Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT

Children’s Books

Two Caldecott Medal-Winning Illustrators Tell Their Own Stories

Dan Santat and the late Jerry Pinkney draw from life (literally) in their memoirs for young readers.

Self-portrait in brown graphite of the author as a young smiling boy drawing in his sketchbook on the floor amid scattered papers and pencils.
From “Just Jerry.”Credit...Jerry Pinkney

According to an apocryphal story, the 19th-century French illustrator Gustave Doré was already so famous for his prodigious artistic talent by the age of 6 (circa 1838) that during the processions on feast days little Gustave was carried aloft through the streets of Strasbourg, drawing all the while and tossing his sketches into the upraised hands of the cheering crowds.

Jerry Pinkney had a more modest — though similar (and similarly gratifying) — public reception in his youth. As a teenager in Philadelphia, he got a job selling papers at an outdoor newsstand. His kindhearted boss allowed him to draw in his sketchbook when customers were few. After one customer saw a sample drawing and offered to buy it, the word got out, and young Jerry was soon selling as many drawings as newspapers (a nickel a paper, a nickel a drawing). His childhood anxieties, about his Blackness and especially about the dyslexia that had made his school days such torture, began to ebb, and self-confidence flowed in their place.

He tells this story toward the end of JUST JERRY: How Drawing Shaped My Life (Little, Brown, 160 pp., $17.99, ages 8 to 12), his autobiography for young readers. Pinkney, who died in October 2021 at 81, is best known for his watercolor illustrations for numerous picture books, including “The Lion and the Mouse,” for which he won the Caldecott Medal.

Classical in style, his pictures are realistic, detailed and often romantic but never mawkish. His work is unblushingly old-fashioned but always beautiful, and children love it. He depicts a world resembling ours but idealized via transparent color and elegant design; it’s palpable enough to convince us that such a lovely place might truly exist.

Image
From “Just Jerry.”Credit...Jerry Pinkney

Pinkney’s pure, spontaneous drawing process has previously been hidden for the most part by his finished illustrations’ perfectionism. Not so in this posthumous memoir. His publisher made the good decision to illustrate the book (lavishly) with Pinkney’s rough sketches for the project, 10 years in the making but not yet completed at the time of his death.

These loose sketches reveal another, unbound side of Pinkney, a side that might never have been seen outside his archives had his work on this book not been interrupted. They are the visual equivalent of memory itself.

Initial, very light, whiplash pencil strokes are evidence of the artist’s pursuit of remembered visions. Quickly drawn, as if to capture the scenes before they got away from him, some details fade into foggy imprecision, while others (certain faces and figures) emerge sharply; suddenly and surprisingly in focus.

We meet Jerry as a 9-year-old boy growing up poor, but welcome and well fed, along with five rambunctious siblings. His sensitivity led to social isolation, though, even at home. It distanced him from his father, to whom he seemed ill equipped for life on the streets.

When Jerry accidentally shot and killed a bird with a bow and arrow, he was inconsolable, until he turned to his sketch pad to work through his grief.

Drawing was also his defense against the ubiquitous racial prejudice everywhere in evidence in 1950s Jim Crow Philadelphia. That alone might have left him permanently enraged. But anyone who met the adult Jerry Pinkney at one of the many book events he attended came away with the impression of a gentle, loving, generous man — qualities that are amply displayed in this book, right down to the font he chose to make reading it easier for anyone who suffers from the same genetic learning disability with which he lived all his life.

Image
From “A First Time for Everything.”Credit...Dan Santat

Dan Santat’s A FIRST TIME FOR EVERYTHING (First Second, 320 pp., $14.99, ages 10 and up) is a memoir of a different stripe. For starters, it’s presented in graphic novel form. And instead of attempting the broad scope of a life, Santat focuses on one escapade during his middle school days.

Middle school is notorious for human drama. Its cliques, feuds, fads, jealousies and killer uncertainties, usually played out in bland locker-lined hallways and overlit classrooms, seem plotted to destroy any vestige of dignity or hope in an artistic kid’s soul.

While these are familiar tropes, Santat’s decision to corral his tsuris into one three-week-long experience — a school trip to Europe when he was 13 — so that most of the familiar stuff happens on foreign soil, makes it fresh again.

The discomforts and disgraces Santat endures at the hands of his peers (steady mocking from a trio of scheming valley girls who rival “Macbeth”’s Three Witches, for example) look different against the glamorous backdrops of Paris, Lucerne, Munich, Salzburg, Vienna and London.

As with Pinkney, it was drawing that came to Santat’s emotional rescue and led him to his future career. On the class trip he began to take his art seriously — a transformation he traces to the moment he felt comfortable enough with a peer to let her watch him draw.

Santat, who won his Caldecott Medal for the picture book “The Adventures of Beekle,” is a skilled comic artist and graphic novelist with a natural cinematic bent. From an early scene during an assembly in the school gym when he is mortified by his bad recitation of a poem and jeered by the entire school, Santat’s panels pull us into the action so forcefully we hardly need to be told what made him a kid who wanted to be invisible.

In addition to his visual storytelling abilities, Santat is a fine writer. His dialogue is hilarious and true, and his timing is perfect.

A remarkable offering.


David Small, a Caldecott Medal-winning picture book illustrator, was a National Book Award finalist for his graphic memoir, “Stitches.”

A version of this article appears in print on  , Page 18 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Life Drawing. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT