Transcription of Illustrating Maine #180
Speaker 1: You’re listening to Love Maine Radio with Dr. Lisa Belisle recroded in the studio of Maine Magazine at 75 Market Street, Portland, Maine. Dr. Lisa Belisle is a physician trained in family and preventative medicine, acupuncture and public health. She offers medical care and acupuncture at Brunswick Family Medicine. Read more about her integrative approach to wellness in Maine Magazine. Love Maine Radio is available for download free on iTunes. See the Love Maine Radio Facebook page or www.lovemaineradio.com for details. Now here are a few highlights from this week’s program.
Scott: It’s great to be taken to another place. A place that doesn’t exist. I mean I actually find that incredibly inspiring, but the idea of being able to transport somebody to a world that is believable, but doesn’t exist is pretty heavy stuff.
Melissa: That’s the key is that you can tell a story simply and honestly. When it is done that way, it has a wide appeal. It’s almost like a web. You will land on this one book that makes you want to find out about all sorts of other things.
Speaker 1: Love Maine Radio is made possible with the support of the following generous sponsors. Maine Magazine, Marci Booth of Booth Maine, Apothecary by Design, Mike LePage and Beth Franklin of RE/MAX Heritage, Tom Shepherd of Shepherd Financial, Harding Lee Smith of The Rooms, and Bangor Savings Bank.
Lisa: This is Dr. Lisa Belisle and you are listening to Love Maine Radio, show number one eighty Illustrating Maine airing for the first time on Sunday February 22, 2015. If you have ever read a children’s book, no doubt you know that the illustrations play an important part of the experience. Children who are often preliterate rely on pictures to help them learn words and develop a love of reading. Adults enjoy pictures as a means of rounding out a story. Today, we speak with two award winning illustrators Scott Nash and Melissa Sweet about their work and why Maine is the perfect place for them to practice their craft.
Thank you for joining us. Here in Maine it’s hard to actually understand just exactly how much a wealth of creativity we really have. It’s interesting to me that I can know somebody’s name and then years and years later end up meeting this person and this individual that I’m talking to, Scott Nash is that person. Scott Nash is an illustrator, graphic designer and Chair of the Illustration Department at the Maine College of Art. He’s also the owner of NASHBOX Studios. He’s someone that I have known about I don’t know it’s probably got to be fifteen years or so.
Scott: That’s the way it goes.
Lisa: That’s the way it goes and here you are today and I get to talk to you and I feel really fortunate that you’ve been able to come in today.
Scott: It’s nice to be here.
Lisa: Scott, you are doing something that I think a lot of people have the opportunity to enjoy which is illustration and also the book that you’ve written, The High Skies Adventures of Blue Jay the Pirate.
Scott: I’m really into short titles.
Lisa: Yes, I can see that. Yeah and yet it’s something that I don’t think people know that much about. They don’t necessarily know why one becomes an illustrator. They don’t know how one becomes an illustrator and how one could be an illustrator who works on national shows and with national organizations and live on Peaks Island the way that you do. I’m fascinated about how you got to be where you are.
Scott: Well let’s change that. We’ll let people know exactly how to become an illustrator in Portland. Let me give you a little history. I moved here about gee whiz twenty years ago. I had run a design studio down in Boston. It got a little bit overwhelming for me. It was suddenly found myself managing a staff of eighty people. I really define myself as a creative person and what’s important to me is to make things.
Basically, a long story short is I started trolling around looking for places and had good friends that were here in Maine and found it to be not only a vital creative community but a very welcoming creative community. It’s not in the least bit stodgy. We got to know people that have become in the first couple of years of being years that are still fast friends for us.
We felt very connected to this place. It seemed like a place where I could have the best of both worlds. I could have the quiet time that’s needed to write and create and also find a place where I could really engage and connect with a wealth of creative talent in Portland, up the coast, throughout the entire state. As a matter, I refer to Maine as being a state of hidden treasures. They’re constantly revealing themselves to us. While I find that really intriguing, I also want to find a way to have them be a little bit less hidden and that’s why I’m very appreciative of being here today to talk about illustration.
Lisa: Well the funny thing is in the intro I almost said, “You can’t turn a rock without finding an artist,” but I thought that people might think that’s really negative. I think that what you’re saying is the same thing.
Scott: You do have to turn over rocks to find creative people here because sometimes we’re hiding. We’ve come from another place and we’re thinking that we want that seclusion. Actually one of the questions on the survey here that was asked was what would I do if I could do it all over again, if I could go ten years back. It would be engage more quickly, really connect with people right from the get go. I sequestered myself for a while, but now I’ve flourished and as we talk you’ll see that I’ve really dedicated to engaging with the community both here in Portland and throughout the state of Maine.
