If you’ve kept an eye on my blog posts over the months, you know I’m very interested in art books for children. Learning to look with an open mind is a crucial skill in developing real multicultural consciousness, and exposure to art can be great training for kids.
No One Saw (2002) was the first in Bob Raczka’s Adventures in Art series (8 books to date), published by Lerner Publishing. “No one saw flowers like Georgia O’Keeffe,” begins his beautiful exploration of how artists bring us vision through their work. Spare rhyming lines are illustrated by signature works of mostly impressionist-era art. “No one saw music like Marc Chagall. No one saw soup like Andy Warhol,” one double page goes, and indeed we never saw either the same way after those artists gave us their views. Short artist bios follow Raczka’s personal, tender concluding message: “Artists express their own point of view. And nobody sees the world like you.”
Bob Raczka’s endearing text and wise curatorship of the art works he presents make all his books classics. Art-loving parents will long be grateful for his skillful aid in embuing a love of art in their offspring. I’m a big fan of Raczka’s; click here for more posts about his books for kids.
Elatia Harris‘ post Monday on one of my favorite sites, 3 Quarks Daily, is a long reminiscence on her fascination, beginning at age 9, with things Japanese. Her mom had already introduced her to western art at Boston museums and galleries, but delving into aesthetics Japonesque, she was on her own. Harris’ report on books that helped her explore her interest is evidence that children need adult books as much as adults need children’s books. Through her beloved childhood books and her own imagination, her nascent multicultural awareness led to a profound and lifelong appreciation of art. Here’s an excerpt from her post, but please don’t miss the treat of reading it in its entirety.
I needed a guide to that universe of art and taste that drew me in, and it could not be my mother…”
“Enter Elise Grilli – a woman whom I suppose I never knew, although it does not feel that way. I first encountered her name on the cover of one of my most beloved childhood books, Golden Screen Paintings of Japan. You can see the scan of my personal copy below left – it’s dog-eared the way a book gets if you sleep with it for many years. On the upper right corner, there is ink I spilled from copying something inside it. Akiyama Teruzawa’s big book from Skira, Japanese Painting, was similarly pored over by me, and is now obviously distressed, like the Modern Library edition of The Tale of Genji, written by the world’s first novelist, Lady Murasaki, and translated by Arthur Waley. Nobody in this bunch wrote for children, but in fact they all wrote for me. Especially Elise Grilli.
Here’s Eliata’s description of her growing aesthetic awareness–a great example of the natural (untutored) capacity of a child to resonate with art that arises out of profound awareness:
Trying to find the right way to draw things, I was instinctively attracted to an individualistic painter of wide-ranging genius [the 16th century painter Hasegawa Tohaku], and my first sensations of wonder and bewilderment have stayed with me always. They are the correct response to the daring and naturalism I saw, that I was too young to know I could not as an artist aspire to.
Harris then discusses a Hasegawa 12-panel screen, his early understanding of abstraction, and a one-brushstroke tree trunk that demonstrates how form and content are one!
In Where in the World?, Bob Raczka takes young readers on an artist’s tour of six continents “without leaving your chair.” Beginning in Japan (one of Hokusai’s 36 Views of Mt. Fuji) and on to Australia (Christo’s Wrapped Coast), Raczka introduces works by Diego Rivera, Gaugin, Klee, Canaletto and six others. Each gets a double page spread with several paragraphs of text explaining the art and the geographical influence on the artist: Tunesia on Klee, for example.
On the cover and in the back of the book, a map of the world wraps up the tour. One of several tapestries designed by Alighiero e Boetti and woven in the 1980’s by Afghani women using traditional rug-making techniques, the map indicates each country with a portion of its flag and “shows us that people from completely different countries and cultures… can ignore artificial borders and work together to create beautiful works of art.” Another map of the world in the book traces Raczka’s armchair route and gives real mileage between destinations.
Where in the World?, aimed for middle school kids, is packed with fascinating details about the art and how it was made. As always, Raczka presents significant works of art without pretense. Kids experience the work for themselves while enjoying the geography along the way. And for more travel (plus art) books for children, click here.
Third World Press founder Dr. Haki R. Madhubuti recently celebrated forty years as an independent publisher. He said:
“Forty years of success is remarkable for any independent company, and in the book publishing industry it’s nothing less than extraordinary. But we believed that the writers of America’s Black literature needed the support of a Black-owned, culturally specific publishing house
If you’ve kept an eye on my blog posts over the months, you know I’m very interested in art books for children. Learning to look with an open mind is a crucial skill in developing real multicultural consciousness, and exposure to art can be great training for kids.
