Rosemary Wells

A picture a day…

Well, a lot of people want to know what the range of time is that it takes to illustrate a book or do a single illustration. And, of course, this all depends on the book and the difficulty of the illustration. I would say I try to do a picture a day on an average picture book. But if I don't do it right, I do it again and again and again, until I get it right.

Sometimes, I'll be lucky and get a picture in a morning and then go on to the next one in the afternoon. I usually don't work beyond three or four in the afternoon, because I tire. I often feel that one hour in the morning is worth three in the afternoon. But I'd say, on average, about a day – depending on the amount of color and the size of the picture.

What is the range of time that it takes to do an entire book? Well, it depends entirely on the book. If you have a 64-page book, like my upcoming Rogers and Hammerstein, which is coming out next year, that will have taken me nine months to do. The Mother Goose, which is longer still, a hundred and twenty-eight pages – each one took over a year. A Max book, or Timothy Goes to School, probably would take me four to five months. Those are shorter books, 32 pages long. So, it all depends, again, on the complexity.

Going back in time

What was it like to go back – almost back in time and do each of these rhymes from Mother Goose? I found great depth in every one. One of the things that I love about my own particular field and how works of literature speak to me is that I can kind of channel them almost, although I don't believe in channeling in the standard New Age view. But I can look at a rhyme and let it play around in my head. Sometimes at five o'clock in the morning before the sun comes up, I'll lie in bed, and I'll just let that rhyme kind of sit between my eyes, and try to see the images that come to mind.

I have a huge library of early twentieth-century illustration, and I love these pictures. And so I let them riffle through my imagination, and I'll say, "What am I going to do to 'Ride a Cockhorse to Danbury Cross'?" Or, I'll find a wonderful picture of a rooster done by some long-forgotten artist whose work I still admire and put that in, and combine it with the work of another artist and make it all the work of one artist, which is me, Rosemary Wells. I have found great delight in early twentieth-century illustration, and I try to bring touches of this into almost everything I do.

It was a wonderful experience to do both of the Mother Geese books, as I put it, and to come up and allow them to trigger off inspiration in me. Almost as if it came from the clouds. I never feel that it comes from me. I feel it comes from outside of me. Most artists and writers do feel this. They feel it comes from the clouds, rather than from inside your own head. And I suppose that's the cumulative effect of thinking about this, doing so many books and studying illustration as hard as I have over a 35-year career.

Today's children have different eyes

When I was a child, one of the great joys and delights of my life was spending two or three hours on a Sunday afternoon with a single book and staring at and absorbing the pictures in that book. I'm not so sure that this generation does very much of that. We have a lot of screen watching in this generation whether it's video games, or TV, or movies. And it's a whole million, billion generation of children who are very accustomed to the passive state of allowing the illustration to come at them, rather than the participatory or interactive state of actually looking at a picture and making it alive through your mind.

So, it is very challenging for today's artist to keep the interest of today's children. No longer can we do small, black-and-white drawings the way, for example, Winnie the Pooh was illustrated. Those drawings had as much movement and color, to me, as today's most expensive printing jobs and four-color efforts by the best artists.

But today's children have different eyes. And so with a long book, you can't expect them to sit still for very long, so you have to keep the pictures moving and interesting and colorful and different from one another. And that's what I try to do. And so in my experience with longer books, I try to use a number of media – different gouaches, different kinds of watercolor, some pen-and-ink, some not, some even pastel – which is a very difficult medium to use. I try to vary it, so that each page is a totally different experience and makes the child go, "Ah!" rather than, "Ugh." So, it is quite a different thing to illustrate a long book.

Standing up to 500 readings

There are various kinds of writing – everything from magazine articles, newspaper reports and nonfiction accounts. But none of them are meant to stand up to 500 readings aloud. The only other form of writing I know that can take that kind of abuse is song lyric writing, which, of course, has a melody to support it.

Children's literature, if it is successful, must appeal to the heart of the child, and that child will grab hold of it and say, "Ma, I want it again."

And the mother will often say, "Oh, not that one again!"

Or, "Daddy, let's read it again."

"Oh, no!" says Daddy.

But you've got to please the parents, too, and you've got to make it accessible so that the parents enjoy it. And what I like to feel I do with my writing is to appeal enough to the sense of humor in the mother and father, or teacher, or older brother, or grandmother who's reading to that child, so that the child will feel the laughter and the enjoyment in the reader's voice and want the book again and again and again. It's a very subliminal and subtle quality, but the most successful children's literature has that. And that's my standard and what I try for each time.

