Riverbank Review profile Barbara Cooney The work of this picture-book artist reflects both her adventurous spirit and her love of the New England landscape she called home. By Jackie C Horne 'I t happens all the time. Readers assume writers always tell to materials and pictures, a minimum of their own life stories," observed Barbara Cooney, referring to instruction, and a stubborn nature." Despite being known as the "class people who confuse her with her beloved character, the artist" at her boarding school, Cooney intrepid Alice Rumphius. In Miss Rumphius (1982), a picture book never considered attending art school, that won the American Book Award, author-illustrator Cooney choosing instead a liberal-arts program at Smith College. But upon graduation created the story of a woman who satis- Born in 1917 in Brooklyn, New in 1938, Cooney decided to take a stab fies both her obligations to herself York, Cooney had drawing "in her at a career in book illustration, and (traveling to faraway places, then re- blood." Her great-grandfather was a moved to New York to study etching turning to live by the sea) and a deeper commercial artist who, like Alice and lithography at the Arts Students obligation to give something back to Rumphius's grandfather, made cigar- League. A year later, she put together a the world (planting lupines across store Indians and painted pictures "by portfolio to show to art directors at the Maine countryside). Cooney, who the yard." And Cooney's mother was publishing houses, and was hired for passed away this spring at the age of an avid amateur painter. But the young her first job: illustrating Bertil Malm- eighty-three, may not have berg's Ake and His World (1940). been Miss Rumphius. Yet in A wartime marriage ended Miss Rumphius readers will in divorce, but in 1949 find a great deal of Barbara Cooney would form a more Cooney, not only in the lasting tie, with physician details from the artist's life Charles Talbot Porter. The two that are sprinkled throughout settled in Pepperell, Massa- the book-a favorite arm- chusetts, with Cooney's two chair, familiar New England children from her first mar- landscapes, a portrait of her riage; two additional children local library-but in the soon followed. Despite her story's central thread. During busy life as a mother and wife, a career that has spanned Cooney did not abandon her more than half a century and illustration work; in fact, dur- featured illustrations for more ing the first twenty years of than one hundred books, Cooney, like Cooney received little in the way of her illustration career, her neatly Alice Rumphius, took to heart the formal art training as a child. "The only detailed scratchboard etchings graced words of Alice's grandfather: "You art lesson my mother gave me was how more than fifty books. Working not in must do something to make the world to wash my brushes," Cooney said. "I a separate studio but in a room where more beautiful." became an artist because I had access her family loved to gather, Cooney 24 Summer 2000 illustrated scenes that were deeply color pages, while black and red alone able as she had with her black-and- intertwined with her everyday life. "I are used for more dramatic, danger- white scratchboard work. Her lack of drew what was near at hand Chil- filled moments: Chanticleer's night- formal training in color sometimes dren-and animals," Cooney remem- mare; the reader's first sight of the fox, proved frustrating to her. That she was bered. Well aware that publishers were the touch of red in its eye and tongue not always satisfied with her efforts often more interested in all the more menacing can be surmised by the fact that she the "warm and fuzzy" for its understatement; contemplated switching careers during quotient of a picture the fox running off with the later part of this period, from illus- book than its overall the foolish, gullible tration to her new love, photography. artistic merit, Cooney, rooster. Cooney was It was only after winning the Calde- characteristically wry, awarded the Caldecott cott Medal a second time, for her work noted of her work dur- From Where Have You Been? Medal for her work on on Donald Hall's Ox-Cart Man (1979), ing this period, "It Chanticleer. The prestige that Cooney felt that "my apprentice- sometimes seemed that the number of the award led her editor to rethink ship was over at last. I would not of jobs offered was in direct propor- her earlier assessment about Cooney's change careers after all.' The subject of tion to the quality of the fur I drew." lack of color sense. Finally, Cooney Hall's lyrical tale-the cycle of seasons Her incidental illustrations for novels had earned the right to use all of the in the life of a rural New England fam- and songbooks-"decorations," she colors in her paint box. termed them-as well as her early The next twenty years attempts at the picture-book form would prove a richly exper- (Margaret Wise Brown's Christmas in imental time in Cooney's the Barn [1952], for example) are char- artistic life, a time when acterized by the gentle but never cloy- the sense of place that SO ing sweetness of their subjects and the characterizes her later skilled draftsmanship of their form. work first began to devel- During the first two decades of her op. Like Miss Rumphius, career, Cooney most often illustrated Cooney traveled the world, the texts of other writers. Of her few absorbing the broad land- early published prose efforts, she later scapes and tiny details remarked, "They are all fortunately out that give such an air of of print, and if anyone asks, I say, 'I authenticity to her paint- have no extra copies." She longed to ings. The castles and farm- illustrate in full color, but her editor, houses of a French alpine From Ox-Cart Man wary of the expense of such a format, village are sprinkled through refused, justifying her action by telling Cooney's Mother Goose in French ily in the 1830s-was perfectly suited to the young artist, "You have no color (1964); the Greek cave where Hermes the illustration style Cooney adopted sense." Throughout the 1950s, Cooney was said to have been born finds its for the text: American-primitive folk toiled with awkward, unspontaneous way into Dionysos and the Pirates art. While touches of American folk overlays to add touches of color to her (1970); the horse-chestnut tree with a motifs had been present in much of meticulously detailed scratchboard bench around it that stands in the Cooney's earlier work, Ox-Cart Man work. Her growing skill in the use of courtyard of the Grimms' house in was the first book in which Cooney this method can been seen in Chanti- Steinau, Germany, appears in Little created complete illustrations in the cleer and the Fox (1958), the first picture Brother and Little Sister (1982). Cooney style reminiscent of the art of