Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast

Jules: Welcome to our first kicks list of 2008! Our weekly 7 Kicks list is the meeting ground for listing Seven(ish) Exceptionally Fabulous, Beautiful, Interesting, Hilarious, or Otherwise Positive Noteworthy Things from the past week (whether book-related or not) that happened to you. As our readers and fellow kicks-listers know, we feature a different illustrator every Sunday when we gather to list our kicks. But one of my New Ideas in ’08 is to feature — on the first Sunday of every month — a student illustrator or a newly-graduated illustrator wanting to break into children’s books. I am excited about this idea more than I can say, the opportunity to see tomorrow’s children’s book illustrators. Who doesn’t wanna see some new blood? Plus, maybe the next Maurice Sendak or Ruth Krauss will pass our way. I’m just sayin’. You never know. And it’s thanks to Jarrett J. Krosoczka and Anna Alter (thank you! thank you!), to whom I turned for assistance, that I already have some students (or new grads) lined up for the next couple of months. Oh, and as for this week’s featured illustrator — our first one ever in this new feature — I have Little Willow to thank. She pretty much just read my mind and emailed and said, “look at this new illustrator’s site I just stumbled upon?” That Little Willow is puh-sychic.

So, let’s get right to it. Who has graced our post this week? Her name is Ashley Smith, and she just graduated in December from Brigham Young University – Idaho with a BFA in Illustration (“Upon writing this — 22 days, 10 hours and 37 minutes later — I am thrust into the harsh realities of post-graduation-freelance-job-search,” she told us, “but I am certainly not complaining. A vacation from the frenetic vigors of five years of deadlines has been a welcome change; however, my creativity thrives on those deadlines, so I am looking forward to a new life defined by them”).

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Jules: Well, hello there! Eisha and I have been taking a holiday blog break for a while here, and — as I type this — I’m still not even sure she’s done with her holiday travelling. I hope she is and is able to contribute her kicks this week.

You may have noticed last week that we went ahead and kicked it old-skool style — and then some — with Arthur Rackham at our very brief kicks post. Well, we had originally planned to feature some new art work from the talented R. Gregory Christie, but we re-scheduled that for this week. We were worried no one would see it last week, due to the busy holidays, and we hope that folks are around to see it this week, too, since we’re excited to be featuring it.

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Hi to all, and happy holidays! We’re not exactly listing kicks today, since it’s such a busy time of year. But for anyone who might have stopped by (and you’re still welcome to leave your kicks), here’s a 1915 illustration by Arthur Rackham, a bit of Charles Dickens in the spirit of the holidays. Since the Edwardian times featured rather prominently in my post from yesterday, I figured we’d quickly feature the man considered the leading decorative illustrator of the Edwardian period.

My big kick is that my family and I get to visit with Eisha and her husband today. I think I even get to meet her punkin’ head sugar britches nephew, whom she loves so. Happy happy and merry merry whatever-you-celebrate to all our readers and our 7 Kicks community. We’ll be on a holiday break for a while, but we’ll see you soon!

Jules: This image is just for Eisha this week! She loves loves loves Ms. Minerva Louise. And then I reviewed the wonderful Minerva Louise on Christmas Eve (here) at the beginning of this month and thought, hey, maybe Janet Morgan Stoeke would be willing to share some Minerva Louise art work with us. Lucky for us, she was.

Somewhere, from far away in Ithaca, New York, I can hear Eisha squealing right now.

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Jules: Today, we’re happy to feature art work from German blogger and painter Gabriela Böhm, whose blog, Kampfhorn (“wee but powerful”), caught my eye a few weeks ago. And when it did, I saw this illustration we’re featuring here, and I fell in love with it (here’s the post where I initially saw the illustration, entitled “Gratitude is a force”). And then I saw posts like this (oh yes! Rilke) and this, the Goddess of Illustration. I love it. So, I asked her if we could feature some of her paintings here. For the record, Gabriela, who goes by Ella, is not an illustrator of children’s books (though don’t you think she should try her hand at it one day?), and I know that’s who we usually feature here. But her paintings were too good to pass up. Here’s a little bit about Ella, which she shared with us:

