Dave the Potter

Artist, Poet, Slave 
by Laban Carrick Hill 
illustrated by Bryan Collier 
Little Brown  2010

A picture book biography of a 19th century African American pot maker who was also a poet, and apparently a slave. 

I don't think anyone's going to let that summary slide without my saying something about it first.  When I look at a picture book biography I have to step back and read it through the eyes of the intended audience, or try to at least.  When the subtitle promises to tell me three things about the subject, and text only conveys two of those three effectively, it leaves me feeling something is missing. That Dave is depicted as an artist making pots comes across in both the detailed verse describing the process and the well-researched images. But all we see of Dave is him at work in his shop and maybe a few details the convey the general era of the story and nothing, text or image, that necessarily informs us of Dave's slavery. 

Does it have to?  Can we simply put the word 'slave' on the cover and assume the reader will understand what is necessary for the context of the story?  Here's my problem then with the text – we learn in the back matter that Dave's profession was unusual for a slave, which I think is safe to assume because what we tend to hear about slaves in the American South leans toward house and field. The fact that he's an artisan is an important distinction, but I instantly want to know: who does a slave potter make his pots for?  Were they commissioned by his owners to be sold locally?  Did his make them for his master's house?  In the back matter we are told one of the earliest records is of 17 year old Dave looking to get a loan for a house – was this for his business?  Was he freed?  So many questions around his identity as a slave which are important only in so far as they help us understand who he was creating his pots for. He doesn't begin to write poems on his pots until he's in his 30s as far as we know – another clue, he's been educated and has a facility with rhyme – which might suggest that his stature had been secured as a local artist that he didn't fear his pots would be rejected for having been inscribed by a slave.  So many things I wish I understood about this aspect of Dave's life.  

Is it right to want so much from a picture book?  Perhaps not, but again, if it's important enough to put on the cover of the book I think it isn't unreasonable to have it addressed within the main text.  This becomes part of my problem with back matter in nonfiction picture books. So much information is jumped to the back after the main text that it begins to feel like everything that proceeds it is like the carrot before the stick, and the reader is going to get both. Yes, sometimes the details aren't going to fit the narrative flow of a story, which is perhaps why we should question this method of delivering nonfiction to younger readers because if we are presenting fact in the guise of fiction we risk readers walking away with only half the story. Out of context of the narrative – literally, separated from the text – the back matter is easily ignored by a reader who wants the gist of the story and only reads the main portion.  And in Dave the Potter there is little in that main text to explain enough of Dave's story to justify the word 'slave' on the cover or in the subtitle.

Having said all that, Hill does a nice job of giving us the process involved in 19th century pottery.  It's a very close narrative, told in verse, an extremely tactile and physical study of what it meant to be literally a man of the earth. Hill captures that sense of what it means to be an artist, working along, knowing only what the artist can about how such things look like during their creation.  The dedication, the shaping, the pride of craftsmanship, much of what is written can be applied to any art or craft. On the poetic front I might have liked to see more of Dave's little couplets incorporated into the story as opposed to the back matter, but it can equally be argued that there is poetry in his craft.  I can't think of a more appropriate approach to a poet's life than to write in verse, as Hill does here, so bonus points for that.

Ignore my misgivings; I think the book deserves its Caldecott Honor and Coretta Scott King awards.  Dave the Potter is a well-told examination of a craftsman's life in the early 19th century, beautifully illustrated and carefully researched, and a fine portrait of an African American plying a trade few did during that particular time in history. I simply wish I had a better sense of the subject in that time. 

My Name is Georgia

a portrait
by Jeanette Winter
Harcourt 1998

Out of the darkness I emerge, and the next few weeks are going to be heavy with picture book biographies and graphic novels. Not that any of you are keeping tabs, just what I've been soaking in for the past couple of weeks while visiting the island of Incommunicado.

For this intimate look at the painter Georgia O'Keeffe, Winter has chosen to tell not so much a life story as a sort of emotional growth of an artist. We do get the requisite facts of her life as a person -- birth, death, early childhood -- but most of what Winter has built this book on are the words that O'Keeffe uses to express her feelings. What emerges isn't so much a description of how art spoke to her, but how she seemed to be answering a calling that was difficult to articulate outside of her art. The distance was always calling me, O'Keeffe says, and Winter uses these moments to build an emotional arc to a story that shows us the inner life of an artist.

Aside from the opening and closing images that plainly state O'Keeffe's dates of birth and death, the book is told in a first-person viewpoint. To achieve this, Winter has taken select phrases quoted from various biographies about O'Keeffe and built narrative bridges to fill in the gaps that otherwise would have been described by traditional biographers. Winter sets the stage and situations and then allows O'Keeffe's words to fill in the feelings surrounding them.

