From PBS: American Masters, 2007, About Maurice Sendak. Click here for article and viewer responses.
Maurice Sendak and I are contemporaries, he three months my senior. We're both illustrators and sons of men who struggled for a living in the Great Depression. But that's where the comparison ends. His is the great talent, mine so much lesser. Click on images to enlarge them.
Above, an illustration from my book, Cape Cod Light, 2000; and below a mooncusser.
These are typical examples of what my book work looked like, and you can see how spare and uninteresting my drawings are when on the same page as this Sendak illustration.
Maurice Sendak, Bumble-Ardy, from NPR article, 2011.
This is what defines a major talent.
Sendak has done more to shape the direction of illustrators in the book business than anyone since N.C. Wyeth. This title, below, caused the sea change.
Maurice Sendak, Where the Wild Things Are, Harper & Row, 1963
Maurice Sendak, Bumble-Ardy, HarperCollins, 2011
Maurice Sendak, Illustration from Bumble-Ardy.
"No one has been more uncompromising, more idiosyncratic, and more in touch with the unhinged and chiaroscuro subconscious of a child" according to writer Dave Eggers in an issue of Vanity Fair. The book is adapted from a Sesame Street cartoon Sendak did in the 1970s.
Read the article by clicking on this link.
I haven't seen the book so I won't comment beyond saying that the artwork is fascinating and I don't care to speculate on what the unhinged and chiaroscuro subconscious of a child might be.
Unidentfied book illustraton by Sendak. I know the word is in severe disuse, but all I can say is "amazing."
Wherever it came from.
I know the following image is an example of a header Sendak did for Google. Another very distinctive approach.
And now for something you surely did not expect:
Don't miss these. Courtesy and © copyright Comedy Central and The Colbert Nation.
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