I try to fill my books with tiny, little jokes that will appeal to very careful lookers and adults who have a certain appreciation of a certain kind of humor. If you look at the endpapers for the book Bunny Money, you will find on the back endpapers the money – the bunny money, which is done as the reverse sides of dollar bills. And instead of putting a bunch of dead presidents on them, I put the 18 people that I thought had contributed most greatly to twentieth-century culture. And they include Jonas Salk and Mother Hale and Martina Navratilova and Yo-Yo Ma and any number of people all done as bunnies, all drawn as bunnies. I try to sneak little bunnies in, in disguise as various people. You'll find Galileo and Kipling and – and Benjamin Franklin in the copyright page notice of The Bunny Planet.

So, I love to put tiny, little jokes in which make the educated adult smile and feel that I'm reaching out to them, too – because I am. You cannot have the child hear your story at this age level, unless an adult is reading aloud. And my books are for those parents to enjoy, too.

Tools of the trade

To me, a trip to the art supply store is better than a trip to the candy store. I just love going down to New York Central Art Supply, which has probably the greatest selection of quality papers in the world, and also the most widespread collection of paints and pastels that I could possibly imagine in the back of the store. And it's an old, creaky, wooden store – messy, and not a state-of-the-art chain art store at all.

In the back of the store is a set of tiny, little drawers that look like apothecary drawers, except they're about 45 inches across. And they hold all the different blues, maybe 20 different blues that Sennelier makes in soft pastels. And beneath that is the drawer for all the reds. And beneath that is the draw for the yellows. And beneath that, greens. I love to just open those drawers and look at the colors, because they lie there so peacefully full of all the paintings that they are going to be in some lucky artist's hands.

Getting me where I want to go

I mostly illustrate using animals. I can't say I don't like drawing children or people, because I do. But I draw animals a great deal better than I draw people, and so I choose to use them.

There are many reasons for doing this. One is you can have animals do things in a drawing that you simply can't ask kids to do on the page of a book. My favorite example comes from a little book called Benjamin and Tulip, where Tulip jumps out of a tree and decides to jump on top of Benjamin and roll him in the dust. If you showed that with two children, it would be cruel and violent, and it would not be something I would like to illustrate. But with two raccoons, it's different, and it becomes a joke.

You can have animals do a greater range of activity – or, at least I can – than I can manage with children. Children, no matter how wonderful they are to draw on a page, are always very realistic. And animals don't need to be. They exist, in my mind, in an alternate universe which I've made into a world that is very real to me and, I guess, to the children who like my books.

There are many issues in contemporary society that make children feel, or at least the adults who think they know what children feel, be excluded or included. Animals exclude no one. They come in all colors. They do not have ethnic last names. They cannot possibly be identified with any group, rich, poor, newcomers or old people in the country. They are completely neutral, issue-wise. And so I can have them do anything and be real life as it's lived, whether it's lived that way in an igloo in the depths of Alaska, or on a Native American reservation, or any other part of this country.

I never touch controversial issues, because too many adults read into that what they suppose. And animals let me skirt by this and go directly to the heart of the matter, which matters most of all to every child, which is, "What is the emotional content of this story?" "Why does this character grab me?" "Why do I love this little dog?" or, "this dragon?" "Why do I feel attached to this horse?" And when you can answer those questions, you realize that in each case the writer has used emotional content to grab the heart of a child. This can only be interrupted and kind of ruined by adults reading in a contemporary, political agenda. That has no place in children's literature, and my books don't go there. And animals help me get where I want to go, which is the heart of the child.

It's about love

We have a whole country of millions of children at risk. "Children at risk," to me, does not mean just the standard qualifications of poverty. Naturally, every child has to have a good breakfast and a good night's sleep. But after that, they need more than any other, single thing a good, solid, one-on-one relationship with their parent. And there is no better way to establish this in a household as a routine than to read 20 minutes a day to your child. You will find that if you do this, and you do it as regularly as you brush your teeth, without fail, like exercise, that it will become part of the relationship – the deep, core relationship – that every parent needs from a child, and that every child needs from a parent. It becomes a quiet, little vacation of intense privacy and love every day. It's not about education.

It's not about vocabulary. It's not about learning to read. It's truly about love and the item or commodity that is of the greatest value in our lives, and that is the book; because the book opens doors to the world for the poorest and least-advantaged child. I like to think that some of our children who are at greatest risk are not those without breakfasts, are not those who live with one pair of old shoes. They are the children who are not read to. They are the children who don't have a lap to sit in and a book to open at night. Those children who do, who are read to regularly and faithfully every day, will never be at risk. They can never fail in life, because what they get from the parent and from the book will sustain them.

