No part of a bookstore can touch the Children's Books aisle for diversity. Picture books come in every conceivable size and shape, from Nutshell Library to Biggest Word Book Ever, from chewable cardboard cubes to intricate die-cuts. These colorful works are destined to be fetish objects or hasty discards, as any parent who's ever tried reading a bedtime book to a bored child will vouch.
If a toddler's attention span isn't enough of a challenge, try working with both words and pictures. Aside from a handful of crossover showoffs, most adult artists confine their professional lives to one discipline. The children's book field is a haven for the ambidextrous. There are children's authors who just write, and illustrators who just draw, but there's also a large corps of hyphenates, many of whom live in the Hudson Valley. Prominent locals include New York Times bestseller Jon Muth (Zen Shorts), James Gurney (Dinotopia), Hudson Talbott (Tales of King Arthur), Giselle Potter (The Year I Didn't Go to School), Mercer Mayer (Just Go to Bed), Iza Trapani (Jingle Bells), and NPR legend Daniel Pinkwater, among others.
These creative multitaskers' approaches are as varied as their output. "When I'm working on a project, I get completely consumed. Hours go by. I don't eat, I don't food-shop," says Dave Horowitz, creator of three irresistible books for young children: A Monkey Among Us; Soon, Baboon, Soon; and The Ugly Pumpkin. "I can spend four hours on one figure and the placement of its shadow on the wall. I get sunken eyes, grow a beard."
Horowitz grins. His eyes aren't sunken, but he has a beard. Children's books are his third career, after drumming for Oregon jam band The Workingman's Trio and spending nine years as a rock-climbing guide. But Horowitz thinks this obsession is different. "Illustration is what I was made to do," he says. "As a kid, I remember people telling me my drawings were very good, so I believed it. It all comes down to encouragement."
He filled college journals with sketches, cartoons, and collage illustrations. Many years later, he started his first book, A Monkey Among Us. This time the words came first. Horowitz writes with a drummer's ear, spinning verbal riffs, rhymes, and rhythms. "Picture books are scripts for performance," he says, "Their primary function is to be read aloud." He finds inspiration in children's classics—Caps for Sale, Frog & Toad, Eric Carle, Maurice Sendak—and his four nieces and nephews.
When Horowitz sold A Monkey Among Us to HarperCollins, he thought he was made. "There are so many misconceptions about a first book. You make a book, you threw a pebble in the ocean. Maybe there are some ripples, but it's an ocean. People who write books do it because they have to."
After Monkey, he moved to Putnam, working with a "terrific" production team: editor, creative director, art director, and book designer. "As much work goes into a children's book as a 300-page novel," he says. "We trade e-mails four pages long about changing one word."
Horowitz lives on Rosendale's Main Street, in a cozy brick house that sports a six-foot green alien on one wall. "That monster was worth a month's rent," he reports. The compact apartment is filled with unusual objects: mobiles of dangling rock hammers and crampons, wild turkey feathers, an anti-Bush bumper sticker on the dishwasher. A 10-year-old lab mix named Blackfoot reclines on the couch.
Though Horowitz types at a crowded computer desk, he creates his unique illustrations on a small table under the window. (It doubles as Horowitz's dining table, which may explain his aversion to cooking while working.) "This table sat in my parents' Long Island dining room when I was growing up. I was sitting in that chair when I heard Elvis had died." Now the ancestral table is covered with layers of construction paper carved into negative shapes that recall the cut-outs of Henri Matisse, and a self-healing cutting mat. Self-healing it may be, but the black mat looks faded and scarred from years of abuse.
Horowitz picks up his principal drawing tool, a slender X-Acto knife. Though he sometimes roughs in shapes with charcoal, working in reverse so the lines won't show on the flip side, his freehand drawings with the knife are startlingly fluid; he'd be a hell of a sushi chef.
Horowitz's next book for Putnam, Beware of Tigers, is already in production; he's working on its successor, Five Little Gefiltes. Creating a character's face, he picks up a stick of soft charcoal. "This is my secret weapon. Other people cut paper, but I don't think anyone else in the business does this." He lays in a shadow, smudging it for an illusion of depth. Two startled eyes and an open mouth later, it's an instantly recognizable Horowitz character, so alive that it's anthropomorphically shocking when he spears the face with the tip of his knife, moving it off the mat.
