Illustrator of the Month May 2015
Transcript of Illustrator of the Month May 2015
Illustrator of the MonthLeo Lionni Birthday: May 5, 1910
Most of Leo Lionni’s books are easy picture books.
Find them in the E section, where they
are shelved according to the
author’s last name.
398.2 LIO
E LIO
E LIO
E LIO
Leo Lionni won Caldecott Honor Medals four times, for Alexander and the Wind-Up
Mouse, Federick, Inch by Inch and Swimmy.
Of all the questions I have been asked as an author of children’s books, the
most frequent one, without doubt, has been “How do you get your ideas?”
Most people seem to think that getting an idea is both mysterious and simple. Mysterious, because inspiration must come from a particular state of grace with which only the most gifted souls are blessed. Simple, because ideas are expected to drop into one’s mind
in words and pictures, ready to be transcribed and copied in the form of a book, complete with endpapers and cover. The word get expresses these expectations well. Yet nothing could
be further from the truth. And so, to the question “How do you get your ideas?”
I am tempted to answer, unromantic though it may sound, “Hard work.”
“You may have asked yourselves, when you saw my books: birds, worms, fish, flowers, pebbles…
what about people? Of course my books, like all fables, are about
people…My characters are humans in disguise and their little
problems and situations are human problems, human situations. The
game of identifying, of finding ourselves in the things around us is
as old as history. We understand things only in terms of ourselves and in references to ourselves.”
“Leo would quote a book that he read years ago — “When a painter paints a
tree, he becomes a tree.” What we create, he believed, we fill in with our own thoughts and feelings. That’s why even the inanimate things in his books
have human qualities — the walls, plants and stones might be humorous or stern or anything else that people
can be. But when Leo said he became a tree, he also thought that the tree became him. “Of course, I am Frederick,” he said, referring to one of my favorite
characters, Frederick the Mouse. And he was Swimmy when he became the
eye of the giant fish. All of his characters were part of his own self,
and he thought that was probably true for every children’s book author.“
- Annie Lionni, Leo’s daughter
Quotes from
• http://www.brainpickings.org/2014/02/20/leo-lionni-annie-lionni-creativity/
• http://www.randomhousekids.com/brand/leo-lionni/
• https://georgeshannon.wordpress.com/tag/leo-lionni/