Death of an Idol

From "The Moonjumpers."

I heard the news today, oh boy. My idol, Maurice Sendak, has died. I have always loved children’s book illustrators and wanted to be one when I grew up. Since he and I were the same age, he wasn’t around doing books when I was a child, so I had to wait until I was a grownup to enjoy his work. Before “Where the Wild Things Are” he had illustrated some books I liked, written by other writers, like “A Hole Is To Dig.” It was when he started to write and illustrate his own work that he really came into his own. He never got over being a child, I think, which is why his books are so appealing to children and people like me.

When the Wild Things came out, as soon as I read about it, I bought a copy for Polly, because I knew she was the kind of child who would love that sort of thing. The reviewers thought it might be too intense for sensitive kids, and they were very wrong. It was only a few years after I got her the book (she was four at the time) that one of her favorite painters was Hieronymus Bosch, so wild things were even a bit tame for her. All of my kids loved that’ book, as have children for over fifty years. They loved “In the Night Kitchen” and “The Little Bear” books, too. He did beautiful black and white drawings for Randall Jarell’s “The Bat Poet” and a wonderful Grimm’s Fairy Tales”

I have collected all of his newer books, even though they began to be a tad weird after a while, like “Down in the Dumps With Jack and Guy.”

The Sendak Family, with Maurice as a baby. They look a lot like his illustrations

Many years ago I b ought, on sale, a wonderful book about Sendak which contains his biography and terrific illustrations form all of his books up to that time. It also has pictures of toys and an actual pop-up that he and his older brother created, as well as a miniature book he created which was a precursor to the wild Things.. He talks about his fear as a child in hearing about the Lindbergh kidnapping, which explains another haunting book “Outside Over There,” one of my favorites. I am using an illustration from “The Moon Jumpers,”an early book he was not satisfied with. However, I love the pictures in it, so there, Maurice dolling.

He was a terrific artist and his work will live forever. R.I.P., Maurice Sendak.

Part of my Sendak collection.

What Are They DoIng?

For reasons that defy logic, Google has created a new series of elements in Blog Spot which makes editing a harder task than it useds to be. You end up navigating a  a lot of pages and trying to figure out how to get to where you need to be.
Now they have in some way screwed up my posts so that one I posted last week is now out of sequence and is dated May 14, which hasn't arrived yet. My latest post follows that one, which is about my book. I don't know how I can transpose it back to where it belongs.
I have written a lot of feedback to Google with no response - not that I expect any.
Why can't they leave weel enough alone?

And now, I find that this one is also listed after the May Day post. Oy veh!

Messing About With Color

I’m playing around with painting, trying new things, like color and style and all that sort of thing. Not really sure what I’m doing, but it’s fun. Besides Gabrielle Munter, I also like Emily Carr, a Canadian expressionist painter who lived in the late 19^th, early 20^th century and did wonderful landscapes in the Pacific Northwest. She is credited with saving the Native American totem poles by calling attention to their artistic merit. People had been chopping them up for wood!! She also did some really fantastic landscapes, similar to Charles Burchfield’s, a superb painter form Salem, Ohio. She, in particular, used color in the same way as Munter, bright and unexpected.

I have always been too literal, and still am, so I am trying to break loose and experiment. So far, it is still tame and I don’t always get the balance right. I am not planning to break into the world of art, just having fun and making messes.

I have to work bigger than I used to because of m eye sight. I can’t do those detailed little illustrations I used to be able to do, like the ones in the book about my mother. My hand is not so steady either for fine line work. I remember reading about James Thurber, who was legally blind because of an early eye injury -   his brother shot him in the eye with a bow and arrow. Not on purpose of course. As he grew older both eyes because impaired, so he did his cartoons on huge sheets of paper. I’ll have to keep that in mind.

These are a couplet if things based on a photo I took of the yard across the street one foggy morning a few years ago. They still need work, which I have to figure out.

But they’re bright.

The links to the artists in this post are from me, and not from that "text enhance" bug that hs been driving me nuts.

Gardening and Cats

The weather here, and elsewhere, has been so changeable that I have not started the garden as yet. We had a week of 80n degrees in March and have been freezing for most of April, with some snow and sleet.

The little garden at the side of the driveway has done well in spite of it all. The purple swamp iris bloomed, as did the forget-me-nots and there are these little white things that popped up this past week. I don’t know what they are or where they came from. I know there were a few of them last year and now there are a lot of them. The mystery lily has spread and when it blooms this year there will be three separate plants. Last summer the main or “mother” plant had six blooms at the top. Quite showy.

Once again I neglected to thin out the Stella d’ oro lilies and they are so bunched together that I don’t expect them to bloom very well. I have heard it’s heavy work and that you have to take a very sharp knife or an axe to separate the bulbs and them I’m afraid I will replant them upside down and they’ll end up blooming in China. Or Australia.

While I was out taking pictures of the little white things, Sateen (our name for him) came purring over. He’s a stray who’s been in the neighborhood for five years. People try to take him in, but if there are or have been other cats in the house, he sprays, even though he’s been neutered. The woman next door feeds him and provides him shelter in bad weather in her garage. He’s very needy and he also drools. He is beautiful though. We are still missing Dupree. There was another stray around a few weeks ago, a lovely tortoise shell with Siamese markings, but she was quickly adopted by a neighbor. I think we need a cat.

