Deborah Kogan Ray on Wanda Gág: A Life in Art
Jennifer M. Brown, Curriculum Connections -- School Library Journal, 12/2/2008
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Wanda Gág (Ray) © 2008 |
Hear Deborah Kogan Ray introduce Wanda Gág: The Girl Who Lived to Draw
When it comes to telling a life story, Deborah Kogan Ray says she has always been drawn to people with integrity–from the poet Pablo Neruda to the explorer John Wesley Powell to the painter Katsushika Hokusai. “In a nutshell, that’s what attract[s] me, that sense of integrity, she states. “It’s true for all [those I have written about], no matter what their discipline.” And it’s true of her latest picture-book subject, Wanda Gág: The Girl Who Lived to Draw (Viking, 2008). In Wanda, Ray incorporates phrases from the artist’s diaries and notebooks to help tell her story.
How do you balance what to depict in your artwork and what to convey via text? You create an intriguing juxtaposition, for example, with the spread that begins with Gág’s words, “I simply couldn’t understand why all people didn't draw,” meanwhile the artwork, opposite, shows her father, an artist, decorating a church.
An illustrator does not just take words and explain in pictures what they say. The aim is to expand the meaning and depth of the story through the imagery. Good illustration extends the text by conveying emotional content, or giving an immediate sense of time and place that need not be stated in words. Wanda Gág was so articulate, her own words seemed the right way to [begin] and then narrate from there.
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Wanda Gág (Ray) © 2008 |
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Wanda Gág (Ray) © 2008 |
[The phrase appears often in her memoir] Growing Pains, and in her letters throughout her lifetime. She’d be incredibly out of sorts–to the point of despair–if she didn’t feel that urge to draw. She was in a state of elation when the “drawing fit” was on her. She was a great believer in the emotional aspect [of creativity].
For Hokusai, The Man Who Painted a Mountain (Farrar, 2001), your illustrations emulate his style. Were you tempted to imitate Gág’s style for this book?
No. I want to be true to what she’s doing, but my aim is to show her world. This is what she saw: the town, the drugstore, and the things that were part of her life. I don’t try to imitate her art, except in the gallery [scene, featuring the exhibition of her work]. Those are pieces that I copied. Also when she's drawing the cartoon of “Robby Bobby in Mother Goose Land” those are all from her original drawings.
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Wanda Gág (Ray) © 2008 |
Your book suggests that Wanda Gág was the first to take advantage of a double-page spread. Is that why many consider her book, Millions of Cats, the first modern picture book?
Among children’s literature historians, that’s what they feel sets it apart. Before then, you usually had a page of text and then a set-aside illustration. Because Wanda was coming from being a fine artist, she worked across the page, and she also employed hand-lettering in Millions of Cats (which her brother, Howard, contributed).
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Wanda Gág (Ray) © 2008 |
It was meeting Ernestine Evans, an editor of children’s books, at [her gallery] opening that got Gág to dust off and rewrite Millions of Cats. [The artist] had attempted it, years earlier, when she was trying to earn a living. Gág’s main focus was her printmaking and drawings. Her move to illustration was serendipitous.
Hear Deborah Kogan Ray introduce Wanda Gág: The Girl Who Lived to Draw
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