The Pleasures of Picture Books
by
Eileen Gunn
The artist Jerry Pinkney, whose work I’ve admired for more
than half a century, illustrated over a hundred books, mostly large-format,
beautifully printed picture-books for youngsters. Over the years, I’ve bought,
for deserving children, a small stack of these very thin books, but I’ve bought
none for myself. I now have a basket-ball team’s worth of grand-nieces and
-nephews, so I’ve been indulging my fondness for giant Pinkney picture-books,
because, after all, they’re presents for the kids, right? Until the beginning
of the pandemic, I would go to the children’s section of the University of Washington Book Store
and buy pretty much whatever Jerry Pinkney books they had. In isolation, I
started buying the books online, at first delivering them in person, and then, due
to the onset of virus variants, holding them for later delivery. They’re big,
beautiful books, and of course I couldn’t resist taking a little read. What
harm could that do? Eye-tracks are invisible, I thought.
Well, reader, it was a mistake. I’ve had a hard time giving
these books up. I did give my six-year-old niece Jerry Pinkney’s recent
retelling of The Little Mermaid, in which the mermaid child befriends a
human girl and pines not for a handsome prince.
But I had also bought, as a companion volume, Strange
Animals of the Sea, a pop-up book that Mr. Pinkney did in 1987, the heyday
of pop-ups. The book is no longer in print, so it’s used. (All the pop-ups work!)
I am sorry to tell you that I have delayed giving my niece that book, telling
myself that pop-ups are fragile, is she old enough, blah, blah, blah. Reader,
wtf? Pop-ups are the most glorious kids’ books in the world, and this Pinkney
pop-up book is ideal for a
six-year-old. This could be the book that inspires her to become an oceanographer
like her grandfather. In fifteen-twenty years, she could be the woman who saves
the oceans.
Okay, reader, you’ve
convinced me. I must give this funny, intelligent, careful child that book. I
will order another copy of Strange
Animals of the Sea for myself. (PS: I have just done so.)
One of the hallmarks of Mr. Pinkney’s work is the way color
dominates. He uses watercolor, which you
might think of as a meepish medium, all washes and seascapes. Not in Jerry
Pinkney’s hands. He builds up layers of color to convey depth and texture, and to
place fine details in art that can be startlingly realistic. (Moray eels!
Octopuses! Huge, open-mouthed goosefish!) The most wonderful thing about
watercolor, of course, is its transparency, its ability to allow light to hit
the bright white paper underneath the paint and bounce back out. If the pigment
is thinly laid, this can light up the colors like gemstones. In addition,
watercolor has the ability, when allowed to flow at its own direction, to offer
the artist serendipity and inspiration. Jerry Pinkney has worked in watercolor
all his professional life: he understands it so well, and deploys it so
creatively, that much of his work just fills me with awe.
Mr. Pinkney’s métier is fine traditional portraiture of
people, animals, and animal-people, in detailed settings, in pencil and
watercolor. He blocks out the overall design in pencil, and uses pencil or
graphite to delineate details that express character and humor. The people and
animals he draws are surprisingly real individuals, because he uses live models
to set up the scenes. The illustrations often include details that enhance or
expand the story, and they reward the reader who spends time exploring them.
My favorite Jerry Pinkney work is a set of four books, The Tales of Uncle
Remus, retold by the estimable Julius Lester in a conversational voice much
one like he’d use telling stories to his grandchildren––say, about the time Br’er
Rabbit got caught in a snare trap.
“Good morning, Br’er Bear,” he
sang out, merry as Santa Claus.
Br’er Bear looked all around.
“Up here!”
Br’er Bear looked up and saw Br’er
Rabbit hanging upside down. “Br’er Rabbit. How you do this morning?”
“Just fine, Br’er Bear. Couldn’t
be better.”
“Don’t look like it to me. What
you doing up there?”
“Making a dollar a minute,” said
Br’er Rabbit.
Mr. Lester’s lively retelling releases the stories from the clutch
of Disney and the condescension of dialect spelling. These tales were created
by Black storytellers to amuse Black people, and the drawings reflect the lives
of country people in wonderfully surrealistic ways: Farmer Rabbit and his wife
milking a cow, for instance, or Br’er Rabbit and Br’er Fox, fully dressed, walking
upright past a small scampering rabbit chased by an appropriately sized fox.
Pinkney draws Br’er Rabbit and his friends as actual animals, not cartoons, and
dresses them in realistic period dress, wearing vests and trousers, skirts and
sweaters, kerchiefs and beat-up hats, clothing appropriate to the time and
place and people the stories came from. Pinkney himself posed for photos
wearing period costume, then drew illustrations from the photos. It would not
be amiss to call the books profusely illustrated, with three complex full-color
spreads and dozens of black and white pencil drawings in each volume. The dust
jackets are wrap-around, full-color works of art: they would make wonderful
murals. Ideally, this series should have been published in the same format as
the picture books, instead of as a small trade hardcover. That would make a
nice project for a billionaire who loves fantasy….
For the first half of his career, Mr. Pinkney illustrated
stories that someone else was telling. Somewhere in the 1990s, though, he
started telling the stories himself in his books, using few words and conveying
the story almost entirely in pictures. This is very much like what he was
already doing: he has often said that he saw his job as an illustrator to
include adding something to the picture that wasn’t in the writing. In The
Lion & the Mouse, a magnificent visual retelling of the Aesop fable
about power and reciprocity, the art rules so completely that the book has
dispensed with words entirely: even the dust jacket has no title or credit on
the front, just on the spine. The lion, yellow and fierce, fully occupies his
pages, and leafing through them is like walking in the African sun. The mouse
is small and modest, but boldly seizes her share of the book, and her
transition from victim to savior is accomplished without a word, just a squeak.