Lisa: Well that is an interesting thing that I think we’ve talked with other artists about. There is the need to sequester and the need to have solitude and the need to create, but then also the very real need to connect. In your case, the need to interact and to teach and to mentor and to be a fabric in the creative community.
Scott: I’m sorry. One of the things I do in my teaching is I teach my students discipline and the discipline is actually a good thing. The way to, I’m finding this is more and more true of creative people is that we have to find a way to compartmentalize our lives so I have depending on how you count it three jobs that I do, three passions. In the morning, I get up on a good day make a cup of coffee, shuffle across our deck which we call our commute, my wife and I call our commute to my studio where I write for most of the morning.
Then in the afternoon come into the studio at NASHBOX or I head into Maine College of Art to work with students. Then I trundle back to Peaks Island, take a boat back to Peaks and spend ridiculous amount of hours at night illustrating and it seems to be a terrific time to create what I call ridiculous ideas. I also embrace the idea of creating ridiculous ideas. It’s the main impetus and main catalyst for a lot of stuff especially in kids media.
I think it’s important for creative people and just people in general, our lives are pretty frenetic to find ways to give yourself time throughout the day to do specific tasks. It’s worked for me and I think it works pretty well for my students as well.
Lisa: I was reading The High Skies Adventures of Blue Jay the Pirate last night.
Scott: Thank you.
Lisa: I know you’re working on the next book.
Scott: I am.
Lisa: When will that come out?
Scott: It’s called The Earthly Exploits. That is the question especially on Peaks Island where the kids come up to me and ask me if I’m on the boat why I’m not back home writing the sequel to this, but in fact it’s a longer process. I stepped into something that’s far more epic than I had anticipated. I have to say I’m fairly surprised that I’ve actually written a fantasy, something that could be categorized as a fantasy adventure and now I’m well on the way pretty much through the second version of the second edition of Blue Jay the Pirate and I have a third one in mind as well. There’s going to be I think three in this series.
Lisa: You don’t know when the next one will come out, but you’re working on it.
Scott: I am. Right I was just evading the question. No, no. It has to be finished, I have to really finish this up in the next couple of months so I’m well on the way.
Lisa: Well the thing that I like about this book it is very rich in illustration and that to me is wonderful because it reminds me of the books that I read when I was younger where there was a whole world that was created and created using illustration. I think one of your earlier illustrations is of the boat that they are on. They are lifting I believe it’s the egg and you label the various parts of the boat. This was one of the things that I so enjoyed when I was growing up was that there would be this world and an illustrator, an author illustrator would take the time to actually configure the entire world and label it. It makes it so rich and layered.
Scott: Well you’re speaking to what I see as one of the primary virtues of an illustrated book. I just recently read a book What We See When We Read by Peter Mendelsund who was suggesting that actually novels should not be illustrated that with a writer what we should be doing is engaging in a collaborative process where we are imaging what basically the general ideas that are laid out by the author. That’s fine if you have a frame of reference, if you’re an adult, if you have some sort of life experience, but for kids it’s really useful to have an illustrated world especially if it’s a fantasy realm.
I mean I’m sure that as an adult you could imagine what pirate birds would look, but I’m guessing most people can’t. I think having illustrated books helps to provide a context especially to kids for what this world is about. I used to love going through I mentioned Treasure Island earlier. I used to love those books. Those are the books that I great up with. One of the things that I especially appreciate about them is that the reading, the illustrations were a reward to, not that the reading wasn’t pleasurable, but it’s a reward to the reading or it enhanced the reading in very specific ways.
These are discussions that we have all the time at Maine College of Art. It’s one of the things about working in this program. We’re all really passionate about narrative, about thinking about narrative, thinking about plot, thinking about character design. Not only though in the writing realm but in illustration as well and drawing. As a matter of fact, I teach as an iterative or progressive sort of process where the students will use drawing as an inspiration for writing and writing as an inspiration for drawing.
It really makes the whole world a little bit more real and tangible especially when you’re working again within a fantasy realm or with subjects like I’ve worked on a book like Flat Stanley about a little boy who’s flattened to an eighth of an inch thick. I would contend that that has to be illustrated because the thought, the realistic thought of a kid being flattened to an eighth of an inch thick is not a pleasant one. I actually do want to control that make sure that he looks like a gingerbread boy as opposed to something else.
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Lisa: I love reading books of all different sorts and I get a lot of good information and I’m entertained, but I also I just love a good novel. It’s just something that I could sit down and I will do exactly what I used to do when I was ten and I will just forget everything and just sit there and read this book until I am done for no particular reason. I think there is something very enriching about that.
