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This is a keynote talk I gave at the Mazza Summer Institute in Ohio, Summer 1999. Every year, the Mazza Summer Institute brings well-known children’s book illustrators to talk to an audience of teachers, librarians, and other lovers of children's book art. The Mazza Collection is a fabulous teaching-museum of original art from children's books, housed at the University of Findlay. If you are ever near the town of Findlay, Ohio, don't miss it! Illustration: Shedding Light (an excerpt from the talk by Barbara Helen Berger) When I was in art school (back in the 60's), I fell so in love with painting that I literally ran across campus to the Administration building and declared it as my major. Thus I took a path into fine art, and I ended up with a BFA — a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Painting. During the five years it took, I never studied anything about how to make books — children's or any other kind — though I was dimly aware that in some other part of the art department, there were things like graphic design, illustration, and even bookbinding which seemed to be more of a “craft.” I remember one day in a drawing class. It was an advanced drawing class and as ever, we were working from a nude model. The professor came and looked at my drawing and said, “It looks like an illustration.” The way he said “illustration” oozed with disdain. As if everyone knew illustration is a lesser art you just don't want to be associated with. Ever. As a child, of course, any distinction between fine art and illustration was totally irrelevant. I simply loved looking at pictures. On walls, or in books. Especially in books. We didn't have so many children's picture books then, nothing like nowadays, but there were illustrated books. My mother, a poet, was great at reading out loud. With her voice providing the music of words, I would gaze at every part of every picture on every page. I did the same with my Dad's big art books, which I pulled from the bottom shelf of the bookcase in the living room. No one was reading out loud to me then, and what child would enjoy all that dry art history anyway? None of that mattered to me. I simply loved sitting there on the sofa alone, legs sticking straight out, the heavy book open across my lap, losing myself in the pictures. Most of them had stories in them, I could tell from the faces and gestures of the people. I recognized some: David and Goliath, Mary and her baby, Venus stepping from her shell. But even when I didn't know what the story was, I could still “read” the picture for itself. And that's what I loved. My own relationship with books must go back as much to those hours alone with my Dad's fine art books as to all the bedtimes upstairs, snuggled next to my little sister, Mom reading to us from myths and fairytales and poems illustrated for children. But I had no idea, no idea at all, how strong and deep this connection with books would turn out to be. Not until many years after college and my BFA. Then, out on my own and living the life of a painter, I encountered calligraphy. A friend of mine was learning italic. I was fascinated. So I went and signed up for a class myself. It was all new to me. Calligraphy is a word that comes from Greek: callos — beautiful — and graphos — writing. Beautiful writing, or as my calligraphy teacher said, the dance of the pen. I fell in love the way someone else might fall in love with learning to play the piano. I spent hours practicing, until that dance of the pen got into my hand. In fact, I learned that a style or alphabet is even called a “hand.” The Italic hand, or the Humanist Book hand. Of course, the tradition goes back into long ago, long before books had the form they do now, before paper or moveable type or anything like a printing press. I began to feel a personal connection with the origin, where books come from—words made by human hands. Naturally, all of this led me right to the glorious tradition of Medieval illuminated manuscripts. Those books were not only written by hand but filled the most amazing art, in jewel colors and gold leaf in miniature paintings on pages made of vellum. On those pages, there is a total integration of words and art, with a beauty so sublime it takes your breath away. I started learning some basics of illumination too, like making versal letters (the large and often decorated letter that begins a section of text). The teacher told us the term “illumination” can be taken quite literally. Think of sitting in a dim monastery or castle hall where the light from a single candle might fall upon the open book in your hands. The raised and brightly burnished gold leaf on the page would reflect the light, bounce it to the facing page, lighting up the words. To illuminate means to give light. Illumination comes from the Latin root, lumen — light. Then if you look up the word illustrate (on the same page in the dictionary), you find it comes from the same root meaning of light, from the Latin verb illustratus, illustrare, to light up, to illuminate. So to illustrate is to shed light on something, to make it clear. The dictionary says illustration is used to decorate, or to explain a text. It's not there for itself alone, it's in the service of something else. It isn't art for art's sake. And that may be why fine art tends to look down its nose at illustration. But the old tradition of calligraphy and illuminated manuscripts was showing me a glimpse of something far more than that. Then sometime in 1973 or 74, Lloyd Reynolds came to town. He was known as the “father of American calligraphy,” a master of the art and a brilliant teacher. He had managed to get all the elementary schools in the state of Oregon to teach children italic as a regular