Day 3 in Bas Congo, part 1

This is me with our lovely driver, Papa Sebastien.

We began our morning at the hospital as it emerged slowly from the mist. Women were washing clothes in an old bathtub and as always in the Congo people were coming and going, including this beatific mother and child.

We went then to a nearby village to pick up a man whose title was alternately Governor, Activities Coordinator or Mayor. He knows all the villages in the area and passes information to the people, of upcoming immunization campaigns and outreach programs to bring vaccines to remote villages. He rallies the crowd with songs about infectious diseases and how to avoid them. I'm serious.

It's rare that I feel too tall in a group photo.

The village was bustling even at this early hour and I was eager to dart down lanes and peep inside open doors, but we had a busy day planned. We made instant friends with children, and seconds later had to say goodbye.

This mural promotes fidelity as a means of AIDS prevention.

We drove about 15km into the jungle, along barely passable roads. People were walking in both directions, laboring with basins piled high with bananas on their heads, or pushing bicycles loaded with sacks of cucumbers. When they saw the car they'd leap aside, pressing themselves into the head high grass. In the wet season, these villages are completely cut off.

We stopped at a school...

and passed a little market...

This boy kicked an ingenious soccer ball made of rags.

We went to pay our respects to the village chief, as is the custom. What we didn't know was that he had just lost his youngest daughter to the measles. She had fallen sick with a fever and rash. They carried her on foot to the nearest health center, but she died within three days.

This is the chief's house. A colonial relic.

This is one of his older daughters.

 

Day 2 in Bas Congo

Our party of five set off from Kinshasa on Tuesday morning, headed South for the province of Bas Congo. The Measles Project is sponsored by The Red Cross, in partnership with UNICEF, so traveling with me and my companion Ed, were two UNICEF representatives, Charlotte and Medard, and our fearless driver, Papa Sebastien.

We stayed in a Catholic rectory and ate fish, plantains and fufu, which is manioc pounded into flour, formed into large balls and cooked in some mysterious way. I know some of you will be pleased to know the other name for fufu is Boule Nationale.

 

After lunch we paid visits to the head of the health district, and the director of the hospital, to explain our project of researching the effects of measles on their community and to learn about their immunization practices, so that I can make my drawings.

We saw the local hospital, with a central, communal well; a formerly grand colonial building with overgrown gardens, no running water and limited electricity.

Photography in public places is illegal in DRC so I had to sit on my hands for the drive through the extraordinary, teeming suburbs of Kinshasa, through the rolling hills dotted with palm trees, passing cars weighed down with three times their height in bananas and young men planted precariously but confidently on top, passing children wheeling tin plates with sticks, and women with bowls of leaves like big green headdresses. After the hospital, accompanied by the local mayor, we visited our first village, and just being out of the car and on the ground and able to interact with people was joyous. We visited three families with young children who had had the measles, and the parents were emphatic about encouraging others in the village to vaccinate their children. The average number of children in a Congolese family is 6.3. Every doorway of every house has a child peeping out, or so it seems, and their shyness lasts approximately two seconds.

 

Day 1 in Kinshasa

Today was my first day in Africa and I am struggling to file away all the images from the streets of Kinshasa. If I had been able to make pictures on the spot, this is what I would have chosen to draw:

The blue and yellow dented vans crammed full of passengers, patterned fabrics and brown limbs squished against the windows, men hanging off the sides and the roofs.

The men and women and children carrying all manner of things on their heads: cardboard flats of eggs, basins of baguettes, giant bags of ice, bowls of oranges and limes, trays of bananas, a stack of blue chairs.

The women in their fantastic dresses, tending vegetable gardens in a tiny strip next to the rubble and the barbed wire and the high walls of military compounds.

The young women with malaria-feverish babies in the hospital for mothers and infants, nursing under mosquito nets.

The broken down alleyways of rubble and stagnant puddles and threadbare chickens pecking at piles of garbage and planks propped over creeks of sewerage, and picking their way elegantly through it all, women in ruffles and bustles and bodices and nipped waists in cloth the colors of parrots.

 

Street photography is forbidden in the city, but when we visited the hospital for mothers and babies, some of the mothers were kind enough to let me photograph them. Today we head into the field, to Bas Congo. I'll be out of touch for a few days.