Scott: Oh, sure. It’s great to be taken to another place, a place that doesn’t exist. I mean I actually find that incredibly inspiring. I love the idea as I told you I was surprised that I created a fantasy novel. In some ways, it shouldn’t have surprised me because I’ve been working on picture books for years, but the idea of being able to transport somebody to a world that is believable but doesn’t exist is pretty heavy stuff.
Lisa: Scott, you’ve talked a lot about being productive and scheduling yourself and the things that you do and the [crosstalk 00:15:47] things that get done and these are very important especially as an artist and someone who is self employed to some great extent. What about the times when things aren’t flowing, when you don’t have the great idea …
Scott: Ah, good question.
Lisa: … when the illustration isn’t readily coming to mind? Is that something that you struggle with or is that something that …
Scott: Yes, of course. I mean there’s a tendency with artists. I think there’s two different impulses. I talked about the divergent thinker. That’s one sort of creativity. Another type of creativity is more myopic. It’s called convergent thinking. It’s move in on one assignment. It’s great to have both of those aptitudes but sometimes when we get too much into the convergent side you get into going deep in something you come up against a block because you have a narrower focus, a narrower range of options. What I suggest to any of my students or any creative person is go to your divergent side, go to the side that is about inspiration, start gathering, find things, walk away, sculpt something, connect with one of the other aspects of your creative life, sculpt, draw, sew something. Of course you can go for a walk or dance or play some music.
I often will if I’m in a rut, I will pick up any one of the number of instruments that are sitting around my space and plunk away on something. Again, it’s gets you out of that myopic approach, the convergent approach and gets you thinking more expansively. I think it’s important to touch that side of your creative soul, make sure that you’re constantly connecting and pulling things in, that inevitably is a great way to break in what we call any form of creative block.
The other one for me that I referred to this earlier and I think it really does work especially for visual artists is to write, draw, write, draw, write, draw. Let one inform the other so if you’re coming up against it, if you’re not able to draw something there is such thing as illustrator’s block as well. You just can’t get this thing, try as you might you can’t get this picture right, then, I suggest that you walk away and you start writing especially if you’re working on something that is a narrative that’s where the two are connected. If it’s one project, switch from one to the other. Otherwise, my advice is get out and do something else.
Sometimes you can have the greatest epiphanies when you get out of say trying to draw something. If you move away and then start to sculpt it, the sculpture will actually inform the drawing and add, this is not meant as a pun, dimension to what you do as an illustrator as well.
Lisa: I also wonder about times of transition. You describe being the head of an eighty person design organization and then making the decision to come to Peaks Island. I think that all of us go through times where something big has happened. Elizabeth Peavey I think was one of our first guests on the show. Her mother died and for a long time and she’s an author, for a long time she couldn’t write anything. She just needed to she described it as letting things [life out 00:19:34]. I’m wondering that if in these big times of transition there’s just some permission you have to give yourself to let things I guess percolate away without your direct intention.
Scott: When I was in grad school which I came in my first year of grad school, I had studied graphic design at [Cranbrook 00:19:59], the second year students were going through developing their thesis, so it was a time of high emotion and neuroses and all sorts of things were exploding throughout the department. One day I walked in and I saw my studio mate and she was basically having a breakdown. I mean she was like, “I am not worthy. I’m terrible. I can’t. The work that I’m doing is awful. This is meaningless stuff.” Sobbing away.
I just didn’t know what to do. I had two minds. One was there’s a flight response on that.
Lisa: Just get out of there.
Scott: I’ve got to get out of there. I also thought, “What the heck am I doing in this grad program because it’s making people crazy?” What I ended up doing was because I couldn’t think of anything else is, “Um, um, here. Here’s a book. Read it.” I gave her believe it or not it was The World According to Garp. It just happened to be on my shelf. She sat there. She took it and she read it for the next whatever eighteen hours, twenty hours obsessively.
I walked in whatever the next day and she was crying again. I said, “What’s the matter? What’s the matter?” She says, “Oh this book was just so good.” What was great though, it was tears of joy but what was great is after that she couldn’t afford to get away or anything but the book took her to another place. She was able to get it together and she ended up creating a beautiful thesis, but it was like, “Here pull yourself away from yourself for a while.” That’s what art does. Get away from yourself sometimes.
In this case, John Irving did the trick. Thank you John Irving. It got me through my graduate experience as well.
Lisa: Scott, you’re the Chair of the Illustration Department at the Maine College of Art and that to me means that MECA has made a commitment to illustration as an art form. Maine has had illustrators for forever and will have illustrators coming up forever. Talk to me about the legacy of illustration.