Teachers open the door

I learn so very much from talking to teachers. Teachers, I believe, have the toughest job in America. They are true professionals and, yet, they're under recognized, underpaid and over supervised often by their superiors, who want them to test young children, which I am very much against.

The teachers who are the best ones in America very often spend three, $4,000 a year of their own salaries to buy materials and books so that their children have the right stuff in the classroom. These are true American saints, and I do nothing but appreciate them.

One of the things I try to talk to them about is what I consider to be a "true north" for my work, which is writing for the lifetime reader – not writing for a child to learn a set vocabulary, not writing so that a child can absorb certain information – but writing so that children will love to read, writing so that children always have a book in their hands, or their backpacks, or sneaking reading under a desk, or in the blanket at night, after they're supposed to be asleep. These are lifetime readers to be. And America needs these children, because, otherwise, we are creating a generation of consumers. The readers will be a generation of producers. And there's nothing we need quite so much in this country as producers – producers of good.

The teachers very often are the one individual in a child's life who stands in the way of a great nothingness, or can open the door to a world of opportunity and intelligence and something the child never knew existed. Very often, that door is opening the cover of a book.

Books before basketballs

I would not encourage so much teachers as school administrators, PTAs, and those who make the decisions above the teachers to make sure we have school libraries before we have sports teams, to make sure we have books before we have basketballs; because children get enough of the other world at home and on the outside, and very little in the way of true intellectual stimulation.

So, it means a lot of funds for our school libraries. It means that school administrations really ought to choose to give every classroom a little mini library, so that the children can take a book home, every night, of their choosing. This is not so hard to do. Very often, in a given town, a business – like a diner, or a Kiwanis Club – will sponsor a Little League team. Those businesses who can't sponsor a Little League team can very often be talked into sponsoring a first-grade bookshelf. You can say: "This Bookshelf Courtesy Diane's Diner," "This Library Shelf Is Courtesy of Dan's Cleaners and Dryers." Whatever it is, those businesses in town who would like to make a little contribution will often do it in this way. It only takes imagination to ask them.

Timothy goes to television

There are two wonderful things about Timothy Goes to School going to television. The first is something that was an effort on PBS's behalf that I really support and really thought was great. Saturday morning television is kind of a pit for violent cartoons. PBS provided something different, an alternative where children could safely watch television that was terrific, without a minute of violent action or anything that was going to make them push somebody or kick-jump somebody in the playground. And so I was a very proud participant in "The Bookworm Bunch" and in this effort to provide alternative, good TV. PBS does a great job.

The second thing that was marvelous about this was the actual doing of the films. When you do television, you can't just use the one story that the book provides. And my book provided one very specific story. You have to expand the characters. You have to expand the horizons. You have to make it consistent from show to show and interesting from show to show.

And so with a group of writers from Nelvana in Canada, we were able to put together 26 episodes that I think make a little bit of sense. It was a marvelous experience in watching the animators actually make a character move on the page, learning that I couldn't use color patterns in shirts or clothing, because that would jump all over the screen, learning how to mesh in my mind the work of different writers and story boarders. It is such a huge and ten-dimensional medium, and it taught me a great deal.

So, all together, I have to say that the experience was very, very positive. Most of all, and most important to me, any television program that promotes children's books – anyone's children's books – and the use of libraries is something worth doing.

The most perfect thing

I think all authors are asked, particularly when they're very prolific – as I am – "What is your favorite book?" And I would have to say it is The Voyage to the Bunny Planet. I think it is the most perfect thing I've ever written or drawn.

I can't tell you where it came from. One day, I was sitting at my drawing board, and it literally landed on my desk from heaven. I've had no greater response to any work I've done than to Voyage to the Bunny Planet. People tell me – complete strangers – in bookstores and libraries and when I'm on the road, "Oh, I need a voyage to the Bunny Planet." And when so many unrelated people say this in exactly the same words, you know you've hit a nerve.

I think if I've hit a nerve in this book, it's because it touches on the three central parts of childhood that a healthy child is made of. One is mother. Another is father. And the third is to be happy by oneself. It's about three little lives of three little bunnies who have rather clunky, dismal days in this account of only six pages long. And when they are waiting on the bench for the school bus to come in the snow, or hiding in the bathroom because they don't want to play with someone else's children, or lying in bed because someone forgot to kiss them goodnight, through the power of their own mind and meditative faculties they ascend to the sky, to the Great Mother of us all, who sweeps them away into the day that should have been.

And I think that's what we all want and we all need, whether we are three years old or ninety years old. I believe that the most exquisite praise I have ever had was on this book, and it came from a friend of mine who is a priest. He said, "Rosemary, I have read The Bunny Planet, and I have never read anything that so well expresses the Jesuitical position on love." I was very happy with that.