X

 

 

Africa!

One snowy morning in early February, I was sitting on a runway in Cincinnati, Ohio, waiting for the plane to be de-iced before take off, checking emails on my phone. Amongst the mundane messages one leapt out: from Christine McNab of the Measles and Rubella Initiative, the subject line read, "Proposal to travel to the DR Congo/ Illustrate." Through this small device in my hand, I was whisked from the icy Mid-West to Africa, to communities devastated by measles, to children dying in the thousands from this preventable disease. The proposal was very compelling, to visit these communities to talk with families and the immunization workers who travel across the country, often on foot, to distribute the vaccine. And then to draw. To create posters and maybe a book and a video, to communicate the toll of measles and show the ways we can prevent deaths and eliminate this disease.

I could barely wait to get back to New York so that I could say yes. In spite of reading terrible news every day from Central Africa, and in spite of my father's thoughtful links to reports of Congolese plane crashes, there were three insistent reasons to go: 1. I have never been to Africa. 2. I can hear all the news and all the statistics about measles, I can read that 380 children die a day, and yet, as I wave my own healthy children off to school in the morning, I can't possibly imagine the truth of this until I see it. 3. I love my work. I love making pictures that encourage children to turn pages or that cheer up subway commuters, but I've never worked on pictures which might conceivably save lives.

Throughout the past months of conversation and planning, Christine has sent me updates on her work with the Measles Initiative. She has told me about health workers in Nepal who climb mountains to reach remote villages, and immunization campaigns in Myanmar, where the children sit patiently in the shade with circles of bark paste on their faces to cool the skin. Inspired by her beautiful photographs, and because I was itching to get started on this project, I painted this image of a newly vaccinated family.

I have just arrived in Kinshasa and will post pictures and stories from the project on this blog. You can find out more about the Measles Initiative here.

 

 

 

 

Exhibition at the Brooklyn Public Library

From now until August 24th, I have an exhibition at the Central Branch of the Brooklyn Public Library. There are original illustrations and sketches including work from The Crows of Pearblossom, Edwin Speaks Up, Spinster Goose, Wombat Walkabout and the Ivy Bean series. Additional artwork
from Ruby’s Wish, Big Red Lollipop, Pecan Pie Baby, Are You Awake? and many others will also be on display, along with bits and pieces of ephemera collected in the process of making books. There are also some secret messages, some personal revelations and an arrangement of things universally accepted as "exciting". This all takes place in the Youth Wing.
Over in the lobby gallery to the right of the library near the language section, I have original paintings from the project, Drawn From My Father's Adventures, and materials from the making of the MTA subway poster.
There will be an opening on June 7th from 6-8pm and I'll be talking about ink and gruel and Kathmandu (amongst other things) at 7:30pm. Please come!

National Doodle Day

As part of Neurofibromatosis Awareness month, I have drawn a doodle which is being auctioned on eBay, along with doodles by famous types like Meryl Streep and Henry Winkler and either Starsky or Hutch and that guy from the X-Files. The Doodles are available for auction on eBay from May 10th - 20th. and you can bid on mine by clicking on the image above. Please. Right now it's going for five bucks which is just embarrassing. I mean Meryl Streep's is hovering around $300, Rowan Atkinson's is at a respectable $100, The Fonz is inching up at $11.37, but Joan Rivers and I are rock bottom.
From the NF website: "These doodles have a very important aim: the funds they raise will benefit NF, Inc. Network, an organization dedicated to providing support to individuals and families affected by neurofibromatosis (NF).
Neurofibromatosis is a genetic disorder that affects one in every 2,500 births. NF is more common than Cystic Fibrosis, Muscular Dystrophy and Huntington's Disease combined. Funds raised from the Doodle Day auction will go to support education, advocacy, coalitions, and research for treatments and a cure."
To learn more about NF, please visit www.nfnetwork.org.