Scott: Well Maine has the distinction of attracting some incredible artists. I mean we all know this. We know that it attracts a lot of fine artists. There’s the legacy of [Monhegan 00:22:31] Island, the painters there and such. I think probably something that’s lesser known is the incredible wealth both from a legacy standpoint but also continues to this day, there’s an incredible wealth of illustrators and writers specifically in the children’s book realm throughout Maine. I mean we all know part of my attraction to Maine was Robert McCloskey’s books about Maine. It was like, “I want to jump off the docks. I want to do this. I want to be part of that world.”
Robert McCloskey was a big inspiration. Again everybody should know that Robert McCloskey resided in Maine, Make Way for Ducklings all of that stuff. There’s [Dolof Fipcarr 00:23:14], Rockwell Kent who’s known for his painting but is also an exquisite graphic artist and illustrator and then of course N. C. Wyeth and the Wyeth but N. C. Wyeth in particular who’s one of the great masters of illustration. Again, it won’t surprise anyone that we’ve quietly built over the years quite a group, quite a cohort of illustrators here in Maine.
I mean we’ve got just here at Maine College of Art we have people like Steven Constanza, Jamie Hogan, Douglas Smith, Douglas isn’t working at Maine College of Art but these are some of the illustrators, renowned illustrators, Mary Anne Lloyd that are residing here and making not only are they making their artwork here but they’re creating, we’re starting to create a very cohesive community. Part of what I’m trying to do at Maine College of Art is to increase not only build a very strong illustration department, but also increase awareness about illustration and the value of illustration.
I mean I think in some ways Maine could, we could claim that we are one of the centers of illustration. I mean really there are that many illustrators in this area. What we’re trying to doing at Maine College of Art is to create more awareness, advocate for illustration as an art form. We’re doing that in a number of ways. We’ve initiated a series of exhibitions that are at the Portland Public Library. Two years ago, we brought the Edward Gorey exhibition here which is a wild success we attracted about fifty thousand people to … I’m sorry that one was thirty-three thousand people actually.
Then it was followed by [Maurice Sendak 00:25:07] show which actually did attract about fifty thousand people. Then the most recent one was actually one of my personal favorites. It was a comprehensive exhibition of the art of pulp fiction from the ’30s and ’40s. Next year we’re planning to do a show on it’s a hundred and fiftieth anniversary of Alice in Wonderland so we’re going to do a show called Wake Up Alice which is a contemporary illustrators view on Alice in Wonderland.
We not only have created a strong department at Maine College of Art, we’re also creating exhibitions, creating film series, and starting to also creating a resource, a [repping site 00:25:51] so that people companies like Maine Magazine or any number of media companies could connect with very easily with the creative talent in illustration that exists here throughout Maine.
Lisa: Well it sounds like you’re doing exciting things personally, professionally, educationally. It sounds like you really have just a lot of richness to your life as a person.
Scott: I’m very grateful for it. This place actually affords me the opportunity to step into all of these realms.
Lisa: Your wife Nancy Gibson-Nash is a collage artist and illustrator.
Scott: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Lisa: Does it help to be married to a fellow artist?
Scott: It does. I mean I’ve heard it go both ways in that realm. I think what really works for Nancy and I is that we’ve been dear friends for years. We’ve known each other for many, many years but our disciplines are very different. I draw. She gathers things. She makes pictures by gathering things together. I joke that we used to call her a collage artist but since she’s moved to Peaks Island and gathers most of her materials from the shoreline, we call her instead of an assemblage artist, we call her a [flatzemblage 00:27:19] artist.
She gathers a lot of inspiration from the place. The truth is with Nancy’s connection to artwork is that I think that she has a pure sense of creation in that she really is not as interested in the business side of making art. I think if she had her way everything would be given to people. She’s got an incredibly generous spirit. That said, she has her creative practice, her collage work, her [flatzemblage 00:27:51] work, but then we also work together at NASHBOX. She does most of the client work and a lot of the creative work as well there.
We’ve managed to I think we’re a case of definitely opposites complimenting one another. I think we’ve got different perspectives but have a great and deep appreciation for each other’s perspectives on the world. I’m more idea based. She’s more intuitive and exceedingly giving.
Lisa: Scott how can people find out about the work that you’re doing and your thirty children’s books and your novel for children, I guess fantasy …
Scott: My fantasy genre.
Lisa: … fantasy genre. The next two that are coming and all the work that you’re doing?
