Leonard Weisgard

Posted by on
Vaudeville Horse by Leonard Weisgard from leonardweisgard.com

And an illustration from The Little Island written by Golden MacDonald (aka Margaret Wise Brown) Caldecott winner from 1947


Right now I’m working on a series of magazine illustrations, and the continuity of scale is important. So it is interesting to see Weisgard’s very odd shifts of scale in THE LITTLE ISLAND. Scale changes bother adults much more than they bother young children--do kids care that the kitten in the book changes size dramatically from page to page? At one point the kitten is a larger-than-life cat, the next minute he looks like a kitten again, and he's inexplicably flying over the little island.

I like Weisgard’s ability to draw both realistically and flatten or abstract the picture at the same time. But this book is wacky, or surreal. Sometimes there is something in Weisgard’s vivid lights and shadows that is slightly menacing. In his Caldecott acceptance speech he says, This is not the time to tell you of the comic books of the past which also caught a directness of action and a luridness of detail.

Here's the beginning of his acceptance speech:

When news of the Caldecott Award for The Little Island first arrived, life couldn't have been brighter or more exciting. But when I was told a speech had to be prepared for it, life became gloomier and gloomier. Speeches terrify me; right here and now I expect to disintegrate into a puddle of fear, wetness and bewilderment.

Update -- July 13, 2013

 I just finished reading The Little Island again, and I now wonder  - did I just see pictures of The Little Island when I wrote this? I don't find it  wacky. A little  hypnotic, maybe. Both ethereal and concrete (with the details of island life).  It's the absence of humans (they arrive by boat, but you never really see them) that make it feel lost in time, or like a creation story. The cat is a stand-in for a child, and the fact that he changes size is an important part of the book.

The island is not truly cut-off from the rest of the world (just because people don't live on it).