For more information about National Doodle Day, email doodleday@nfnetwork.org

Anatomical Drawing at the Observatory

This past weekend my daughter and I took a class at Observatory, one of my favorite places in Brooklyn. It wasn't the Anthropomorphic Mouse Taxidermy Class, because I had already taken that one, and it wasn't Organization and Productivity for Creative/Artsy Types, with Oliver Burkeman of the Guardian, because I was too disorganized to put that in my calendar, it was Comparative Anatomy: Animals and the Fundamentals of Drawing with my good friend and excellent teacher, Chris Muller.
I am one those apologetic self-taught artists, constantly surprised when something I draw actually vaguely looks like the thing it's meant to resemble. This class was brilliant. I'm not going to start drawing accurately, (I can hear your collective two or three sighs of either relief or disappointment), but it's useful to know that most people are eight times the height of their head. And that all mammals have seven neck bones. (Or was it eight?)
We also went to draw at the Museum of Natural History, and I sat on a little, floral, (borrowed) folding stool. So...much...fun.

I know there are way too many teeth. But isn't he adorably eager to please?

This may look like a lumpy suit, but is, in fact, a skeleton.

Ivy and Bean Make the Rules!

I have just sent off the last of the illustrations, about seventy in all, for Ivy and Bean book 9. Hooray! It should be out this Fall, for those of you waiting with bated breath. I've said it before, but Annie Barrows is a genius.

SCBWI Bulletin

I had fun doing this cover for the March/April issue of the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators Bulletin. Every one of their cover illustrations involves a kite in some way. It's the Chinese Year of the Dragon, so this was the first kite to spring to mind.

Etsy Video

I'm conscious I'm running two identical blogs at the moment. Sorry about that. I'll veer off again soon!

Poster on the New York Subway

 

I was thrilled recently to be invited to create a poster for the New York MTA Arts for Transit program. Thrilled is something of an understatement. Every year, two different artists create subway related posters which hang in all the new trains in the city. My friend, the wonderful R. Gregory Christie has designed the other one, so I am in excellent company. Thousands of our posters will be in circulation, so if you are traveling under or over Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens or the Bronx any time in 2012, you can't miss them. The first one has been spotted on the M train just this morning, other trains to follow.

Needless to say I love the subway. I glean all my characters from my fellow passengers. The same sorts of things which attracted me to Missed Connections, I find on the train: subtle interactions, eccentricity, beauty, sorrow, secrets, kindness, generosity, excellent hairdos. Every sort of person imaginable and unimaginable. For this poster, I measured my allotted space very carefully and figured out I had enough space to draw 34 people. I had to whittle and whittle my list of favorite characters. The surfer standing with his board in a puddle of water didn't make it. Neither did the gorgeous elderly drag queen, the man with the enormous orange velour armchair or the disheveled mermaids. I'm sorry. I still love you.

I believe the poster will soon be puchase-able online at the MTA store for about $25. Proceeds from the sales go to support the not-for-profit New York Transit Museum’s exhibitions and education programs.

Missed Connections Party in Boston

From the Brookline Booksmith:
"Australian artist and kids' book illustrator Sophie Blackall breathes new and wondrous life into the Missed Connections section of Craigslist.com with whimsical, funny, and achingly beautiful paintings based on the short descriptions of strangers who would be more. This book is the perfect gift for the one you love (whether they know it or not).
Judy Rosenberg, owner of classic Cambridge-cakery Rosie's Bakery and author of The Rosie's Bakery All-Butter, Cream-Filled, Sugar-Packed Baking Book will be joining us as well. There will be cake, beautiful illustrations, and so much fun.
Also, please join us for refreshments at the after-reading party at Finale here in Coolidge Corner sponsored by Meredith Goldstein of the Boston Globe's Love Letters. To attend the afterparty, please RSVP by emailing events@globe.com. Who knows what connections you'll make? Have your own missed connection story you'd be willing to share at the event? Send it to events@brooklinebooksmith.com."

New York Times Best Illustrated

It was a thrill and a huge honor recently, to be one of the judges for the New York Times 10 Best illustrated Books of 2011. My wise and thoughtful companions, Jeanne Lamb and Lucy Calkins, and I spent the day poring over a room full of books, a treat in itself, and wished several times we could choose 20 Best, or 15 best, or even 11 Best.
Congratulations Frank Viva, Chris Raschka, Pamela Dalton, Lane Smith, Arthur Geisert, Jon Klassen, Patrick McDonnell, Isabelle Arsenault, Kadir Nelson and Zhu Cheng-Liang for illustrating ten beautiful, inventive, funny, endearing, clever, moving, memorable books.