Scott: I’ve got probably too many websites. There’s the Blue Jay the Pirate website which I would encourage people to go to, not only for the artwork and the story that I’ve created but I actually think it’s worth it to go see the artwork that kids have created around Blue Jay the Pirate. Then there’s our studio which his NASHBOX which can be found at nashbox.com. Then my website is scottnash.com and Nancy’s is nancygibsonnash.com. We got all those URLs very early on.
Then I would also encourage people to check out the Facebook page for Maine College of Art illustration. We call it illustration MECA and of course take a look at the Maine College of Art website as well which his meca.edu. Is that too many?
Lisa: I think that just about covers it. At the very least if people have an interest in knowing more about you they can Google you. You’re Scott Nash.
Scott: Yes.
Lisa: It’s sounds like any number of things will come up for them too if they want to find out more.
Scott: A rabbit hole [crosstalk 00:29:56].
Lisa: Just like Alice and Wonderful.
Scott: Yeah exactly.
Lisa: It’s really been great to talk with you.
Scott: Likewise.
Lisa: I know it’s such a fascinating thing to know that there are so many people with very different sorts of creative spirits that are in the state of Maine and I think that it’s appropriate that we finally have Scott Nash on Love Maine Radio having now picked up this book, it must be three years ago. I knew you’d eventually make it here. We’ve called you here in spirit and you are here.
Scott: Thank you.
Lisa: We’ve been speaking with Scott Nash. He’s an illustrator, graphic designer and Chair of the Illustration Department at Maine College of Art. Thanks so much for coming in.
Scott: Thank you for having me.
Lisa: As a physician and small business owner, I rely on Marci Booth from Booth Maine to help me with my own business and to help me live my own live fully. Here are a few thoughts from Marci.
Marci: When was the last time you took a break from what you were doing, from the work that was piled up on your desk and just looked up? I know that during the course of my days, I often forget to take a moment or two to just breathe, look up at the sky and dream. Terrible that I have to remind myself to breathe but when I do I feel energized because in those moments I’m able to let go of the daily grind and think more about what I want to accomplish, how I want my business to grow. Sometimes those are the aha moments.
If we all took a few moments out each day to stop what we were doing and dream a little about our business futures not only would we feel a great sense of calm, but we may come to realize that these dreams can in fact come true. I’m Marci Booth let’s talk about the changes you need, boothmaine.com.
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Lisa: As radio show listeners know, I am a huge fan of children’s books, not just because I have children but also for my own personal entertainment. Today we have with us, Melissa Sweet who has illustrated more than a hundred children’s books from board books to picture books and nonfiction titles. Her collages and paintings have appeared in the New York Times, Martha Stewart Living, Madison Park Greetings, Smilebox, and eeBoo Toys. She’s written and illustrated three books Balloons over Broadway: The True Story of the Puppeteer of Macy’s Parade, Tupelo Rides the Rails and Carmine: A Little More Red a New York Times best illustrated in 2005.
Melissa lives with her husband in Rockport. Thank you so much for being here today.
Melissa: Thank you for having me.
Lisa: You don’t look that old to me so the fact that you’ve illustrated more than a hundred books and written three of them and working on a fourth, you’re a very productive individual.
Melissa: Well I’ve been doing it for thirty-five years, so if we spread it out, it’s a busy schedule but not un-doable right?
Lisa: Yeah. Well you must like it. I think that’s the thing that strikes me is that nobody can be that productive unless it’s something that you really enjoy doing.
Melissa: I really love it. I always loved the book as an art form. I have such freedom that I can’t imagine doing anything else. I really get to stretch out and create creatively and do exactly the kind of art I want to do and think about the size of the book, the whole nine yards is really mine and the designers after I’m finished, but it’s pretty fun.
Lisa: When we were preparing for this show, we looked in our local paper and lo and behold there’s a picture of you. You recently won a Caldecott Award. That’s a big deal.
Melissa: It’s a really big deal in the children’s book world. It’s definitely the Oscars for the children’s book world. The American Library Association has what they call the Youth Media Awards. Those are announced in January every year and that’s when we find out who … It’s the biggies, the Newbery for the text and the Caldecott for the art. There’s an award and several honor books. This year my book The Right Word was garnered a Caldecott Honor, so there was six books in that category and there’s the award went to a man named Dan Santat for a book called Beekle. It’s a really great book.
Lisa: Yeah, you also won the Robert Sibert Medal for The Right Word.
Melissa: Yeah, so The Right Word is a biography of Peter Mark Roget the man who invented the thesaurus. The Sibert Award is for informational books or nonfiction but it [couldn’t 00:35:10] be a little hazy in that category so it was incredible really. It means that we got the material down basically, that it garnered the Sibert means as far as nonfiction goes we got it.
Lisa: A River of Words which is another book that you illustrated got the Caldecott Honor previously.
