| The Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books: Gone But Not Forgotten Each month we offer a focus on a particular author or artist. Sometimes we use this space to discuss a rising new talent or an established star, but we also like to celebrate those who now live on only in the rich legacy of their books. See the archive for focus pieces from previous months. Trina Schart Hyman , 1939-2004 |
To think of Trina
Schart Hyman in the past tense is not only heartbreaking but nearly impossible
as I sit surrounded by her art—forty years of enticement into the world of
story through windows made of pen, ink, and paint. The more than 100 books
that she illustrated project an artistic presence that is personal, immediate,
and enduring: Trina, queen of graphic narrative, prolific but never at the
cost of book craft. Here, the grace, action, and humor of her drafting here
stand alone; there, they support nuanced watercolors in a play of line and
light. This kind of drawing requires intense intuitive awareness, as she demonstrates
in her essay "Zen and the Art of Children’s Book Illustration" with a recollection
from art school. The instructor has just described Leonardo da Vinci’s winning
a Vatican commission without submitting a sketch, drawing instead a perfect
circle on the floor at the pope’s feet.
It’s a good story, and we were all impressed by it. Except I guess I wasn’t impressed in the right way, because I opened my big mouth and the words that came out were, "I could do that." My drawing teacher just looked at me. He said, "You think you could do that? I’ll bet you five dollars you can’t." And he handed me a stick of black conté crayon. "Go ahead—I dare you!"
Now, I didn’t have five dollars. I had about forty-two cents and three subway tokens to last me until the end of the week. But I did have plenty of chutzpah. As I mentioned, I was young and ignorant. So I took the conté crayon, and didn’t dare think about the five dollars or about making a fool of myself or anything like that. I just did it! And if it wasn’t exactly, precisely perfect, it was near enough when the instructor checked it out with a compass. He gave me the five bucks, too! Then he asked me, "How did you do that?" (The Zena Sutherland Lectures 1983-1992, pp.188)
Trina goes on to explain,
Lose yourself, become the brush, become the line, think only of the stopping point, that is, the goal, and you will draw a straight line. Or a perfect circle. . . . For instance, when I was drawing all those quadruple-red-cross borders for Saint George and the dragon, that was a whole lot of freehand straight lines, believe me: 256 of them, to be exact. And I couldn’t let myself mess up or let them go wobbly, because I was working on the sort of paper surface that doesn’t take kindly to the usual ink-erasing devices. (p.190)
As this story unfolds, we hear not from the impulsive personality with wicked wit but from the artisan with practised control. Of course, these elements often converged. In one famous response to a negative review in Kirkus, Trina graced her next book with an unobtrusive gravestone inscribed "Virginia Kirkus RIP." Paradoxically irreverent and deeply respectful of her trade, Trina must have drawn a million Cricket Magazine bugs for every award she won. I was lucky to have her illustrate several of my own books, including the first in 1977, and cover art for the latest in 2003. Introducing the Sutherland lecture quoted above, I tried to explain my deep attachment to her as a person and an artist: "she paints as vividly as I dream." That’s where she lives now, in perennial books and dreams, in perpetual present tense
--Betsy Hearne
Illustration©2002 by Trina Schart Hyman from Sense Pass King by
Katrin Tchana, published by Holiday House.