From the NY Times:
The New York Times Book Review has announced its list of the 10 Best Illustrated Children’s Books of 2011. Artwork from this year’s winners will appear in the special Children’s Book section of the Book Review’s Nov. 13 issue.
The judges this year were Jeanne Lamb, the coordinator of youth collections at The New York Public Library; Lucy Calkins, the Richard Robinson Professor of Children’s Literature at Teachers College of Columbia University; and Sophie Blackall, an author and artist who has illustrated 24 books for children, including one of last year’s Best Illustrated winners, “Big Red Lollipop,” as well as “The Crows of Pearblossom,” “Spinster Goose: Twisted Rhymes for Naughty Children” and “Are You Awake?” — all published this year. They chose from among hundreds of children’s picture books published in 2011.
The Book Review’s 10 Best Illustrated Children’s Books for 2011, in alphabetical order, are: “Along a Long Road,” written and illustrated by Frank Viva (Little, Brown Books for Young Readers); “A Ball for Daisy,” written and illustrated by Chris Raschka (Schwartz & Wade); “Brother Sun, Sister Moon: Saint Francis of Assisi’s Canticle of the Creatures,” written by Katherine Paterson, illustrated by Pamela Dalton (Chronicle Books); “Grandpa Green,” written and illustrated by Lane Smith (Roaring Brook Press); “Ice,” written and illustrated by Arthur Geisert (Enchanted Lion Books); “I Want My Hat Back,” written and illustrated by Jon Klassen (Candlewick Press); “Me … Jane,” written and illustrated by Patrick McDonnell (Little, Brown Books for Young Readers); “Migrant,” written by Maxine Trottier, illustrated by Isabelle Arsenault (Groundwood Books); “A Nation’s Hope: The Story of Boxing Legend Joe Louis,” written by Matt de la Peña, illustrated by Kadir Nelson (Dial); and “A New Year’s Reunion,” written by Yu Li-Qiong, illustrated by Zhu Cheng-Liang (Candlewick Press). Next year, The New York Times Best Illustrated awards will celebrate its 60th anniversary.

Missed Connections, Love, Lost & Found

New Ivy and Bean website

There is a new Ivy and Bean website over at Chronicle Books with downloads and all sorts of fun stuff. Book 8 is coming soon! And paper dolls too!

Book Launch Party This Thursday

I hope some of you can join me on Thursday evening at Word bookstore in Greenpoint, Brooklyn!
xx

Princeton Children's Book Festival

I will be at the Princeton Children's Book Festival this Saturday from 11am-4pm. Would love to see you if you happen to be in Princeton. xx

What Are You Doing Tuesday Nights This Fall?

I will be teaching (the great) Sergio Ruzzier's class at SVA. Registration is open, no experience necessary. There will be cake.

Atlantis! The movie!

Atlantis!

This week I am up at a Summer camp in New Hampshire, called Beam. It's a camp which invites artists, architects, engineers, craftspeople, teachers, designers, chefs and musicians to collaborate with kids on projects which require invention and adaptation and creativity and resourcefulness and humor. Right now the kids are working on a project with U.K. art/architecture team, Wignall and Moore, on a project called “The Story of Machines That Never Flew,” an aerial installation of fantastic aircraft dreamed up by thinkers and dreamers, ancient and modern. Beam campers and staff are constructing and documenting their building of a collection of distinct mechanical and sculptural inventions to tell the stories of the designers whose imaginations soared but whose creations never left the ground. I've seen parts of a boat-shaped airship and feathered wings and a giant squid and all sorts of other intriguing things taking shape around camp.

So what am I doing here? I am doing a project called Atlantis! I have always been interested in displaced things; a subway train at the bottom of the ocean, a lion in Harrods, a rusting ship in the desert and a city at the bottom of a lake. We are going to make that city. Smallish in size, with fantastical, futuristic, Gaudi inspired buildings. We are going to design the buildings and make molds and pour concrete and embed them with seashells and mosaic from smashed plates (who doesn't like smashing plates?). And then we are going to sink the city in the lake. And film it underwater. It's deeply exciting.
Of course this is way out of my field of experience. I am reading everything I can read about hydrocal cement, and feeling only a slight wave of panic. I'll keep you posted on our progress.