. The farmer, usually dressed in a crisp white shirt and earth-colored pants, wears red pajamas, suggesting he only lets go at day's end. And boy, does that toddler clown give him permission to let go--making faces, juggling eggs, packing a picnic basket.

In the parting images, Frazee lets readers know that the clown has made a lasting impact on the farmer--he will carry the joy he shared with the little clown always.

Finding the Fireworks

One of things I love most about Marla Frazee’s projects is the way she chooses them. “When I read a book to consider illustrating I don't want to fully understand it. I want to puzzle it out,” says Frazee. “I almost want to be afraid of it.” You can see just what she means when you look at her artwork for Stars by Mary Lyn Ray. The text is poetic and lyrical and closely observed, yet it does not include a set group of characters. Frazee found ways to connect the images and build relationships among characters so that you feel an emotional connection to them.

Frazee spoke at the Society of Illustrators in the same presentation as Stephen Savage (which I mentioned last week). She said the text of Stars reminded her of Ruth Krauss’s A Hole Is to Dig, illustrated by Maurice Sendak. Krauss, a former teacher, once said something along the lines of she hoped her students didn’t sue her for lifting their conversations verbatim and recording them in the book. Stars has that same loose, free-associative quality as Krauss’s book.

If you look at Frazee’s illustrations for All the World by Liz Garton Scanlon, and Everywhere Babies by Susan Meyers, the same is true there, too. Frazee creates the narrative through line with her images. We recognize her characters from certain details—pigtails, a slouchy posture, striped onesies, overalls. Although they go unnamed, we feel as if we know them.

Marla Frazee’s Web site, in addition to showing a picture of her studio under an avocado tree (she's sitting on the porch of her studio with Rocket, above), gives all sorts of insights into her work. At the Society of Illustrators, she talked about how she starts with a series of single images. “Sometimes the way into a book is just that--just a way to get started. Like you tend to have polite conversation and then you click,” she said, adding that you have to give yourself permission to make mistakes.

She talked about painting with a tiny brush. It made me look anew at the spread of the yellow sky with its hundreds of dandelion seeds, and the winter scene veiled by snowflakes (“Of course each one had to be unique,” Frazee said with a laugh). Cecilia Yung, art director at Penguin Books for Young Readers, who helped organize the presentation, made this wonderful observation: “The starring character is the sky.” Going back through Stars after that, I thought about the sky’s many moods, and how it envelops the stars in all its incarnations—as celestial body, as the blossom shape that precedes the pumpkin, and as the shiny kind a child keeps in his pocket or gives to a friend to lift her spirits. And that fireworks finale merges the human- and nature-made creative forces into one. Brava!

Reflections on the Caldecott Medal

On Monday (January 18, 2010), at the American Library Association conference in Boston, Mass., the 2010 Newbery and Caldecott Awards were announced. That ceremony has often been called the equivalent of “the Oscars” for all of us in the children’s book field.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the Caldecott Medal, primarily because of the wildly diverse range of winners and honor books the category has included. Here is the charge of the Caldecott Committee: “The[ Caldecott Medal] shall be awarded to the artist of the most distinguished American Picture Book for Children published in the United States during the preceding year. The award shall go to the artist, who must be a citizen or resident of the United States, whether or not he be the author of the text.”

The guidelines for the committee appear in their entirety on the ALSC (the Association for Library Services to Children) Web site, but the line of greatest interest to me is this one: “A ‘picture book for children’ as distinguished from other books with illustrations, is one that essentially provides the child with a visual experience. A picture book has a collective unity of story--line, theme, or concept, developed through the series of pictures of which the book is comprised.”

Consider this year’s Caldecott Medal-winner, Jerry Pinkney’s The Lion and the Mouse. Aside from a few animal sounds, there is no text at all. The entire story unfolds through the “visual experience.” What greater “unity of story,... developed through the series of pictures” could a book have? Notice how he varies the pacing: full-bleed spreads of the lion staring at the mouse that’s disturbed him, for instance, and much later in the story, a series of small panel illustrations when the mouse works to free the lion from his trap made of rope. (Full-bleed refers to the illustrations “bleeding” off the edges of the paper, using the full expanse of the spread.)

Then look at this year’s Caldecott Honor book illustrated by Marla Frazee, All the World. Nowhere in Liz Garton Scanlon’s text does it say anything about a family. That whole story line is developed through the illustrations alone, and yet it provides the through line for all of the other activities in the community. Thus Frazee creates a “unity of story” within the lines suggested in Scanlon’s lilting poem. The poem's overriding theme explores the idea that all the small moments connect to a larger shared experience—and it plays out in Frazee’s intimate scenes, or vignettes, that lead up to majestic full-bleed spreads.

Contrast those with the 2008 Caldecott Medal–winning The Invention of Hugo Cabret, in which Brian Selznick creates stretches of wordless sequences that move the story forward, within a larger prose narrative. The story is about a filmmaker, so the idea that the book “essentially provides the child with a visual experience” contributes a great deal to the reader’s experience.

These are fun conversations to have with young people. Their observations are so keen, and when they feel passionately about a book (whether for OR against it), they come up with some very persuasive arguments. Give it a try!