innovative at the time. Pictorial impact is made through bold images, strong flat-colour
masses, and a line with direct expression.
Helen Oxenbury. Over the past two decades Oxenbury has produced a variety of
illustration with shifts in style and techniques while working within the Caldecott
tradition. Her early work as in Ivor Cutler’s eccentric Meal One (1971) about a robust
relationship between a mother and son, shows a preoccupation with surface texture, as
well as her many other strengths: fluent drawing, organisational skill, inventiveness with
composition, technical mastery of viewpoint and convincing characterisation. More
recently her name has become associated with board books, big and small, and picture
books for the youngest viewers. For these she uses instantly recognisable forms, drawn
and modelled in soft pencil line and colour wash. In her collaboration with the poet
Michael Rosen, for We’re Going on a Bear Hunt (1989), Oxenbury alternates drawings of
sketch-like immediacy with water colour paintings, which vary in scale to match the
drama of events.
Kveta Paconska gives an example of the European aesthetic tradition with The Little
Flower King (1991). The simple fairy tale of a quest for a wife by the eponymous hero is a
textual springboard for artwork which effortlessly and joyfully crosses the age range: the
artist takes the line for a walk with the adventurousness of Klee, and charges the images
with the lyricism of Chagall.
Jan Pienkowski is an artist-designer who both makes and seizes upon technical
innovations in colour processing, in advanced print technology, and in paper
engineering. In The Golden Bird (1970) and The Kingdom Under the Sea (1971) he unites
the black silhouette, a characteristic technique of his, with his own experiments on
marbling paper, which for these books is reproduced facsimile. His silhouette
illustrations of Christmas (1984) and Easter (1989) use a bronze powder technique for
the gold printing which enriches the page. Pienkowski has also designed hugely
entertaining pop-up books such as Haunted House (1979) which even produces
naturally made noises to add to the scary effects.
Tony Ross is a prolific interpreter of folk- and fairy tales and a maker of his own parodic
dead-pan variant of the genre. One of his best, Puss in Boots: The Story of a Sneaky Cat
(1981) achieves a fine balance between tradition and innovation. The shapes of the
pictures, the viewpoints and the scale constantly change to reflect the daring energy and
ingenuity of the events of the tale.
Maurice Sendak, through his originality of vision and his technical skill has a oeuvre
which is unmatched in its thematic range and graphic styles. In his self-styled trilogy he
explores childhood as a state of being, and shows how through fantasy children achieve
catharsis for their feelings. Where The Wild Things Are (1963) was a breakthrough for
form and theme. The spare text, its punctuation, the format, layout, symbolic imagery,
scale of the pen and wash illustrations, wordless pages, colour saturations and tones,
interdependently created a small boy’s rage and its release. In The Night Kitchen (1971),
a more complex work in every way, is a celebration and candid acceptance of the
curiosity, sensuality and sexuality of children, taking shape in a dream, with New York
of the 1930s transformed into a fantasy kitchen. Outside Over There (1981) a study in
sibling rivalry, is Sendak’s tribute to Mozart, a reworking of a fragment of a folk-tale, a
pictorial record of the Northern Romantic tradition, and an example of how far it is
236 TYPES AND GENRES