Gabi’s World

Artist Gabi Swiatkowska finds inspiration in the unlikeliest places

By Andrea Glick -- School Library Journal, 11/1/2005

Gabi Swiatkowska is giving a tour of her studio, a dark basement in a narrow wood-frame house in Greenpoint, an old working-class neighborhood in Brooklyn, NY. Her large worktable sits in a corner, facing exposed pipes and gray cinder-block walls. Apart from a painting propped against a wall and a hanging poster, there’s little to suggest an artist at work, let alone the remarkable new talent behind two recent picture books: My Name Is Yoon (2003) by Helen Recorvits, for which Swiatkowska won the 2004 Ezra Jack Keats New Illustrator Award, and Summertime Waltz (2005, both Farrar) by Nina Payne. Swiatkowska brings to Payne’s poem about childhood summers a virtuoso drawing and painting technique, coupled with a gleefully unorthodox use of space and a gift for creating funny, surreal imagery. All in all, it’s a strikingly innovative work.

Standing in her basement on this August day, Swiatkowska (pronounced Svee-at-KOVE-ska) is apologizing profusely, explaining that her house is a mess because it’s undergoing a long-needed renovation, and she and the other tenants are about to move out. A petite woman of 34, Swiatkowska is indeed dressed for packing, and her outfit—loose pajama-style pants and a cotton tank top—and straight brown hair pulled into pigtails make her look about 25. She wants a visitor to know that normally, when everything isn’t crated, the seemingly drab basement has a lot of character and is, for her, a perfect place to work. “This is so bare, I even vacuumed it,” she says of the now exposed table. “Usually when I start working, I don’t touch it for, like, half a year, and there’s a layer of dust, and my tchotchkes are everywhere.” By tchotchkes, Swiatkowska means the stacks of cut-out pictures, art books, and graphic design magazines that she likes to surround herself with as inspiration for her work.

Swiatkowska says she usually becomes so immersed in her projects that her surroundings seem to disappear. With Summertime Waltz, for instance, she distinctly remembers working in the basement, where the only window is well above eye level, and seeing in her mind’s eye bright rays of sunlight filtering through lush leaves.

One look at Summertime Waltz, and it’s easy to believe that Swiatkowska can glimpse possibilities that most of us can never imagine. As several reviewers have noted, the artist uses Payne’s poem as a jumping-off point for her own flights of fancy, taking to a startling extreme the maxim that picture-book illustration should add to the text, not simply reflect it. So while Payne’s first line of prose, “Lovely the lateness in summertime darkening,” is accompanied by a beautifully rendered, fairly traditional image of a child gazing dreamily at the sky, the second spread—“Dinner is over. The grownups are talking”—introduces a quirky cast of characters seated around a dinner table, as well as two tiny penguins standing in a soup tureen. On many pages, Swiatkowska includes intricate drawings of random objects, weird creatures, and strange-yet-familiar tools in which she seems to channel some combination of Rube Goldberg and Hieronymus Bosch.

To achieve the swirling textures and the gorgeous gradations of color seen throughout the book, Swiatkowska generally uses layers of acrylic paint or other water-based pigments (for health reasons, she stopped using oils 10 years ago, when her daughter, Zak, was born), which she then scratches, rubs, and manipulates in all sorts of ways.

Swiatkowska was 17 when she moved to the United States from Poland in 1988 to join her parents, Michal and Lidia, who’d already been living here for several years. They had come for a visit in 1981, when the Polish government declared martial law. Initially unable to return home, Swiatkowska’s parents ultimately decided to settle in Brooklyn’s Greenpoint neighborhood, a longtime Polish enclave. Gabi and her two siblings remained in Pszczyna, a village outside Cracow, where they were cared for by their maternal grandmother and then a series of aunts. Swiatkowska had long shown talent in art and was admitted in 1985 to study painting at the prestigious Lyceum of Art in Bielsko, Poland. The training she received during those high school years was rigorous and traditional, with a heavy emphasis on technique. Soon after she came to the States, her mother pushed her to enroll at Cooper Union, the highly selective art and engineering school in New York City that grants full scholarships to those admitted.

Looking back, Swiatkowska says she chafed at the approach of both art schools, finding the Lyceum a little too technical and Cooper Union a little too free. In hindsight, she’s grateful for both experiences, which gave her a grounding in and love for traditional painting as well as experience with graphics, design, and less rule-bound ways of working. “I’m not exactly an abstract modern painter, but I’m also not just copying masterpieces,” she says.