I went to the Texas plains,
the Wild West of my childhood books.
...you have never seen SKY--
It is wonderful.

Rather than break the flow of the narrative with quotes or attributions, Winter simply offsets O'Keeffe's quotes in italics. For the younger reader these statements probably read more as emphasis, but for older readers (and adults) this serves as an elegant solution to the dilemma that arises when a picture book author writes about someone else in the first person.

It's an interesting point (and one I have been exploring a lot lately, so it's likely to show up again) that nowhere else but in children's books do we find biographies written in first-person narration. Any adult author that dared to write about an historical personage in the first person, their book would be labeled as fiction, but here and in many others like this the Library of Congress has categorized this book in the traditional non-fiction category of Biography.

In carefully choosing O'Keeffe's words Winter is able to present the reader with a sense of how the artist thought and felt. Whether or not this is an accurate portrait it would take an art historian to sort out, and taken by themselves I'm not so sure I would draw the same conclusions on character that is implied here in this book. But Winter is smart in calling this a portrait and not a biography, understanding the artist's use of the word to mean "a likeness" with all the leeway it provides. An artist, painting a portrait, has the delicate task of finding the best way to represent their subject while at the same time inserting their own style to the process. I have no doubt that Winter has "painted" a portrait of Georgia O'Keeffe, but is it an accurate one?

As Winter portrays O'Keeffe, she is a woman driven by the landscape, compelled to paint it, to find her peace within it, to commune with this space in an almost religious sense. It isn't hard to believe this was what O'Keeffe was like, what she felt, and it's a fairly sophisticated idea to communicate to a picture book audience. Where the biography is lacking in he type of information one might look for in a report -- why she made the decisions to move to New York, her relationship with the photographer Alfred Steiglitz, how old she was at any of these ventures -- Winter does manage to convey a sense of time passing and the emotional growth of the artist.

As for the illustrations Winter has said she wanted to give her impression of O'Keeffe's work and in this area I feel she falls flat. Winter's style is unique in and of itself and I am sure I could recognize any illustration from any book of hers on sight. O'Keeffe painted small things very large to make people notice them (as is pointed out in the text itself) but Winter paints the large things very small, surrounding her images on each page with a lot of white space. O'Keeffe was drawn to the large openness, the faraway she calls it, but here it looks so contained, so tiny.

Still, for a biography that looks at first blush to be very slight, this book is contains a great deal that is felt more than it tells.

I'm the Best Artist In the Ocean

by Kevin Sherry
Dial 2008

The follow-up to I'm the Biggest Thing in the Ocean turns out to be The Biggest Disappointment of the Year so far.

Giant Squid is back, and being a creature full of ink, he just has to draw. He's pretty goo at drawing all the other fish he sees -- he can draw this, he can draw that -- just as he was boastful of all the fish he used to be bigger than. Leave it to a couple of disgruntled clown fish and a shark to rain on Squid's creative spirit by pointing out that he's making a mess. Then, after a similar thoughtful moment Squid announces that he's making a "Mess-terpiece!" Fold open the the extended spread to reveal that Squid has tagged a whale with oceanic graffiti.

What was great in the previous book was that Squid was a boastful little boy. Like a boy first able to grasp the concepts of language and self, Squid defines himself according to his limited knowledge until he realizes the error of his boast. Then, quite energetically, he embraces that realization and realigns his ego with his environment: he's the biggest thing inside the whale!

But the brag of being the best artist in the ocean doesn't make sense because he's the only artist in the ocean, as far as we can tell. Comparing himself to nothing, the fact of the matter remains in question. Logically one would assume he would find a better artist in nature and then could readjust his claim, but not here. Instead he utters a play on words and leaves us with a very elaborate illustration.

I have to interject here that I went to art school and have more art history in me than I know what to do with. That's me being Squid, but the boast is for a purpose. See, when you read the tiny print at the back of the book you discover that Sherry modeled the endpapers off the work of Miro and the illustration in the whale was influenced by Picasso's Guernica.

The graffiti on the whale is an homage to a cubist's rendition of the horror of the Spanish Civil War? What. The. Hell.

Now, if I hadn't read this note I would have just tripped merrily along, but then I had to go back and look. I don' quite understand how Miro fits into it, but is the Guernica-whale supposed to represent the Squid-artist's depiction of the horror of the oceanic life cycle? I mean, I guess it's cool and all, if you get it (which I didn't on the first pass) but is that really something to casually work into a picture book?

