Children's Book Illustrators

E.B. Lewis, Mitra Modarressi, Tom Leonard, DyAnn DiSalvo-Ryan

From the dramatic realism of Chester County's N.C. Wyeth in the early century to the flying frog whimsy of Mount Airy's David Wiesner, winner of the 1991 Caldecott Award for Tuesday, the Delaware Valley has always been home to some of the world's finest children's book artists.

The following pages showcase the work of four very different area illustrators whose unique styles and attitudes are making them known as emerging forces in the world of kid lit. Their latest books will bring wisdom and pleasure to many children this holiday season.

* * *

"I am a fine artist," declares Earl Bradley Lewis with a broad smile and an absolute sense of certainty. "I see myself as a documentor of places in time and space. I want to stop the world, to hold it still. I want you to notice the cloud formations and the way the sun hits a tree."

This is Earl Lewis' credo and it is why, after struggling for years to find time to work at his painting, he was certain he had no interest in children's books.

"I'm not an illustrator," he rebuffed the agent who contacted him after Lewis' watercolors were featured in a 1993 cover story in Artist's magazine. But a bit of prodding and a look at a slew of recently published kids' books led Lewis to allow his portfolio to be submitted to nine major publishers.

The results were stunning. Five publishing houses, recognizing both the growing sophistication of young readers and the expressive beauty of Lewis' work, offered contracts immediately. His first book, Fire On The Mountain (Simon & Schuster), an Ethiopian folk tale rewritten by Jane Kurtz, was published this fall and snapped up as a featured choice of the Children's Book of the Month Club. More than ten additional books illustrated by E.B. Lewis will be published within the next three years. Lewis—who gave up painting altogether for several years in the mid-1980s—is working feverish 18-hour days at his North Philadelphia studio.

Raised in Frankfort, the brawny-but-gentle Lewis began attending Temple University's Saturday morning Student Art League in the sixth grade, ultimately enrolling full-time at Tyler after completing high school in 1975.

Like many art students concerned with making a living in addition to pursuing their muse after graduation, Lewis sought an education in graphic design and illustration as well as painting. Lewis recalls professors who recognized his gift urging him to drop his commercial work in favor of high art. "You can't do both," he recalls them saying, "You'll lose something."

Nonetheless, he persisted in his dual focus, eventually finding employment as a graphic artist. "Brochures, business cards," he remembers. "I hated it."

In 1980, Lewis shifted gears, becoming an art teacher at Philadelphia's Woodhaven Center, the first of several jobs working with the mentally disabled. Gradually, his painting time started to slip away.

"Individuals become like the people in their circles," he remarks, reminiscing about working with teachers and healthcare providers. Even so, Lewis characterizes the period, during which he earned a Special Education degree, as rewarding. "I found my worth," he recalls.

And eventually, Earl Lewis found his art again. Beginning in 1986, Lewis would stay in his classroom at the Trenton State Psychiatric Hospital long after his teaching hours ended. From four to midnight, he worked at the Corot-like city scapes and water views that eventually won him sold-out solo exhibitions at Philadelphia's prestigious Rosenfeld Gallery. His gallery success led to the children's book bonanza that has finally allowed Lewis to leave day jobs behind and be a fine artist full-time.

"I don't paint down to children," explains Lewis, the single father of two boys. "I like the work to be challenging, just like I enjoy painting for stories that have difficult vocabulary."

Indeed, the images in Fire On The Mountain are subtle, museum-quality pieces which will continue to be sold in galleries as paintings rather than book illustrations.

"I always want to get better at painting," insists Lewis. "I'm constantly learning and striving. I always want to be an apprentice. Mastery is a dead zone."

* * *

"You know I don't want to be a grown-up!" remarks 27-year-old Mitra Modarressi, with a wrinkle of her nose and a toss of her long, uncoiffed black tresses. "I don't think of myself as an adult."

Indeed, a stuffed toy character from Maurice Sendak's Where The Wild Things Are has an honored top bookshelf perch in the elfin author-illustrator's slacker-styled Center City lair. Tossed on Modarressi's battered couch is a heart-shaped pillow imprinted with the pretty-boy puss of Beverly Hills 90210's Jason Priestley. "It's a joke!" Modarressi insists, rolling her eyes as the sonic sludge of Superchunk issues forth from the stereo.

