Hand any four-year-old a fist full of crayons, and it is a very, very few who don't get busy with them, drawing, coloring, scribbling. I have not stopped scribbling.
Whether it's music, loss of something, loneliness or friendship - if that emotion is heightened in some way and painted to fit in between the covers of 32 pages, that can become a picture book.
When I present the Charlie Parker book, I do a call and response that works quite well. With the Thelonious Monk book, I play the music and work with kids in a group to create a color wheel and show how the wheel can be mapped on a 12-tone chromatic scale.
Whatever I'm thinking about has got to fit into thirty-two pages, the standard picture book size. So that's something. But the structure and the form for me are almost the most important, because these will express as much as words and images will the content of the work.
Usually, a number of events will be going on around me to start me on a book. What I mean is, I will have read a poem or seen a picture that is lingering in my mind.
To learn to ride a bicycle, as with the other great noble human inventions, is a hugely complex activity. Generally, it requires three things: the learner, the teacher and the bicycle, all in the same place at the same time, most often outside someplace.
Somewhere in this process, I begin reading and showing my book to my audience. When I say my audience, I mean a single imaginary child who is a blend of myself as a young person, the students in my wife's classroom of first- through third-graders, and the students from two classrooms I visit regularly in the Bronx, New York.
Part of why I like watercolor is that mistakes are visible, and you can't really repair much. It has to look easy. When it comes out, it looks easy, but to get to that point takes a lot of doing.
If you labor heavily upon a work of art, then part of what you are saying is, 'This is a heavy work of art.' If you happen to be trying to say something about lightness, then the art should be light as well.
If it's just brushstrokes wrestling around, it isn't much of a picture book, is it? There still has to be a picture. And maybe it needs to be a picture of a dog named Daisy or a little girl riding a bike. So I have to be careful before I get too carried away in the manner itself.
I wasn't always minimal. In the early days, I was laying it on as thickly as I could, trying very hard to get it right. But I found that the harder I tried, the more tired whatever it was I was working on looked. And then I grew tired of it as well.
I want each and every entire brushstroke to be seen. I want the marks made by the tip of the brush to carry as much meaning as the marks made by the dragging tail end, the part that splits open as the paint pulls away, thins and dries.
For the continued survival of our planet and humanity, it is crucial that certain discoveries and skills and inventions made by people over the years be passed on from one human generation to the next, from one person, face-to-face, to another.
For a long time, I was brilliantly achieving drawings that were inert, suffocating and dark. If ever you need illustrations that are inert, suffocating and dark, I know how to do them.