Part of the beauty and, frankly, the fun of Swiatkowska’s art lies in her exceptional skill as a painter and her references to Old Masters. My Name Is Yoon, for instance, recalls Flemish painters like Vermeer and Rembrandt in its earth tones, muted landscapes, and the dramatic play of light and shadow on its characters’ faces. Swiatkowska says she’s attracted to the “silence” of the characters depicted by painters like Vermeer. “In our [modern] pictures, you almost always have people doing something—there’s motion. When they pose [in a Vermeer], they just look silent, calm, peaceful.”

But Yoon is not some slavish imitation. The story of a young Korean girl who struggles to adjust to America, its title character exudes personality, and its playful surrealism—such as when Yoon imagines herself turning into a cat or a flying cupcake—belongs to Swiatkowska alone.

For many years, Swiatkowska resisted the idea of doing children’s books—though she never stopped working on her art, painting furniture and plates, making tiles, and taking photographs. Friends would see her drawings of funny creatures and suggest it to her, but she says their comments didn’t register. She isn’t sure why. Five years ago, however, she was out in her garden painting a shelf when suddenly she thought: “I should just do children’s books.” She says this now in a mock-cheerful, high-pitched voice, poking fun at herself for what sounds like a Hollywood epiphany. But the incident persuaded her to take a class in picture-book illustration at Parsons School of Design in 2000. After that, she sent out several samples of her work. Two editors responded almost immediately: Christy Ottaviano at Henry Holt and Frances Foster at Farrar.

Ottaviano says she receives 100 such mailings a week but rarely sees artwork she can use. “I thought there was so much expression in her characters,” she says of the additional sketches she asked Swiatkowska to submit. Swiatkowska quickly received her first assignment, Hannah’s Bookmobile Christmas (Holt, 2001). Almost simultaneously, she received a call from Foster, who’d been having trouble finding the right person to illustrate My Name Is Yoon. Soon, Swiatkowska was working on that book, too, as well as on a second assignment from Holt, Arrowhawk (2004), a book by Lola M. Schaefer based on a true story about a red-tailed hawk’s struggle to survive after being injured by a hunter.

Swiatkowska says she didn’t know at the time that assignments were hard to come by for aspiring illustrators. “I thought, 'Yeah, that’s how it happens: you send out your portfolio and you get a job.’ And then I was talking to all these fellow artists who were trying to get these jobs and some of them were trying for, like, seven years.”

For all the ease in getting her first assignments, Swiatkowska was nervous working on those initial books. She spent a lot of time wondering what the rules were, what she could and could not do. She also learned that she felt a bit less comfortable with books like Arrowhawk, whose detailed, more literal narratives leave less room for an artist’s imagination. With Yoon, on the other hand, the title character’s struggle to fit in is expressed obliquely, through Yoon’s daydreams in class and her stubborn refusal to write her name in English. As a result, Swiatkowska felt that she had greater license to express “ideas that cannot be put into words.”

Looking at the progression of her books, you can actually see Swiatkowska becoming freer, more comfortable with following her own vision. Although Hannah and Arrowhawk are well- illustrated, they don’t have the singular, offbeat style of Yoon or Summertime Waltz. “By the time I got the text of Summertime Waltz, it was obviously about no rules for me. I was just thrilled when I read it because I thought, “Anything goes with this poem!” she says, laughing at her audacity.

Foster, the editor of Summertime Waltz, and someone who’s worked with many of the best children’s book illustrators, admits she wasn’t quite prepared for the images Swiatkowska was sending in. “I sort of held my breath each time,” wondering, “Could we get away with it? But I felt I had to let Gabi have all the freedom she needed for this.” It was a “scary moment,” Foster says, when Payne came to see the work. “She looked and was sort of speechless at first,” Foster recalls. “Then she said, 'This is incredible. This is just amazing. I couldn’t have hoped for more.'”

Right now, Swiatkowska is living in her old hometown in Poland, where she moved a couple of days after giving the tour of her studio last August. She left in part to give her daughter, Zak, more freedom to be on her own than she could have in New York. Swiatkowska is thrilled to have found a career that will give her the chance to work from different places. Her plan now is to stay in Poland for six months or so and then, she hopes, to visit India for a few months.

She has already completed two other books. One is a sequel to My Name Is Yoon called Yoon and the Christmas Mitten (Farrar), scheduled to come out for next year’s holidays. And this spring, Holt will publish Waiting for Gregory, written by Kimberly Willis Holt, the children’s and young adult novelist. It might seem strange to pick up and move just as your career is taking off, but Swiatkowska explains that while she values stability, she does like “to be uprooted every now and then” in order to shift her mind-set.

Prodded a little, she talks about a kind of confidence she’s developed that things will somehow always work out. “There’s only so much one can control and then you have to count on life’s support. I like experiencing that: I like feeling life supporting me in some way. When there’s nothing I can do about it, I just have to count on luck or for things to work out. And I always find that it does, sometimes in a very strange way.”