Melissa: Yes, that was in 2009. A River of Words is the story of William Carlos Williams the poet and that was, it’s always incredible when the call comes in and you find out that you’ve gotten this award but with each of these books you put a lot into them not just in creating them artistically but there’s a lot of research behind it all, for me and for the author and the publisher. We’re all in on getting it as accurate as possible yet telling a story that’s appealing to kids. To be honest, I knew William Carlos Williams poems, but it never occurred to me that you could do a children’s book for kids.
That’s I think a really exciting part of the industry now is that there’s almost no subject that we can’t if it’s properly crafted become a children’s biography, children’s story, yeah.
Lisa: Of all the books that you have illustrated, you forwarded some books for me to look at which I thought was interesting that two of them were actually about doctors, doctors who were known for not only being doctors but one was William Carlos Williams who was known as Dr. Williams. The other was Roget who we think of as the thesaurus guy, but he was Dr. Roget.
Melissa: Right. I think that’s amazing too. What I love about it is both of those men had to make a living and they chose the profession of medical doctor, really different eras so Roget was fifteen when he went to med school. Med school in the early 1800s was a totally different picture than it is today. Then yes William Carlos Williams was a general practitioner so he would be the doctor that you’ve might have grown up walking to his house where his office was and he delivered something like three thousand babies. I think that’s amazing.
Yet, William Carlos Williams constantly wrote poems. He would be driving to someone’s house for a house call pull off on the side of the road and work on a poem. Roget was really I think the word I want is polymath. He invented the slide rule. He was a doctor. He invented a chess set that could travel. He had his hands in a lot of pies and all this time he’s collecting these words classifying them and then eventually it was fairly late in life when he created his thesaurus that eventually got published.
I love that they had all these creative endeavors yet they also made their mark creatively.
Lisa: With Roget also he was a list maker. It was fun to read about that because I think those of us who like making lists. It’s some way of ordering possibly disorderly world that we live in. This guy did that and he also seemed to like timelines.
Melissa: Yeah, so when Roget was growing up, a young man. He had become a doctor and he was making all these lists. This was around the time of Darwin making all his discoveries. I believe Roget knew Darwin’s father, Erasmus Darwin and also Linnaeus pre-dates him but also a famous classifier. At that time when I think it’s so interesting to think about we look out, we walk outside our door and we look at the world these people, scientists and others were looking at the world and really categorizng it.
Nature for them had all this interconnectedness, these small, small details that we just take for granted. We can open a book and find this information but they were really creating the information for these books. It’s pretty exciting time, the time of enlightenment. I mean I think I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall.
Lisa: It’s fun for me to read the books that you’ve illustrated because the words are one thing but then there’s almost like a side story that goes along with the illustrations that you create. It just creates a much bigger picture of the story itself.
Melissa: Thank you. I do start out with the intention of creating depth. There’s the depth of the pictures and also the words but there’s also sub-stories, so for instance you’re holding a spread right now. You see the London in the background, peppered throughout the background. We don’t have to say they’re in London and what time of year it is that can all happen though the art. There’s a small map at the beginning to show a short journey after Roget’s father dies and they go back to the London area. What’s fun in a children’s book is you can do this layering where not everything has to be spelled. In fact it’s probably more potent if it’s not, if we keep the text fairly svelte and we look at other ways to tell the story. I think that we have that freedom in a book like this is amazing.
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Lisa: You wrote a book about the guy who invented essentially the Macy’s Day Parade and you did it at least in part because you had your own interests in puppetry and marionettes and that media. That’s a little unusual, isn’t it?
Melissa: Yeah, possibly. I have always been interested in three dimensional pieces that look like toys or Rube Goldberg S sculptures, that idea of movement. I had marionettes when I was a kid. My cousins gave them to me in a theater and I remember holding them and I couldn’t wait to take them apart and put them back together again. I had really no interest in the theater of puppetry but I wanted to figure out how they were made and how they moved.
I was actually, the story is that I worked for a toy company called eeBoo and the art director there told me about this man Tony Sarg and she said, “Oh, he’s a great puppeteer and he was a brilliant illustrator. Oh, by the way, he’s the man that invented the Macy’s Parade balloons.”
I just couldn’t believe it. I thought, I have never thought about who invented those parade balloons. The fact that he was a marionette maker as well just seemed so incongruous from this very small detailed movable puppet to these gigantic iconic balloons. When I began to research him there wasn’t a whole lot of information about him. I had to really piece together his story which is exciting. I felt like somebody had put an uncut diamond in my lap that I was really careful about not talking about him too much but still trying to find out information about him.