Edward book for which Cooney provided both experimented with almost every medi- Hicks and other, anonymous early- art and text. In her retelling of "The um, including watercolor, pen-and-ink American folk painters. It was the style Nun's Priest's Tale" from Chaucer's with wash, charcoal, acrylics, pastels- that she would adopt for all of her sub- The Canterbury Tales, Cooney turned even collage, varying her methods to sequent picture-books. the limitations of preseparated color meet the needs of the subject at hand, Intriguingly, Cooney's work on printing to her advantage. The bucolic, and searching, perhaps, for a color Ox-Cart Man was the first that she peaceful scenes are rendered in five- medium in which she felt as comfort- completed in her new house, which 25 Riverbank Review and the rugged beauty of the landscape they inhabit. The Tibbetts family plows and plants, fells trees and builds stone walls, carving a home for themselves on a lonely Maine island. Though the youngest son, Matthias, leaves to sail as a cabin boy, his heart always skips a beat when his island home comes into view; he keeps his promise to himself to return, raising children and a grand- child in the same place where he him- self was born. Rendered in the cool grays and blues of the ocean and sky, the landscape of Island Boy becomes almost a character in the story; a lasting and permanent haven for Matthias the man and his family. In Island Boy, the cycle of seasons underlying Ox-Cart Man connects to the larger cycle of life itself. Matthias is born, travels, returns to the island, From Island Boy grows old, and dies, all within the scope of a thirty-two-page book. That she and her son planned and built on Waves), could have helped but become death is a part of the cycle, an event to the coast of Maine. Returning to the a writer. be accepted, not feared, is an under- place where she had spent summers as Often more personal than her earli- stated keynote in Cooney's story, as is a child, playing outdoors with a passel er work, and simultaneously more her trust in the interconnectedness of of cousins in the woods and fields, demanding and more rewarding for life across generations. Matthias's love proved inspirational for Cooney, not her readers, Cooney's later picture for his daughter Annie and for her son only as an illustrator but also as an books draw on themes typically associ- Matthias, and their love for him in author. The few books that she had ated with the folk-art tradition. Like return, express a continuity that is as both written and illustrated prior to Ox-Cart Man, Island Boy (1988) cele- solid and real as the ground beneath this period were mostly retellings or brates both the hardiness and indepen- their feet. This belief in the special rela- collections of the work of others, dent spirit of rural New Englanders tionship between young and old rather than texts solely from undergirds many of Cooney's her own imagination. Coo- picture books, including Miss ney's rediscovery of Maine Rumphius, where young Alice coincided with the discovery learns from her grandfather of her own storytelling voice, the importance of giving a voice brimming with the something back to the world, same combination of detail, a lesson that she in turn pass- artistry, and deeply felt emo- es on to her great-niece. tion found in her best paint- If Cooney draws upon ings. It is hard to imagine folk-art traditions to give that the author who wrote, depth to her work, she also "The waves scalloped in and moves beyond them in her out, lapping at their feet. portrayal of strong, deter- The sky was the blue of heav- mined female characters. The en, and the sea went on for- predominance of female pro- ever" (in Hattie and the Wild From Hattie and the Wild Waves tagonists in her later books is 26 Summer 2000 striking, especially when compared to her earlier work. From her illustrations of the lives of real-life iconoclasts Emily Dickinson (Michael Bedard's a poem for summer Emily, 1992) and Eleanor Roosevelt (Eleanor, 1996) to her most autobio- graphical book, Hattie and the Wild Waves, Cooney persistently portrays unconventional girls and women struggling against restrictive commu- nity values to discover and express their own individuality. Hattie takes pleasure in things that "nice girls" in turn-of-the-century Brooklyn aren't supposed to enjoy: whistling like John the Coachman; standing in the bow of JD her father's sailboat; walking along the shore, trying to understand the lan- guage of the wild waves. Hattie knows The Summer Day that she doesn't want simply to be a bride like her older sister, or make lots Who made the world? of money like her brother-she wants Who made the swan, and the black bear? to be a painter. And though few Who made the grasshopper? encourage her, in the end Hattie finds This grasshopper, I mean- a way to make her dream come true: the one who has flung herself out of the grass, "The time had come, she realized, for her to paint her heart out." the one who is eating sugar out of my hand, Hattie is but one of the many cre- who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down- ative spirits that inhabit Barbara who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes. Cooney's work. Her sensitive portraits Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face. of painters, writers, and craftspeople in Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away. books such as Emily, Jane Boulton's I don't know exactly what a prayer is. Only Opal (1994), Mary Lyn Ray's I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down Basket Moon (1999), and her own into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass, Miss Rumphius and Hattie, illustrate Cooney's belief in the power of cre- how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields, ative endeavor to add resilience to the which is what I have been doing all day. spirit and give meaning to life. Tell me, what else should I have done? Through her work, Barbara Cooney Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon? inspires young readers to believe that Tell me, what is it you plan to do they, like Hattie and like Cooney her- with your one wild and precious life? self, can and will offer a lasting gift of -Mary Oliver beauty to the world. Jackie C. Horne, a former children's book editor, From House of Light, by Mary Oliver. Copyright © 1990 by Mary Oliver. teaches at the Center for the Study of Children's Reprinted by permission of Beacon Press, Boston. "The Summer Day" is also Literature at Simmons College and reviews included in the anthology Light-Gathering Poems, edited by Liz Rosenberg books for Publishers Weekly. She is working (Henry Holt, 2000), which is reviewed in this issue. on a Ph.D. in eighteenth- and nineteenth-centu- ry British Literature at Brandeis University. 27