Picture Perfect

Photograph by Wendy McEahern.

So what did you do?
I saw an ad in a paper that said, “Nurses wanted in America—free passage.” And I thought, God, I love biology; I’ve always been good at it. I’ll become a nurse, I’ll go to America, and I’ll go to art school—and that’s exactly what I did. I became one of the youngest head nurses ever.

How did you get back into art?
I saw that Mt. Sinai Hospital in New York City was offering a scholarship, and I applied for it and got it. I started there in January 1959, and I was assigned to the polio unit for three months—and assigned to Nell Blaine, one of the top six women painters in America. She was in an iron lung, and I was taking care of her. By the time I was ready to go back to England, after my year, Nell had invited me to rehabilitate her to an apartment and travel with her—and to paint and study with her.

Wow! What a break.
Nell Blaine changed my life. In the ’60s, her studio in Paris was full of people like Larry Rivers. He slept on her floor many times. And [the poet] John Ashbery met us when we got off the plane in Paris. We spent two years traveling. In Paris, we went to museums and concerts and met artists. In Madrid, we went to the Prado every day, and Nell talked about painting. We saw all of the paintings in London and met the poet Robert Bly. I was in the middle of a very mixed group of all of these famous intellectuals, and I was totally terrified, but I was learning a lot constantly.

Your book Show & Tell explores the art of children’s book illustration through the work and lives of 12 of its best practitioners, including Brian Selznick, Betsy Lewin, Bryan Collier, and Hilary Knight. How did you come up with that idea?
What really made me want to do this book was, one day, while I was working as an assistant art director for Cricket magazine in the ’70s, I read a review of a children’s book. The reviewer wrote two or three paragraphs about the story—and this was a 32-page picture book with beautiful, four-color art and only a little line of text on each page. The reviewer’s only comment about the art was, “Pretty little watercolors accompany the text.”

Ouch.
I read the review out loud to Trina [Schart Hyman] and she said, “Holy…”—well, you can imagine. “Don’t get so excited. It happens all the time. Nobody knows how to talk about children’s book art.” And I said, “Well, I’m going to talk about children’s book art one of these days.” And she said, “That’s a damn good idea.” I never forgot it and I wrote it down in a journal. And years later, after 30 years spent in New York and meeting all kinds of illustrators, I finally said, “OK, now I really know how to write about this.”