“Three facts about me and my art:

(Why is it so hard to talk about what you do?!?)” 😉

You can also read more about her here at her blog’s “About” page (she’s a fighting squirrel, but you’ll have to go read to find out what that means). We thank her for letting us feature “Gratitude is a force,” and she also sent us a new illustration, “Trick or Treat,” which would have been perfect for Halloween (but is just as perfect now, too). Just look at that! Read the rest of this entry �

Jules: We have Jackie at Interactive Reader to thank for our new-found adoration of Julia Denos’ illustrations. Jackie featured Julia and her snowflake in October for the Blogging for a Cure effort for the Robert’s Snow auctions. Here is that feature; if you missed it, go read and enjoy, ’cause it’s a great interview and feature, and — bonus! — Julia is pictured eating one of her picture books and saying, “as a fanatical picture booker, I can’t deny the urge to chew a well designed spread.” This statement immediately endeared her to me, as I understand this urge, you see. And Eisha was all squealy over her artwork, too, proclaiming it as “crazy beautiful,” which it is, and saying that it’s “exactly the sort of art I’d want to create if I had a shred of talent.” You can see at that feature of Jackie’s that a lot of other bloggers immediately fell in love with Julia’s style and immense talent. So I asked Julia (who I think also goes by “Jules” — kickin’) if we could feature her today, and lucky for us, she agreed.

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Jules: Yuyi Morales stopped by 7-Imp today! What a treat! Yes, lots of “!”s, but I’m excited. This is an image from her most recent title, Little Night (reviewed here in August by Yours Truly), a book with such sumptuous, gorgeous, dream-like artwork I can hardly stand it. Truly beautiful stuff.

And it gets better! Yuyi is sharing, not one, but two images from her forthcoming picture book, Just in Case: A Trickster Tale and Alphabet Book, a Neal Porter Book, to be released in Fall 2008. Just under the illustrations is what Yuyi had to tell us about the new book.

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Jules: Many thanks to author/illustrator David Ezra Stein, who sent us a 7-Imp exclusive this weekend, an image from his forthcoming picture book, How to Be Nice. It will be released in Fall ’08 from Putnam.

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Jules: So, I’m going to try to keep things short this week, since the last two illustrator-feature portions of our kicks lists were loooooong. Interesting, but long. And that’s not to slight illustrator Rotraut Susanne Berner, whose illustration (one of many) from Jutta Richter’s The Cat: Or, How I Lost Eternity is featured here. If you’re not familiar with this German illustrator, I wouldn’t be surprised. I wasn’t, but I saw her illustrations in this unusual, little book, which I just finished, published by Milkweed Editions and translated from German by Anna Brailovsky, and I liked them. Not to mention I like to highlight international illustrators when I can, though I’ve done a rather pathetic job of it this year, despite my best intentions.

This is a quite distinctive, very philosophical-in-nature read, technically categorized in intermediate fiction but definitely an adult cross-over title as well. I love how Joyce Carol Oates described it as being not unlike “a Grimm fairy tale recast by Franz Kafka.” It’s about Christine, an eight-year-old girl, whose daily walk to school takes her past a talking alley cat, whose insights always give her something to ponder. I like this review of it I found after reading it (I love to read my reviews when I finish a book) and what they call the book’s striking and “odd starkness.” The book was named one of “The Best Seven Books for Young Readers for November 2006” by German Radio. Read the rest of this entry �

Jules: So, a while ago I read this intermediate-aged book called Billy Hooten: Owlboy (Yearling; released in July of ’07). Have you read it yet? It’s good stuff, the first book in a fantasy-comedy series for children, all about a misfit kid who becomes an unlikely superhero. Billy Hooten is what most people would call a nerd and gets picked on a lot at school. But after he tries to help someone in need in the cemetery bordering his back yard, he stumbles upon bizarro, creature-ridden Monstros City, which lies underneath Billy’s hometown of Bradbury, Massachusetts. When he finds out that, indeed, the residents of Monstros City believe him to be the next Owlboy — their revered superhero and the protagonist in a beloved, old-skool comic book series — he has to determine for himself if he can live up to the name.

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