This is a book that begs to be read out loud to a small child, and yet there
are no words, just sounds. How can it be read? Just open it up: the book
silently persuades you to tell the story yourself, in your own words, pointing
out to your listeners all the wit in the illustrations––which, of course, is
the most fun way to read books to kids. A few more of Mr. Pinkney’s books––The
Grasshopper and the Ants, The
Tortoise and the Hare, some of the fables––also have very little text, and
detailed, hilarious illustrations. Puss
in Boots has a few more words, but features the most adorable silver tabby shorthair
wearing boots in all of children’s literature, and that’s a highly competitive
genre niche.
Although much of Mr. Pinckney’s work is glorious
picture-books for children, he has illustrated a few classic adult novels as
well. In the Seventies and Eighties, he illustrated a series of reprints of
modernist literary novels for the Franklin Library, including Updike’s Rabbit, Run, and Nabokov’s Lolita. (The drawings
for Lolita are very charming
Pinkney-esque pencil drawings with spot color, and perfectly SFW.) In 1991, he
created ten delicate and evocative pencil-and-wash works for a new edition of Zora
Neale Hurston’s masterwork Their Eyes Were
Watching God.
Jerry Pinkney’s illustrations have commanded attention since
the very first book he illustrated, The Adventures of Spider: West African
Folktales, published in 1964, when he was just 25. A book for young children,
this early work is design-driven, with swaths of bright color and bold detail,
with the design itself carrying much of the emotional weight. He was awarded a
Gold Medal at the 1964 Boston Art Directors Club, I believe for the Spider
illustrations, which encouraged him to become a full-time illustrator, rather
than a designer, which was potentially a far more lucrative career. His
continued interest in design, as he developed his personal artistic style, means
that his illustrations dominate the pages in a very sophisticated way: they are
interesting on both the large scale of design and the more intimate scale of
illustration. His work is readily recognizable as his, and I’ve often been
surprised to find it in publications far outside children’s literature.
Re-reading Mr. Pinkney’s work has been a bit of a nostalgia
trip for me, and maybe that’s why I’ve enjoyed revisiting it so much. He first
came to my attention in the mid-1960s, when he was just starting to receive
awards for his work. I was working part-time for my father in his Boston graphic
design studio, which handled a lot of illustration then. It was a transitional
time in commercial art: photography was displacing illustration, and it was
getting harder for illustrators to make a living. Mr. Pinkney chose to work in
traditional illustration at a time when the market for it was declining. Working
in both commercial art and book illustration, he managed to make a living at it
and support a growing family, and he continued to create both personal and artistic
challenges for himself. He was a Black man, and he made a point of illustrating
books of African tales or by African-American writers. He actively addressed
Black issues and portrayed Black adults and children in much of his work, at a
time when the white publishing industry considered that a very risky venture,
especially in children’s books. There was a time, and it lasted into the
twenty-first century, when it was a surprise to see Black characters in books
telling European fairy tales. Inclusive kids’ books, like Sesame Street,
featured animal characters because it was assumed (and probably a fact) that
while readers were reluctant to buy kids’ books with Black protagonists, they
were happy to buy books that featured talking animals. (And Mr. Pinkney, as I’ve
said, can draw a very convincing community of talking animals.) Jerry Pinkney
not only drew Little Red Riding Hood as a Black child, he marketed that book
and many others to mainstream white audiences and became one of the most
celebrated illustrators of children’s literature of the last fifty years. His
most recent book, The
Welcome Chair, was published in 2021, shortly before he passed away in
October at the age of 81. There is a rewarding exhibit at the Normal Rockwell
Museum, Jerry
Pinkney: Imaginings, that offers a marvelous tour of his illustrations, including
videos of Mr. Pinkney talking about his work and explaining his creative
process.
I’m grateful to my nieces, and to their kids, for helping me
stay in touch with Jerry Pinkney and his work over all these years, and to Ambling Along the Aqueduct for the
chance to wallow in nostalgia and buy all these lovely books for myself. Yes, I’ve stopped hoarding the copies I
bought for the kids. At least thirty of the hundred-plus titles Mr. Pinkney
illustrated are still in print, and can be ordered from bookstores. More than
fifty are available used or new, and you can find them in pretty much every
public library. Check ’em out.
*
Note: The links I’ve provided above were chosen because they
show off the books well and may allow you to explore the interiors. I’m not necessarily
endorsing the sellers.
Eileen Gunn is the author of two story collections:
Stable Strategies and Others (Tachyon Publications, 2004 and Hayakawa, 2007) and
Questionable Practices
(Small Beer Press, 2014). Her fiction has received the Nebula Award in
the US and the Sense of Gender Award in Japan, and been nominated for
the Hugo, Philip K. Dick, and World Fantasy awards and short-listed for
the James Tiptree, Jr. award. Her non-fiction has appeared in
Smithsonian magazine, Locus, Paradoxa, Science Fiction Eye, the New York Review of Science Fiction, and other magazines covering science fiction, technology, and culture. She is the author of
The Difference Dictionary, a guide to and analysis of William Gibson and Bruce Sterling’s novel
The Difference Engine.
Gunn serves on the board of directors of the Locus Foundation, which
publishes the genre newsmagazine
Locus, and served for 22 years on the
board of directors of the Clarion West Writers Workshop. After leaving
the board, Gunn has served as instructor at Clarion West.
