From: GWoelfle at aol.com <GWoelfle>
Date: Fri, 28 Feb 2003 21:59:58 EST

I'm with Monica in her praise for Action Jackson and her dislike of artists' biographies illustrated "in the style of the artist." With those what we get is a watered-down imitation of a (presumably) great artist and kids most likely take that style to be equivalent to the artist being discussed. For that reason, Frida was disappointing to me. Kahlo's paintings are full of extremely tough complex emotions. The illustrations were attractive, but rather infantilized copies of that work. Action Jackson gave us the story of the artist as artist, i.e. showed us a bit of his life and a lot of his creative process. Then it showed us one of his paintings. Both illustrations and text (and source notes) were rich and full --- and then as a climax we got Pollock's own painting -- admittedly reduced in size and stretched over the gutter of the book, but still, we saw the actual result of all that life and process of his. It's an outstanding book for all those reasons and I'm thrilled that it won a Sibert Honor.
   Please, let's see more of this sort of book, and less of the "in the style of" picture book biographies. Kids deserve nothing less than the great art of great artists.
     By the way, I am in NO WAY denigrating the work of illustrators. I think there are fabulous illustrators doing amazing things with picture books these days -- we're in a golden age of picture books. I just don't want kids misled about who painted what.

Gretchen Woelfle Author
Received on Fri 28 Feb 2003 08:59:58 PM CST