But whether harkening back to early childhood fantasies as a source of images for her paintings or maintaining an effortlessly hip adolescent attitude and lifestyle, the autumn release of Modarressi's second book, The Dream Pillow (Orchard), did afford her the opportunity to do one bit of growing up that felt welcome.

Modarressi's mother, the esteemed novelist Anne Tyler (The Accidental Tourist, Breathing Lessons), wrote the text of her daughter's first picture book, Tumble Tower. The story of messy Princess Molly, published in 1993, was the first of a three book contract for Modarressi, who makes no bones about her mother's participation providing a crucial linchpin in the deal. "I hoped people would really like my illustrations and not just think it was charity."

For The Dream Pillow, Modarressi added pen to paintbrush and trepidatiously set out on her own. Without a celebrity collaborator, recalls Modarressi, "I was worried that it would get shoved under a rug and forgotten about." Her concerns proved unfounded as an advanced review in Publishers' Weekly declared Modarressi "an artist with a unique vision."

"I was so psyched!" exults Modarressi recalling that first glowing notice. "It was just me!"

Indeed, The Dream Pillow—a sweetly eerie story of two little girls and a creepy cushion—is thoroughly infused with its creator's quirks and predelictions. "I have definite ideas about what I want to paint," Modarressi notes of her minutely detailed watercolor illustrations. "I love to work in green, so I wrote a bad dream where one of the characters gets buried in giant peas!"

Modarressi, a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design who sold and studied children's books at Philadelphia's Borders and Barnes & Noble for three years before trying to create one of her own, paints in dusty, pastel hues reminiscent of Pez candies, lending The Dream Pillow its gently fantastic feel.

"I filled the story and pictures with things I loved when I was little. I always imagined shoes that could make you fly, so I put them in. And I remember always wishing I had a tiny house all my own, so I gave the girls a dream house inside of an acorn."

While no longer dependent on being known as her mother's daughter, Modarressi feels no desire to let go of cherished elements from her own childhood. The star-spangled blue pajamas of one of The Dream Pillow's characters, Modarressi recalls the galaxy of glow-in-the-dark stickers that graced the ceiling of her childhood bedroom in Baltimore. "And look!" she cries, pointing to the arch of a hallway door. It is festooned with a garland of gold foil stars.

* * *

Who'd have thought it? Kids' books from Tom Leonard? Tom Leonard, gun-for-hire.

Garbed in plain black T-shirt and jeans, sitting at the plain black work table in his bare bones downtown apartment, Leonard hovers over an arsenal of horsehair brushes. He executes in acrylic.

After graduating from the Philadelphia College of Art with a degree in illustration in 1977 and hooking up with a top-notch New York agent, the single, childless Mount Airy native knocked out sixteen years worth of crisp, professional work for whoever liked his stuff and was willing to pay the price.

Posters and print ads and editorial illustrations for everyone from the Massachussetts State Lottery to the medical journal Hippocrates to NFL Films. Leonard, who refers to himself as "a monitor and connoisseur of the popular culture" and prides himself on daily intake of Oprah! and Geraldo, has even cranked out paintings for Genesis and Gallery, the sort of publications that used to be referred to as "girly magazines" but have in recent years come to be known as "men's magazines."

And then along came his agent with a cache of unpublished poetry by Margaret Wise Brown from an editor at Hyperion Books for Children, a division of Disney. Talk about your odd couples. Brown is one of the most beloved children's authors of all time. Her Goodnight Moon is the soporific of choice for millions of parents trying to lull the little ones to sleep.

"I had never heard of her," admits Leonard. "And I never imagined I'd be illustrating a children's book."

In fact, the first poem he read—a precursor to Brown's bestselling book The Runaway Bunny—struck Leonard as ridiculous. "The poem has these lines like 'Run, bun, run' and I'm thinking that I'm supposed to paint, like, little hamburger rolls with feet."

Initial misunderstandings aside, the resultant collection, Under The Sun And The Moon and Other Poems (1993) was a critically-praised beauty, which lead to another job for Hyperion. Leonard's just released second book, All Eyes On The Pond, is a small masterpiece.

Drawing on his experience with nature illustrations for Science Digest, Leonard took to author Michael J. Rosen's rhyming text about pond creatures' points-of-view like a fish takes to water. In fact, a fish is one of thirteen animals whose visual perspectives are presented in richly detailed two-page spreads that Leonard has vibrantly painted for the book.

