The Lady Hermes

I hope my friend and fellow illustrator Carolyn Croll (illustrator of SWEET POTATO PIE, which I wrote,) will read this.  She’ll understand why it makes me think of her and send her good wishes.

A few nights ago I went to an art opening at our newly renovated Byram Schubert Library, which has a spacious and beautiful gallery.  The show was huge, and the artist being honored was my middle child, Lizzy Rockwell, who is an illustrator.  There were plenty of visitors, framed pictures everywhere, good nibbles, old friends, and it was a festive evening.  So if you happen to be in the neighborhood of Greenwich, Connecticut, head for this wonderful branch library and check the show out.

Lizzy, as her father was, is a wonderful naturalist-artist.  When I saw the images I’ve posted here, I was taken back many years into her childhood.

She was not quite three years old, and her sister, Hannah, was almost six.  We were spending the month of August on Block Island to escape the heat and smog of New York City.  At that time, Block Island wasn’t the trendy neo-Hamptons place it has become.  But it was on the main flyway for migrating birds, and apparently Monarch butterflies too.

Some books take a mighty long time between the flash of an idea and the finished book.  If I count the first moment of the idea, ”Big George” (January 1, 2009, Harcourt/Houghton) has been 10 years in the coming.  Or more.

I live in Revolutionary War country, and one day I offered to take my grandson, Nigel, who was five or six at the time, to a house George Washington may or may not have stopped in – or at least one General Israel Putnam, our local hero, had.  He told me he wasn’t interested in things “ancient like George Washington,” adding that I probably was because I was so ancient.  I didn’t dare admit to him that I never had been very interested in George Washington myself.  As far as I knew, there was nothing to know about him except that he was “The Father of Our Country” and the face on the dollar bill.  He simply WAS and that was enough.  That day I began reading up on him.

To find out about the remarkable and surprising man I discovered, you’ll have to read “Big George; How a Shy Boy Became President Washington.”  The story took seven years from the first words typed by me to being the handsome book illustrated by Matt Phelan and published January 1, 2009.  

I get lots of inquiries on illustrating books for children. I try and answer them as best I can but every question has its own answer. Some years ago a painter friend of mine commented that she probably should switch gears and try illustrating books (which she obviously thought easy to achieve success in, since I had).  At that point I was finishing up some corrections on a book and asked if we could discuss the ins and outs of illustrating in a week when I’d be done and out from under the time pressure. My friend looked at me in horror and said “You mean you actually change your artwork when people tell you to?”

I'm amused that people who see the cover art by my daughter Lizzy Rockwell for our most recent collaboration, "Presidents' Day" assume that the boy and girl on the cover (dressed as Abraham Lincoln and George Washington) are intended to be Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Not so. The book was written and illustrated and delivered to the publisher long before we knew that our first major African-American contender for president would be running against our most formidable woman candidate in the Democrat primaries.

When I was too young to understand such technological marvels, perhaps five or six years old, my father took me to the newspaper printing press of The Commercial Appeal to drop off advertising layouts and copy for the morning paper. I was spellbound by the noise of the press, the speed, the smell of ink. To this day I'm convinced I was early on imprinted with love for printing, with ink running through my veins.

 As an artist I've worked in many different fine art printmaking media, but never used one for a children's book until I decided to use monoprints for two of my recent picture books, "Here Comes the Night" and "My Preschool." I wanted the illustrations to have to soft yet vibrant effect that this technique offers.