To make a sequel to I'm the Biggest Thing in the Ocean it would have seemed natural to me that Squid have some other illusion of himself exposed, knocked down another peg, or perhaps he could help some other sea life see the error of their ways. Perhaps we could learn something about the oldest thing in the ocean, where we move from old dolphins to old tortoises to crusty Old Mr. Coelacanth.

I guess that's the lesson I never learn. No matter how much I want sequels to favorite books I really should be more careful what I wish for.

Delicious

The Art and Life of Wayne Thiebaud
Susan Goldman Rubin
Chronicle Books 2007

A book so luscious you want to lick it, that's my blurb for this one.

For those unfamiliar of artist Wayne Thiebaud, of any age from middle grade up, this is a great introduction. Better, it explains Thiebaud's growth as an artist and the circuitous route he took to get there, working as a commercial artist, in department stores, drawing cartoons for Disney, and farthest from his thinking was the fine art paintings that have been his claim to fame. What I like about this gentle message of an artist discovering himself is that while he always knew he wanted to do art he wasn't forced to make a decision before he was ready. As he was mentored by individual artists and made his living as a working artist he gained a lot of experience that would later become useful as a painter.

I think there are a lot of creative souls in the schools who know they want to do something with the arts but don't really understand how one figures this out. When I was in high school the idea of working as an artist, of making a living, meant what was called commercial art which primarily meant advertising art. If a high school student said they wanted to be an artist that's what was on offer, that was all anyone really understood about art. If a guidance counselor could have suggested how I could channel my interests in photography and graphics into, say, book design or children's books I think my life would have been very different. If someone could have put this book into my hand, showing me how a fine artist found his footing and did some artful floundering along the way, my life would have taken another very different direction.

So, yeah, I hold some real high hopes that this book finds some middle grade and teen readers who are interested in what the life of an artist looks like.

The book itself is beautifully put together. Chronicle really gets it right, with practically each spread featuring one of Theibaud's luscious cakes, tempting candies, or angular intersections faced with text in white set against an ever changing compliment of backgrounds. The paintings influence the color palate which, by design, give this book an appropriately artistic tone. Honest, just pick this book up and leaf through and ask yourself why all books on art can't look this good.

The gals (can call you guys that?) over at 7Imp did a much better job covering this book that I seem to be able to manage right now. Check out their review and then check this book out.

Four Pictures By Emily Carr

by Nicholas Debon
Groundwood 2003

Travel broadens the mind, there's just no other way to explain this discovery. While traveling through Europe I stopped in an art gallery, in Amsterdam, that contained Australian Aboriginal acrylic paintings. I'm not going to mix things up here by showing you what they look like, but I had an immediate draw to them and when I got home I began researching Aboriginal art.

Hitting the shelves at the library I wasn't happy with what I was seeing so I requested some inter-library loans. In the meantime I browsed the general art survey section hoping, perhaps, to alight upon some information by chance. And there among the titles was this book. Something familiar about it, the name? Yes! The same artist who did the book The Strongest Man in the World: Louis Cyr. Huh, look at that. I hadn't even thought to see if he'd done anything before. I must be slipping, or busy, or something.

In this book Debon uses four paintings by the Canadian artist Emily Carr as a framing device to tell her life story. That's a bit of a stretch, really, as it isn't so much a biographical book as it is a collection of sketches centered around four of Carr's works. Utilizing graphic novel-esque panels to present her life we are shown; Carr's early life living and painting the landscape and the Native people of British Columbia; Her studies in Paris before the Great War when she was in her late 30's, including her first exposure to modern art and her inability to handle feeling confined by cities; Her inclusion in a retrospective of Canadian artists after abandoning her painting that puts her in contact with other artists and reinvigorates her; Her later years living like a gypsy and painting in nature.

And?

Like a portrait that only shows you a single expression, a surface that contains hints at deeper emotions and subtext beneath, Debon ends the examination of his subject without further comment. So much is left out, so many missing details, that the book could not be considered a biographical account by any stretch of the definition. It is an impression at best, a multi-faceted portrait of one artist by another presented in format that doesn't quite work. There are narrative aspects to the segments and some illumination around the events surrounding the representative paintings, but the exercise ultimately feels empty.

After this and the Louis Cyr book I have to say that at least Debon seems to be getting better at telling stories with his pictures but he still hasn't got the hang of what it is that makes his subjects interesting. With both of Debon's books I'm left feeling ... eh ... with no desire to dig further into the lives he's chronicled. Perhaps that's why I didn't find this book earlier.