I just felt it was precious information just that I thought there’s really a book here but I have no idea what it is. In the end, I had really fallen for not only him as an artist but the volume of work he created, the house wares, the work he did for Macy’s, the dishes and all the design. Really he was designer. I loved his illustrations. I loved his puppets. Then the idea of the Macy’s parade I had to find out what was the inception of that? Where did that start? He had his hand in it from the beginning.
The story in book and the story we thought would appeal to kids most is that idea of who was he as a kid, a kid who loved motion and was always rigging up things, making puppets. He had a lot of toys. His grandmother had a toy collection so we start there. Then it just seems so natural that this would be the person that would come up with these iconic balloons. Really he was solving a design problem which I loved. It was incredibly exciting. I still am quite smitten with him.
Yeah and that love of movement and three dimensions I used in my collages the idea of you are walking into his studio. The collages were very three dimensional and they were photographed to give the feeling of what it might be like to be amongst this paraphernalia.
Lisa: His work also was influenced by the blimp.
Melissa: Absolutely. We’re going back to the early 1920s now and the Goodyear Blimp was filled with helium and that gave him the idea for the Macy’s Parade balloons. The first balloons were filled with air and they were paraded down the street propped up with sticks like an Indonesian shadow puppet. It would remind you of that. There were handlers dressed in costumes. These balloons were gigantic really, nothing like anybody had ever seen before, but then they wanted to get the balloons higher. No one had ever made a helium balloon. No one had ever thought of it. He goes back to Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company who made the Goodyear Blimp and they say, “Yeah, we think we can do this.”
What I love about this story is there was no dry run. At a time when no one knew were they going to take off? Were they going to collapse? How much helium did they need? There was none of that. They just were winging it. That’s such a refreshing thought I think in this litigious world of ours that they just went for it. It was like the ultimate performance art really. Yeah, so forevermore there were these parade balloons.
Lisa: You’re not originally from Maine.
Melissa: No, I am a New Jersey native. I came here for a summer job to work at the Jordan Pond House. I cooked there for just a year or two and stayed. Back and forth a little bit from Boston but really from then on my toe was in Maine. I’ve lived here full time a long time. I don’t know you judge it because sometimes it was summers and sometimes it was all the time but yeah for the better part of the last thirty years for sure.
Lisa: What was it about the Jordan Pond House or Acadia or Maine or what brought you up here? What kept bringing you up here until you finally settled in?
Melissa: Well I grew up in suburbia so there was a little bit … There was some woods. There was places to go on our bikes but I remember getting north of Boston and into Maine and it just seemed to go on forever, the woods. It was breathtakingly beautiful. I had spent time at the Jersey Shore but never seen the ocean from that granite craggy coastline. Acadia is just magical and to have the freedom to spend a summer there and have all that downtime to take a hike between lunch and dinner or after dinner you go up a mountain, I think that it’s really wonderful. It’s a really, really wonderful place to land in your early twenties. I never get tired of the landscape.
Lisa: You’re working on a piece about E.B. White?
Melissa: I am. I am. I am incredibly lucky. Talk about landscape. If there was anybody that recreated a sense of place I think it’s E.B. White. His writings of Maine, especially One Man’s Meat. I never get tired of them. They take my breath away with every reading I hear something new and I think that I have absolutely seen Maine through his eyes. I’ve seen it differently. I’ve seen it more acutely, not that I didn’t appreciate it before but it’s almost impossible to read E.B. White and not come away altered in some way. This book that I’m working on is an illustrated biography. It’s heavily illustrated with my artwork, archival photos and a lot of quotes by E.B. White so it’s chronological and it’s in chapters, so thinking it’s about starting age seven or eight up.
It goes from his youth to Cornell University and the genesis of him as a writer and the New Yorker and on. His love of Maine and New York. I think we’ve peppered it with his quotes to give kids first of all an opportunity to read him, read his more adult work which I think is completely accessible for lots of ages. We’ve picked pieces that are appropriate to wherever he was in his life, some are in hindsight, some of right when he was a certain age he wrote them and that’s the quote we’ve used. I think that that gives it, we were talking about depth and the right word I think it’s giving this book the depth we were hoping for. It’s not really a simple biography. It has a lot of layers.
Lisa: It’s really wonderful that I as an adult can sit down and spend ten minutes, fifteen minutes with a children’s book and learn something that I didn’t know anything about before. I mean obviously I’ve heard of the poet, William Carlos Williams and heard of Roget and his thesaurus. I know about the Macy’s Day Parade, but it’s something so simple yet it just expands one’s mind in such an interesting way. The fact that it’s so accessible not just to children but to adults.