In working on All Eyes On The Pond, self-described "media junkie" Leonard fell in love with the multiple images required by the book form, recognizing creative possibilities that had never existed in individual illustration assignments.

"I'm a movie nut," Leonard says, pointing to a prized videocassette of Citizen Kane that rests atop his television. "And I tried to make this book work like one continuous tracking shot on film."

Turning from page to page in All Eyes On The Pond, the reader's eye is lifted from the water's surface, sent soaring into the air with a flock of ducks and plunged to the muddy bottom with frogs and turtles.

"I love to cram my work full of little details," remarks Leonard. "And it turns out that kids really respond to that."

Now, says the hired gun, he wants to take aim and produce a children's book all his own. "It doesn't pay as well," notes Leonard, comparing the work on a book's worth of images to a one-shot commercial illustration. "But it lasts forever."

* * *

Listen to DyAnne DiSalvo Ryan—author-illustrator of the recently published City Garden (William Morrow)—and you hear Brooklyn.

"Such a pick-cha!" she laughs as a visitor leerily peers into the shallow tank where Speedy, the Ryan family box turtle, wallows in the mud and munches on Monkey Chow. "It looks like a pile of poop!"

It was another turtle, a Park Slope turtle, that helped push DiSalvo-Ryan to uproot her family from the New York neighborhoods where she had spent her entire life and move to the bric-a-brac cluttered Camden County Victorian that has been her home for the past six years.

"We were taking a walk," the artist, now 39, recalls, "and my daughter, who was 3 sees this turtle. She points to it and goes 'Look, Mommy, a snake!' Such a city kid!

And though a city kid herself, DiSalvo-Ryan, along with husband Ed, soon decided to give her own children the advantages of the Philadelphia suburbs. "We wanted a place where they could bike to school," she remarks, "Where safety hadn't become such an issue."

Ironically, settling into the suburbs led to DiSalvo-Ryan's distinctly urban artistic breakthrough. Since 1980, the School of Visual Arts graduate had crafted her tender pencil and watercolor images to illustrate over 20 books, including four by the reknowned children's author, Beverly Cleary. But DiSalvo-Ryan had never been widely known for a unique sensibility of her own.

That has all changed. With 1992's Uncle Willy and the Soup Kitchen and now, City Green, DiSalvo-Ryan has begun to write as well as illustrate, creating touching, resonant pictures of the place she left behind.

"The further I get from Brooklyn," DiSalvo-Ryan has discovered, "The clearer I can see it. And my longing for it makes it even better."

City Green is all about making things better. In the book, a young girl named Marcy leads her inner-city block in transforming a trash-strewn vacant lot into a blooming community garden. In the process, she wins the gratitude of the neighborhood's foremost curmudgeon—"Old Man Hammer, hard as nails." The book's final page offers children advice on getting involved in public gardening projects, including a referral to Philadelphia's own American Community Gardening Association.

In Uncle Willy and City Green, DiSalvo-Ryan demonstrates a none-too-easy knack for presenting images of diverse communities and social services without ever getting maudlin or preachy. Kids will surely notice- and benefit from—to the nun and the girl in the wheelchair and the heavy mix of ethnicities and ages among the folks who work toward the transformation of their local eyesore. But DiSalvo-Ryan the author avoids text that would call too much attention to the messages planted by DiSalvo-Ryan the illustrator. "My pictures," she says, "Speak subconsciously."

To keep her own mind full of city images, DiSalvo-Ryan and her family make frequent forays to Philadelphia and trips back to Brooklyn. A box full of recipe cards in her South Jersey kitchen is jotted over with the visual notes she makes on these excursions: Old women carrying bakery boxes by the strings, men playing boccie ball under the elevated train tracks, children stirring at a sidewalk puddle with their mothers' spoons. She smiles as she flips through the cards, Mr. Bluey—the parakeet—chattering overhead.

"I feel like I can influence kids," she says. "I want to interest them in different cultures. Not exotic, foreign cultures, but urban cultures that seem to be passing with the generations."

"I grew up in a place where I had experiences with all kinds of people and I think I have a responsibility to let children know that nobody is really all that different from anybody else."