possible to explore— historically, culturally and psychologically—inside the covers of a
picture book.
Lane Smith exploits the effects of using new materials in a technically incorrect way. He
alternates oil paint glazes with water-based acrylic sprays, layer upon layer, which
through their reactions form strange surface textures and sometimes collage elements
are added. In his postmodernist interpretation of The True Story of the 3 Little Pigs! By
A.Wolf, as told to Jon Scieska (1989) the crackles, bubbles, and swirls of the paint act as
a visual metaphor for the wolf’s energy. In The Big Pets (1991) a dreamscape, the images
of animals loom, move mysteriously, their edges lost in the layered depths and dark,
muted hues.
Chris Van Allsburg invites his viewers to become highly active creators and narrators
in The Mysteries of Harris Burdick (1985). The contents of the picture book purport to be
a series of picture plates to fourteen stories left at a children’s book publisher by the
mysterious Harris Burdick. Each picture, in intense tonal drawing, heavily shadowed
and mysteriously lit, has a title and one line of text and appears to allude to a genre. His
illustrations are permeated with a dream-like stillness and intensity, whether in
monochrome as in The Garden of Abdul Gasazi (1979) or in muted opaque colour, as in
The Wreck of the Zephyr (1985).
David Weisner draws upon stylistic allusions to animated cartoons, the silent films,
the wide screen, and superhero comic books for Tuesday (1991) his visual burlesque of
a night raid on a small town by squadrons of frogs on aerodynamic lily pads. The text
comprises a few words and the monitoring of the hours in minutes in numerals. The
layout mimics the pace of the action. Vertical picture strips are superimposed on double
spread ‘bleeds’ to give simultaneous presentation of isolated incidents; horizontal strips,
close ups, zooms and long shots echo cinematic techniques. A clean outline, luminous
colour and meticulous detailing gives the images a quality of hallucinatory ordinariness
which contrasts strongly with the events portrayed.
Brian Wildsmith is as much a painter as an illustrator. His early work, like Fishes
(1968), a concept book, rejoices in rich surfaces, layered, scored, scratched, spattered in
bejewelled colours. With vision, he takes an old story and gives it a new twist in his
environmentally aware picture book, Professor Noah’s Spaceship (1980). Wildsmith
integrates different styles painting for a structural purpose. Earthy hues and brush
strokes, fine or bold, suggest an equivalence for the natural world of fur, feather and
forest, whilst saturated chemical-dye hues and geometric patterning on hard-edge forms
are used for mankind’s technological obsessions. Wildsmith has also developed the split-
form picture book, where alternate leaves throughout the book are only half-page width.
He uses this device to make new double spreads as the pages turn, and to forward a
narrative thrust, not in its more traditional mode, to promote bizarre effects. In Give a
Dog a Bone (1985) the split page also contributes a guessing game to the tale of a stray
dog’s search for food.
Lisbeth Zwerger. With the minimum of pictorial means—pen and wash, traces of
pencil under-drawing, and the ability to exploit the relationships between figure and
ground—Zwerger supports, dramatises and amplifies folk- and fairy tales. Settings are
reduced often to only a line, or a change of tone in the background wash. The focus of
the composition is on the character, brought into being by a lively line and lack of
THE MODERN PICTURE BOOK 237