In Living Color
Nature's Hues Explored on Paper
Jennifer M. Brown, Curriculum Connections -- School Library Journal, 11/8/2007
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Steve Jenkins may have been born with an aptitude for science (his father was a physics professor and an astronomer), but his unique approach to its study and his cut-paper collage art make his books, and those he co-created with his wife, Robin Page, immediately recognizable. Their What Do You Do with a Tail Like This? (Houghton, 2003), a 2004 Caldecott Honor book, zeroes in on the special characteristics of a variety of creatures and encourages children to guess which animal owns each tail, nose, or other feature.
In many ways, this guessing game gets at the underlying tenets of scientific investigation. A close reading of Jenkins’s books suggests that he places as great a value on the process of investigation as on the actual answers. This respect for scientific inquiry is evident in all of his books, whether he is exploring animals’ various modes of transport as in Move! (2006), the theory of evolution in Life on Earth (2002), or why animals have a certain hue, as in his latest book, Living Color (2007, all Houghton).
Is it true that you keep a laundry list of animals that you find especially interesting? Does this list take the form of a sketchbook, or factual jottings? Or is it more akin to a scientific notebook, with some combination of sketches and facts?
It would be more romantic if I had a sketchbook like Leonardo’s. It’s more a list in my head, and I have a file of images, post-its in books, and notes in notebooks that I fill up and put on a shelf. I also have little pieces of information that I’ve typed into files under rough categories.
I think there’s an advantage to this disorganization. What happens is, when I go back trying to locate [bits of information], I come across other things that work better than what I went to find. The cleaner wrasse was an animal that turned up when I was researching a book about symbiotic relationships [it rids larger fish of parasites]. Because of its [shimmering blue] color I brought it back out for this book.
You have stated that in many cases it was "easier to find out how than why a creature looks a particular way." What kinds of obstacles did you encounter in your research?
For some animals we really don’t know [why they look a certain way]. There’s the idea that as great as natural selection is at explaining so many things about the natural world, there’s also a danger in applying it to everything you see.
If a color has a clear advantage or disadvantage, it will be selected for or against. A lot of colors are neutral….A lot of shells are a function of chemical process, rather than natural selection. I didn’t want readers to feel you could nail down the color of every creature with a definitive answer.
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Living Color (Jenkins) © 2007 by Steve Jenkins |
It’s rare to find someone so interested in scientific details who works in cut-paper collage. What drew you to this approach?
Part of [the appeal of collage] is my limitation as a representational artist. I’m not sure that I would be able to achieve the level of skill that a lot of people…have achieved. Photographs can be very informational, but often they’re less informational in certain ways. Obviously collage has less information about a way an animal looks.
The analogy I make is with an impressionist painting. If you look at a Monet across a room, it’s a water lily pond, but if you look at it up close, it’s gobs of paint on a canvas. We recognize that we’re part of what makes that picture happen. With collage—and I don’t think kids would articulate this—if I use a crinkled piece of paper that looks like leathery skin, like a dinosaur’s, I think there’s a part that the viewer plays in making that connection. I think that’s true of any visual abstraction that people can resolve into an image.
You give a terrific example on your Web site (www.stevejenkinsbooks.com), of how you move from the sketch to the paper collage. Does that involve a lot of trial and error, or is the process smooth?
The trial and error occurs more at the sketch stage. I have a big drawer of papers organized by color, 200 to 300 papers in each one. Usually, knowing a general color range I want, I’ll pull out 8 to10 possibilities. Sometimes I’ll cut out a hole in a pattern and move it around on different papers to see what it might look like.
Robin and I have started making some paste papers–white paper, like a printmaking paper, that’s been colored with acrylic paint and wallpaper paste, glue really, that seals the color into the paper. You can put one color down, let it dry, then scratch through it, rub it with a sponge, it creates interesting patterns.
On your Web site, you also lay out a thoughtful, respectful evaluation of the evolution vs. intelligent design approach to teaching science. Is this something you feel passionately about?
I did a book on evolution a few years ago called Life on Earth—and made a conscious decision not to introduce intelligent design. Those issues are not science issues. There’s a social and cultural controversy—but it’s not a scientific issue.
To me that’s the opening salvo. If it works, and people can discard the theory of evolution to fit a dogmatic view of the world, then all kinds of things are up for grabs—the big bang theory, for instance.
Steve Jenkins discusses his books and artwork in a nifty two-minute movie and slideshows
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