Find That Thing You Would Do Anything For. Then Do It!!! The Magic of Storybook Artist Jerry Pinkney
By Rebecca Pepper Sinkler
Don’t just sit there, draw something, paint something, write something, make something!
That’s the charge the renowned, prize-winning book-illustrator gave his young, wide-eyed audience on a visit to his one-man show at the Woodmere Art Museum, a small but hip museum in the Chestnut Hill neighborhood of Philadelphia. These were kids from across the river in NJ, Camden Morgan Village Academy high school artists who came in sizes S, M, L, XL, the way you do when you’re in your mid teens. Many of them sketched as they listened. And from the look of it, they were entirely in tune with Pinkney’s rocky relationship with school.
Gladly liberated for the day’s field trip, they seemed wowed by Pinkney’s original watercolor illustrations that filled the gallery walls and cases: of black cowboys from Julius Lester’s book based on accounts from ex-slave Bob Lemmons, Black Cowboy, Wild Horses and women jazz musicians in Marilyn Nelson’s Sweethearts of Rhythm: the Story of the Greatest All-Girl Swing Band in the World, the only all-female African American swing band born in 1940s Mississippi. They lingered over the displays of “dummy books” — mock-ups of works-in-progress — and they nodded in empathy as the gentle, captivating Pinkney related tales of his own school daze, his hopeless attempts at reading, spelling, and writing those “terrible essays” growing up on Earlham Street in Germantown in the 1940’s.
Pinkney knows what it is to be an aspiring artist, a self-described “curious child” burdened with dyslexia, blessed with a big talent. He talked about how, as a boy, he and his brothers and friends on their dead-end street off Germantown Avenue, formed “drawing clubs” in their basements, scavenged for art supplies — paper, metal, anything — in the junkyard; how he weaseled out of reading aloud in class and dreaded Fridays, test days that left him feeling slow and alone. But he reminisced more happily on how he sketched people waiting for the bus and even department store mannequins (they stood still) at down times on his first job (at 13) hawking newspapers at a newsstand.
More important, he shared how he gradually won self-esteem, partly from having mostly African American male teachers, figures of authority and role models as educated men. His confidence took leaps when his peers glommed onto his artistic brilliance and his teachers started turning to him to illustrate a point on the blackboard.
His frank openness prompted an avalanche of questions, on everything from the nitty-gritty of process to the stuff of emerging dreams.
What’s his favorite tool? A #2 pencil. But he’s fond of markers, pastels, watercolor.
Does he work from photographs or live models? Both.
Does he use color in his sketches? No, color is intuitive for him, pencil is his guide, and he doesn’t erase the pencil lines when he’s finished.
His favorite surface? Whatever he hasn’t tried yet. “I used to go to art supply stores, to the discount table, and pick up anything on sale: for my illustration work, I use Arches Hot Press, and now, Cold Press. But for my new work, in pastels, I tend to go with papers that I don’t know well. You have to set up something that keeps yourself excited. I’m actually intimidated by surfaces. I need some anxiousness, wondering how it’s going to work out. And when it isn’t working out, that’s where you reach down deeper into yourself, get better images, more imaginative images, find personal growth and satisfaction. It’s pretty powerful.” (As he talks, he grips an imaginary pencil in his hand.)
“Sometimes,” he continues, “it’s going to be a battle, finding that thing that grabs you, that you would do anything for. One of things I want you to hold onto, which I didn’t understand till many years later: when you find that thing, when you are going through that process of trying to get there, enjoy the process itself. Once you do that, no matter what happens, you’re not disappointed at the end because something did happen.
“One of the things that always happened in the process, when I sat down to draw, it calmed my world down. It still does today. If I take a pencil or a brush in my hand, everything smooths out.”
It’s a theme he’s touched on before, for SafeKidsStories.com, in his 2016 essay about finding safety in art.
Who helped him? Back when he was selling newspapers, one of his daily customers took note of his sketching and asked him to show him his work. Turned out, the man was a famous comics artist, John Liney, creator of a popular syndicated strip called “Henry.” He invited him to his studio. “There, in that space, I could see strips he was working on, his drawing table, his materials. Later, we became friends, and he was my mentor. But in that studio, the seeds of possibility were planted, that led me to continue, to think of myself as an artist and choose a vocational high school (Murrell Dobbins) with a good commercial art program,” and later, the Philadelphia Museum School of Art (now University of the Arts).
Dobbins was where he met another mentor, Sam Brown, an artist and teacher, and “a person of color, who was colorful. He wore a bow tie, and he had the warmest smile. He had a sign shop and I worked there in the summers.”
And that perennial question for creators, where do you get your ideas?
As a dyslexic person, he chuckles at the paradox that his ideas often spring from text, literature, poetry. “It all starts with a story. These books lean on what you know about history. Then I figure out how do I complement what the text is saying?”
He reads a lyrical passage from Black Cowboys, Wild Horses,” conjuring the wild open places, majestic horses and African American wranglers he captures on paper. Back in the day, the Woodmere’s curator explains, one in three cowboys were black.) Pinkney goes on to explain to kids who have never witnessed “colored only” signage, how he wanted to bring home the humiliation of segregation in one illustration of “separate-but-equal” water fountains in Sweethearts of Rhythm.
Though he’s known for his stunning interpretations of classic children’s stories, his inspiration often lies deep in the history of the people he grew up with on Earlham Street, his parents, his peers, his teachers and mentors who were never like the black characters depicted on the news and in Hollywood movies. These are his models, celebrated with compassion, wit and style on the pages of his books.
Finally, how do you deal with “art block”? asks a girl, maybe afflicted with temporary creative paralysis.
“Get away from it, walk away,” he counseled. “Lighten up. Get some ‘constructive distraction’ — look at work by other artists working in the same style you are. You can’t force an idea,” he said. “Where does the the spark come from? It’s not always on the drawing board. It can be on a walk, or a passage you read in a book. I walk around my studio, stop and do a drawing of something there, maybe a music stand, or a palette, never more than 15–20 minutes. When you know something well, peer to the right, see something new, part of that drawing doesn’t exist until you draw it.
“You need to be working every day. It’s in the practice itself. What you hope to do doesn’t exist until you do it.”
That’s why, no doubt, he urges them on, despite art-block, bad surfaces, and external and interior hurdles: “Find that thing you would do anything for. Then do it!!!”
** Note from Safe Kids Stories. When you do draw, paint, write or compose something you want to show the world, send it to us safekidsstories.com and we will consider it for publication here.***
Rebecca Pepper Sinkler is an editor at Safe Kids Stories. She was book review editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer in the 70’s and the New York Times Book Review in the 80’s and 90’s.
