
Picture This: Advent Adventures and New Discoveries
Nicolette Jones draws our attention to illustrations from three numerically themed books.
In December, I gave myself a seasonal task for #NewIllustrationoftheDay on Bluesky and Instagram. The daily posts usually feature illustrations from newly published picturebooks, intended to highlight the range and quality of work in the genre. But December is a quiet month for new publications, so I set out to create an advent calendar of illustrations from books with the numbers one to twenty-four in the title. The goal was not just to find any old book that fitted the bill, but as always to find pictures worth drawing attention to.
Although familiar favourites came to mind, this also turned out to necessitate quite a lot of research, and some promising leads turned into dead ends. For instance, Tolstoy’s only children’s stories appeared in a collection called Twenty-Three Tales. Surely, I thought, some interesting illustrator will have embellished that book. But no. Nothing but a frontispiece engraving of the writer at work.
It all worked out in the end. But on the way I found several illustrators I had never encountered before and am very glad to have discovered. Here I look closely at illustrations by three of them.
The first, posted on the 16th of December, was from 16 Words: William Carlos Williams and the Red Wheelbarrow, written by Lisa Rogers (Schwartz & Wade Books, 2019) and illustrated by Chuck Groenink. It considers the circumstances in which Williams composed his famous 16-word poem The Red Wheelbarrow, published in 1923 when Williams was 40.
Groenink, originally from the Netherlands, now lives in New York and has illustrated a couple of dozen books in the US and Europe since 2010. The pictures for 16 Words, his website tells me, were ‘made with pencils and graphite over acrylics and watercolours with added digital colour’.
The image I chose shows Williams, who was a doctor in the town of Rutherford, New Jersey, where he spent his life, taking a moment between appointments to write at his black sit-up-and-beg manual typewriter. The period detail is appealing: his waistcoat, stiff collar, starched shirt front and bow tie under the white coat, the glass bottles on his desk, the wooden office chair, the clothbound books, and the cursive script of the framed certificate on the wall. Williams said of his poetry ‘no ideas except in things’ – which resonates with each of these carefully selected objects, that tell us about Williams’ job, environment, circumstances. His face echoes photographs, especially the shape of his nose and his dark hair. (His parents grew up in the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico respectively and spoke Spanish at home; English was not their son’s first language.) But it is the treatment of this scene, beyond the facts of place and time and physical appearance, that is so effective.
The perspective leans slightly, with the desktop slanting towards the window, making it a focus, although the view is empty. The poem in question is about objects glimpsed through a window, while light, like inspiration, shines in, falling on Williams and his desk. The limited palette of greens and browns suggests a quiet, thoughtful calm but also makes us understand that the red wheelbarrow, still in the poet’s head, must have been a striking sight in the context. There is a quirky quality to the drawing – not quite realism, with a touch of caricature, which helps to make it friendly and fun. The picture is harmonious, of a piece, like a poem, with all the elements in the same tone. And so much depends on that. Groenink has understood the in-the-moment stillness of both the Imagist poem and Rogers’ text.
Also a new discovery was popular Australian illustrator Craig Smith, whose work reminded me of Michael Foreman’s, particularly in this scene from I Was Only Nineteen (Allen & Unwin 2014), a picturebook which uses for its text a 1983 song by John Schumann, of the folk band Redgum, about the Vietnam War. A grandfather looking back at his youth as a soldier has not yet recovered from the trauma.
Smith uses watercolour skilfully, rather as Foreman does, with a foundation in drawing, and vibrant washes in the sky, although Smith cites different European influences on his style: Etienne Delessert, Roland Topor, Heinz Edelman, Friedrich Karl Waechtar. All of these have an interest in the surreal and fantastical (Edelman is the designer behind Yellow Submarine). But the image aims at realism, and since Smith is an advocate of researching the subject to be illustrated, we can trust that the detail is a credible record. Meanwhile the influences listed also suggest the artist’s concern with the inner life, and the psyche of the characters depicted.
This picture shows the calm before the storm, a moment of camaraderie in which young soldiers, sitting close together, sing to two guitars. It conjures their bond and their capacity for friendship, while also implying that the lyrics it illustrates are indeed the memories of a singer who served in the conflict. “We made our tents a home”, says the song. But although there is warmth in the moment and beauty in the yellow and orange sky, the lyrics speak of an “Agent Orange sunset through the scrub”, referring to the horrific defoliant used in the Vietnam War. The khaki canvas canopy under which the soldiers sit, and the dark line of scrubby trees, have the look of dark clouds gathering, and seem to be a premonition of smoke and fire. The image is more suggestive and sinister than it appears at first glance.
And a third discovery, for December 22nd, was the work of artist Francesca dell’Orto, who trained in Milan and practises as an illustrator and textile designer. The image I posted is from a book originally published in Uruguay in 2017 called Leru Leru, that came out in the UK from Dixi Books in 2021 under the title Twenty-Two. The story, by Susana Aliano Casales, is about two siblings who are bullied at school because one is a boy who looks like a girl and the other is a girl who looks like a boy.
Dell’Orto admits that since she studied set and costume design, her process is very similar to directing a theatre. ‘I draw all the objects, characters, and elements of the scene separately. I play with moving them digitally as in a small theatre and, when I find the picture, I unify all the layers and paint lights, shadows and details.’ She uses Photoshop and a Wacom (drawing tablet) screen, but hand paints, with watercolours, acrylics and other techniques, background and textures that she scans and incorporates into the illustrations ‘in order to have a less digital final result’.
The picture has the magic, and the unreality, of a stage set. Two small shacks represent a bakery, on the left, and the school on the right. The siblings are welcomed by three fantastical characters, with strange attire and masks, hinting at commedia dell’arte. A decorative row of delicate trees, lit from behind, blends with the smoke of the bakery.
Even without the story, this surreal picture is fascinating and imaginative, with unlikely elements brought together: the thick black strokes of the tree trunks and the pale tracery of leaves; the theatrical empty space of the ground and the busy, colourful group crammed into the bakery; and the effect is both playful and unsettling.
I am very pleased to have found these three talents. It is lucky that their numbers came up.
Nicolette Jones writes about children’s books for the Sunday Times and is the author of The Illustrators: Raymond Briggs (Thames & Hudson); The American Art Tapes: Voices of Twentieth Century Art (Tate Publishing) and Writes of Passage: Words to Read Before You Turn 13 (Nosy Crow).
Books mentioned:
16 Words: William Carlos Williams and the Red Wheelbarrow, Lisa Rogers, illus Chuck Groenink, Schwartz & Wade Books, 978-1524720162, £14.99 hbk
I Was Only Nineteen, John Schumann, Craig Smith, Allen and Unwin Children’s Books, 978-1911631620, £7.99 pbk
Twenty-Two, Susana Aliano Casales, illus Francesca dell’Orto, Dixi Books, 978-1913680183, £6.99 pbk