Melissa: Yes, thank you. That’s a huge compliment and I think that my editor and publisher would love to hear you say that. We work E.B. White said something I’m not going to get this quote exact but it’s something that children are a demanding audience. They’re the hardest audience. You can’t talk down to children. You have to talk up really. I think that that’s the key is that you can tell stories simply and honestly and it does have and when it is done that way it has a wide appeal. Somebody can now say you were thirteen and you read a River of Words about William Carlos Williams, that’s an invitation to go see more of his poems or read an adult biography.
For a kid a young child maybe six or seven to read that biography, then an opportunity to find other poets, other doctors who did other things. I think they have this wonderful, it’s almost like a web. You land on this one book that makes you want to find out about all sorts of other things, so thank you for saying that.
Lisa: It’s also so important as an adult reading to a child to be able to capture both of them. I mean before a child can read himself to be able to sit down and have a book that you both enjoy and maybe for different reasons but it’s something that we don’t think about. We think okay our audience is kids. Somehow you’ve managed to pull both of those in with these books.
Melissa: Thank you. It’s intuitive. I don’t think about that when I’m creating the art. I’m thinking what do I like? Here’s another E.B. White quote. He wrote for an audience of one. I would like to think that when I really am sure how to approach a book I am doing it for … It is for me knowing that if I nail it everyone will love it, but I’m the ultimate critic. I shoot for making art that pleases me to no end that I’m really engaged with and that I will go to any length for. It’s not a job that way, it’s a lifestyle.
For instance, just an aside with the right word I knew on the cover I needed it to look like a book. I needed it to look a thesaurus, but I didn’t have the ability to work to make a leather binding that might look like an eighteenth century binding. I went to great lengths to find the right book binder to create that for me and other pieces in the book. Now that small detail is everything. You just don’t cut any corners.
I think in the end all of those details come together to make the book sing in a way that might not if you just were under deadline and just going to get out. I’m not really saying that very well what I want to [say that 00:55:34]. I think it just shows up that you take that kind of care in crafting the book.
Lisa: As I was reading about you learning more about you, I was very glad to hear that you enjoy doing spirograph and colorforms and paint by number kits when you were younger. These are all things that I remember doing myself. Actually, I went and bought a spirograph just the other day so I could do it again as something year old older lady here.
Melissa: That’s fantastic.
Lisa: I think that the nice thing about things like that is that they make art accessible to all of us even those of us who maybe don’t feel like we have an artistic bone in our bodies.
Melissa: That’s a great way to say it actually because each of those things that you just talked … They’re toys and we’re playing. It doesn’t matter what the outcome is. The fun of it is learning how to use the tool or play with those shapes and really you’re designing. You’re creating a design in spite of yourself and that’s a fantastic thing so you’re learning two dimension design, pattern, texture, that’s all there is to do to become an artist. I mean you have to play with those concepts. I think those toys are amazing. I hope kids are still playing with them.
Lisa: Well they are at my house.
Melissa: That’s awesome.
Lisa: It’s not just me even though my children are all older now, they all look at my spirograph and they all want to take out their pens when they come over. Well it’s really been a pleasure to speak with you today.
Melissa: Thank you.
Lisa: We’ve been speaking with Melissa Sweet who has illustrated more than a hundred children’s books. Melissa how can people find out about the work that you’re doing?
Melissa: You can find me at melissasweet.net and when you’re on my site you’ll find my books and it’s easy to find me on Amazon as well.
Lisa: Well congratulations on your well deserved Caldecott Award and thank you so much for coming in and talking to us today.
Melissa: Thank you Lisa. It has been great.
Lisa: You have been listening to Love Maine Radio, show number one eighty Illustrating Maine. Our guests have included Scott Nash and Melissa Sweet. For more information on our guests and extended interviews, visit lovemaineradio.com. Read about Scott in Maine Magazine. Love Maine Radio is downloadable for free on iTunes. For a preview of each week’s show sign up for our e-newsletter and like our Love Maine Radio Facebook page. Follow me on Twitter and see my running travel, food, and wellness photos as [bountiful1 00:58:05] on Instagram. We love to hear from you so please let us know what you think of Love Main Radio. We welcome your suggestions for future shows.
Also let our sponsors know that you have heard about them here. We are privileged that they enable us to bring Love Maine Radio to you each week. This is Dr. Lisa Belisle. I hope that you have enjoyed our Illustrating Maine Show. In upcoming weeks, look forward to our conversations with Anne Gable Allaire, Bill Allaire, and Deborah Heffernan and learn how their lives were forever changed by the heart transplantation process. Thank you for allowing me to be a part of your day. May you have a bountiful life.
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