thing! (And studies were showing the children did better in reading and all kinds of other skills. It makes sense — writing beautiful letters with your own hand wakes you up to the magic of written words.) Here was my chance to study with Lloyd Reynolds myself. So I went to his workshop. By this time, he was an old man, and a wise old man in the truest sense. In the workshop one day, he gave us a saying to write out: “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow.” Then he said, “Now, caress the letters lovingly onto the page.” As we dipped our pens in our ink bottles, and bent over our boards, he paced slowly around the room, repeating those words over and over. “Caress the letters lovingly onto the page.” It was a meditation. Every ounce of your attention went into this one act, feeling the edge of the pen against the paper, the flow of the ink in every stroke with its slant and its curves, the way the edge of the pen carves out the white spaces inside each letter and between each letter, weaving them into words. When I was done, I looked at my own page. “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow.” And the meaning was right there in the ink on the paper. Never before had I managed to write so beautifully as that. My letters were clear in form, and they had grace. There was a life in the ink. Love had done it. No one had ever spoken that way in a painting class. No one ever said, “caress your colors lovingly onto the canvas.” But now, having just tasted the experience, and seeing the result before my eyes, I knew this is how art really happens. Any art. It is love, flowing directly from the artist's awareness right through her hand and into the work. If your whole heart and mind is in it, then the result is also your best. Better than you ever thought you could do. I began to think, I want to create an illuminated book, myself. I want to create one for children. A few years later, I made a trip to New York. I went to visit the art museums, and also the Pierpont Morgan Library, which has a collection of Medieval and Renaissance manuscripts. They are not generally out on display, but you can write a letter and make an appointment. So I did that. When I got there, which manuscript did I want to see? I had to give them its name or its number. I had no idea. So I asked for manuscript # 944 (which I got from a postcard in the gift shop). “You're in luck,” they said. #944 was in the intermediate vault because they were having it photographed for an art book publisher. They gave me white gloves to wear and showed me into a room not open to the public. The curator of Medieval manuscripts, a quiet, scholarly man, also wearing white gloves, soon appeared with a very small, red velvet-covered box. He unfolded the box and inside was the book—#944, The Prayer Book of Michelino da Besozzo. This was an artist I had never heard of, who did this work of illumination in about 1410, they believe. The vellum pages were no more than 7" high. I couldn't read any of the Latin text, any more than a young child can read the words of her first picture book — but the art! Its radiance came not only from the bright gold leaf (which is not like any gold paint you can buy), it shone from the colors themselves. The brilliant lapis blue, and pinks as rich and gentle as roses. But not only that. Every tiny painting, and every flower in the borders, had been painted with great love and devotion. Though the face of each figure was no bigger than my baby fingernail, every face was so poignantly human. These people were both humble and awake, contemplating the mystery of the stories they were part of. This was a prayer book, after all, so these were the same sacred stories you find throughout the fine art of Europe in frescoes and sculpture and stained glass. But here, in this one tiny book, the intimacy was astounding. That is the unique thing about a book, isn't it? You are close to the pages. It's you and the art, one-to-one, as close as you want to be. Children know that. I certainly did. And Michelino's book showed me again the truth in what Lloyd Reynolds had taught us. If a work of art is truly loved into being, it has a presence, an energy. Then this art isn't only shedding light in the sense of decorating or explaining—it is in itself a light. As the curator slowly continued turning the pages for me to see, I had to step away more than once so my tears would not fall on that priceless book, its beauty moved me so deeply. If I had any lingering doubts about the art of books or illustration, that little manuscript from more than 500 years ago wiped all my doubts away. Most likely, none of our books will still be around 500 years from now, but that's not the point of course. Something touched me directly from those pages. It didn't matter if the book was so small, or from so long ago, a different time altogether. It had something that transcends both size, and time. This was not a lesser art. I came away set free from that idea, and thoroughly inspired. I've come to think of a children's picture book as no less than this. It's like a mirror. Whatever light may shine from the words and pictures, that's the reflection of a light already present in us all, artist and reader alike. It is timeless. It is of the spirit. We may have this in us already but still, we don't always know that. We all need to see and feel the reflection, to be affirmed and nourished by a sense of luminosity in the world and in eachother and in ourselves. And so, the word “illustration” turns out to be more profound than I ever could have imagined.
This was followed by slides exploring the use of light in my book illustrations. The illuminated book for children that evolved was Animalia (Celestial Arts, 1982, reissued by Tricycle Press, 1999). |