Another Favorite Thing

A while back I wrote about some of my favorite kitchen things and plumb forgot a very important item. It used to be easy to find a brown pottery tea pot, even at the five and ten. When my last one bit the dust, back in the early seventies, there was not one to be found. When Polly made her first trip to Europe, which was going to include England (the Brits are very clear about not being in Europe which is a place they got to on holiday), I asked her if she could bring me back one if she happened to check out a Woolworth’s in London.

What she brought back was not a five and dime tea pot. It’s a beautiful Derby Stoneware pot with a light blue lining. It makes great tea. I bought it a tea cozy at a Woolworth’s in Scunthorpe in about ten years ago. That’s another thing that was hard to find over here. Just about the tie that cozy became threadbare, my friend jay Bell knitted me a charming number that the tea pot and I just love.

My shiny brown pot is now almost forty years old and looks like new. I think with all the trendy kitchen shops now tucked into every mall, one can probably find a brown pottery pot (not china, but pottery), but I treasure this one.

Painting Away

Been painting for the first time in a long while.  I’m experimenting with as looser style than I used to do. Still inspired by Gabrielle Munter. Emily sent me a delicious calendar this year and each month is a treat. I just love her use of color. I have a book Emily gave me a couple of Christmases ago, which shows some of the black and white photographs she worked from and the places she   saw around her in the Murnau area. (Since there was no color photography at that time, at least for the casual photographer, you can see how she actually saw things in her paintings. All of the subjects were right around the little house in Murnau where she and Kandinsky lived together. It’s just before the Alps begin, with a lot of little lakes and the mountains in the near distance.

The picture above is of a vacant house down in Holmes County. I happened to drive past it as the sun was rather low in the sky. The back of the house is missing, and the light in the windows is the sun, not indoor lights. I have been meaning to do this painting for a very long time and decided to just plunge in and think like Munter. I may do another one of the same subject, because this was fun to do.

The painting below is base on a picture that Ellie took of the wild cat, Francine. I haven’t met her, but she is the subject of many hilarious photos from the Petrou homestead in Erding. This one was so colorful and I couldn’t resist. I don’t think I have quite captured the zaniness of Francine, who is very photogenic in a wacky way. Both she and Izzy, the alpha cat of the family, are extremely nutty felines and I have Izzy’s photos on my refrigerator door, replacing grandchildren’s pictures. My beautiful granddaughters are much too glamorous for the likes of a refrigerator door.  Anyway, I love the photo of Francine contemplating the ennui of a late winter afternoon, close by a glass of wine and l’heure bleu.

What We Read

These past weeks, with the early spring, the view out my kitchen window reminded me of a favorite book I used to read to the children at bedtime, especially.

It’s the best bedtime book ever written, by Margaret Wise Brown, even better than “Goodnight Moon.”  It’s “The Little Fur Family" and the illustrations are by Garth Williams. The little fur child goes out to play in the wild wood and when he comes home in the late afternoon, this is what the sky looks like, and this is how the sky has looked on these chilly spring late afternoons.

This started me thinking about those days of reading to small children and the books, poems and stories they liked  the most. Each one had a different favorite. For Polly, when she was really little, it was the A.A. Milne poem “I want a soldier, a soldier in a busby,” from “When We Were Very Young.” She liked to hear it over and over. I actually found a wonderful metal wind up soldier in a busby, back when one could buy such things at the 5 and 10 for a coupe of bucks. He marched and played a drum, too. 

For Sally it was “Whatever’s the Matter with Mary Jane (and it’s lovely rice pudding for dinner again..) which I think she identified with, even though I never made rice pudding. I think she liked the idea of a child saying “no” to food she didn’t like. They both liked the one about Bad King John who only wanted a red rubber ball.

Emily loved “Peter Rabbit,” especially the part where “the sparrows flew to him in great excitement and implored him to exert himself” when the buttons on his jacket got caught in the gooseberry net in Me. McGregor’s garden. She loved to say that part, even though I am not sure she understood exactly what it meant. Beatrix Potter did not stint in her use of language, giving children some respect in their ability to understand her stories as she wrote the.

John liked “Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel,” even though he had all the other books available. I had to read it over and over, as I had read the others’ favorites. When he was old enough for his library card, that’s the book he’d get out. One day the librarian showed him “Mike’s House,” a book about a boy who always called the library by that name, because that’s where the book about Mike Mulligan lived. John liked that one, too.

My early memories of being read to were of Peter Rabbit, poems by Stevenson and Eugene Field (“Winken, Blinken and Nod,” among others). And I wanted to hear them, over and over again too.

I am sure someone has done a dissertation or some sort of research study on why children love the repetition of the same stories or poems. Most of the ones my children liked I didn’t’ mind reading again and again because language was so well written and soothing. In the case of Margaret Wise Brown, there was an element of musicality to her rhythms and word choices. Reading her books was like singing lullabies.