Horowitz layers his illustrations from dozens of individually cut pieces, attached from behind with small strips of masking tape. Sometimes he leaves in X-Acto scars to accent the handmade—"No computers were used in making this art," he intones in an orotund narrator voice, then looks around frantically. "Oh, god, I lost a gefilte."
He works standing up, moving constantly, singing along with CDs he plays at top volume, sometimes taking a break to play drums. Each book evolves its own soundtrack. (While working on Beware of Tigers, his album of choice was Public Enemy's Revolverlution, a choice that might startle some parents.) "A lot of my rhyme comes from hip hop. What Jimi Hendrix did for guitar, there are rap stars doing with words—phrasing, wordplay, internal rhythms, and sound."
Does he have a soundtrack for Five Little Gefiltes, perhaps the Klezmatics? Horowitz thinks for a moment. "So far, it's a whole lot of Nina Simone."
 Barbara Bash in her studio in Accord |
"People say, you're so lucky, you get to listen to Steve Gorn play while you work. Well, yes. I also get to listen to Steve Gorn curse at the computer." Bash smiles with the fondness of long, happy marriage. She's seated before a rack of enormous calligraphy brushes, their outsized handles and unruly hanks of black horsehair suggesting punk featherdusters.
The giant brushes' output is displayed around the studio, in great, Asian-influenced swirls of calligraphy. There's a Tibetan ceremonial umbrella furled in one corner, and many of Bash's illustrations, including a spread from her newest book, True Nature (Shambhala, 2005).
Like Horowitz, Bash came to art young. "In elementary school I loved to draw and write the name of the thing next to it. Words were always a part of it." She grew up in suburban Chicago, where her father worked as an advertising executive and later as publisher of the town newspaper. Her mother worked for a local arts council.
After college, Bash worked as a professional calligrapher. When family friends Dan and Beth Walker saw her botanical drawings, they hired her to illustrate a children's book called Tiger Lilies and Other Beastly Plants. This led to Tree Tales, Bash's Sierra Club series of natural history books for children. "I was always on the lookout for something in the natural world that piqued my interest. Then I heard about giant saguaro cacti being pollinated in the middle of the night by longnose bats." From the southwestern desert, Bash traveled to India, Africa, and the Pacific Northwest to research books about banyan, baobab, and Douglas fir trees.
Though Bash's books are meticulously planned, she says neither the words nor the pictures come first. "I'm always working in both forms, verbal and visual. It's like two trains on parallel tracks that will pull into the station at the same time. First one pulls ahead, then the other."
She starts out with field observation and sketching. As the book's concept evolves, Bash creates "thumbnails," with a few lines of text and quick pencil sketches arranged in small grids like a filmmaker's storyboard. Then she makes a palm-size "minibook" to get the sequence of pages correct.
These minis take months to perfect. Next, Bash makes a larger dummy, adding touches of colored pencil or watercolor "to get the feel of a palette coming in," and types the text for the first time. Bash's editors may find this long process frustrating, urging her to finish writing and then do the pictures, but Bash maintains, "The text changes what I want to illustrate, and the final art changes what I'm going to say."
At last she creates full-color artwork, working slightly larger than the book's eventual format to render details more sharply. She also returns to hand lettering; each of her books is painstakingly calligraphed.
Travel with sketchbooks primes Bash's pump. She's heading to India for two months with her husband and teenage son, Wiley, "to see what we find. I'm wide open. It's all part of the fishing I'm doing right now to see what the next book will be." A long-term practitioner of Tibetan Buddhism, Bash is accustomed to sitting meditation and contemplative rhythms; her books require readers to slow down to the gentler pace of their handwritten text. "All the books have a deeper message: You can go outside to sit and draw, too."
"A picture is worth a thousand words, especially in a picture book," says Dave Horowitz, noting that A Monkey Among Us contains a mere 120 words, "But it has forty pictures. You figure forty times a thousand." He shrugs, letting his words trail off. The pictures can say the rest.