Color and line, certainly I find that if I’m having trouble, if I am stuck, if I do ask myself what is the emotion of the moment of this drawing, whether it’s, you know, in a book like Yo Yes or a book like The Hello Goodbye Window if I stick to trying to capture the emotion in terms of the line and the color the finished drawing is coherent and makes sense.
If I — which is sometimes surprising in that it can be a quite rough looking thing and yet it can still function better than if I am focused really on trying to get it right somehow, whatever the right might be. And the right, well probably the right means that the nose is where the nose should be, the eyes are where the eyes should be, which, which gets you away from the fact that this really is just a collection of colors and lines.
They’re not — you’re not creating a sculptural image, an anatomically correct image, it’s an emotional bunch of stuff and if the, if the eyes are overlarge and yet it fits that emotion no one notices. This kind of abstraction continues to fascinate me, especially when you’re drawing children that’s, that can be why it’s very hard to come up with good children I think.
With animals we are already more used to abstracting them. You know, a dog can be quite abstracted and you can get away with it. With a child when that child when that abstraction gets — we’re obviously closer to children so the abstraction has to really work and you have to be quite diligent about it somehow.
As I’m speaking I’m thinking that the abstraction — we can get used to all kinds of different abstraction and for instance in the world of animation, the Powerpuff Girls, those are super abstracted images with huge eyes, I think the fingers are not delineated in any way. They’re just kind of like teardrops and I think that’s quite wonderful that that has worked.
And — or when you think of Mickey Mouse, he basically has a thumb and three fingers and you realize why that’s that case. Getting that fourth finger is annoying, it’s too many fingers and they become too thin in a sense when you’re drawing. So the three fingered Mickey Mouse was a proper solution to that hand.
I won’t say all children are more open to abstraction than all adults. Maybe they are. I think on the whole though, we as adults become more word oriented and more and more — we are — we want things to be explained to us with words. And when we go to a museum we immediately look at the panel describing the painting, the small description to the right of the painting.
It gives us a way of handling that painting. And sometimes when I go to museums I try to just say I will not read anything. I’m just going to look. I think that’s one, one aspect of why children might be more open to an abstract or what we would call a rough or almost grotesque line. I loved Ludwig Bemelmans’ drawings always as a child.
Never ever dreamed of them as anything other than just right and was shocked as an adult to read that the reviews of his work were often that he could not draw, that he couldn’t — that he was an awful artist. I think he was a masterful artist, but the thing is to pull that off, that kind of roughness accurately or to have it work is not an easy thing to do but it’s not something that I as a child ever, ever questioned.
It appealed to me immediately and emotionally and I liked the, I liked that loose line very much. And I always did as a child I never thought about it really as some kind of — as anything wrong or abnormal.
I like Roger Duvoisin as well, I like a lot of the folks of that day Esphyr Slobodkina, William Steig, sort of the same tradition brought, brought along further. Those are my heroes and in terms of children’s books they are fantastic. I love them.
