Word: allsburgs
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...that seems distinctively his own. In The Mysteries of Harris Burdick (1984), a volume of page-size charcoal drawings accompanied by short captions, a suburban house blasts off into the night sky. Beneath it are the words "The house on Maple Street. It was a perfect lift-off." Van Allsburg has a gift for adopting unusual vantage points. After spotting two ants in his kitchen one day, he dreamed up Two Bad Ants (1988), in which the adventures of a pair of the insects -- being buffeted inside a garbage disposal and nearly getting cooked in a toaster -- are seen from...
...Allsburg's vision may be bizarre, but it strikes a broadly responsive chord. Jumanji (1981), his board-game fantasy, won the Caldecott Medal, the industry's most prestigious award for illustrated children's books. The Polar Express, also a Caldecott winner, has appeared on best-seller lists in three Christmas seasons since its release in 1985. In this lovely tale, a boy wakes on Christmas Eve to find a train wreathed in steam below his bedroom window, waiting to take him to the North Pole and a meeting with Santa Claus. In all, the nine books Van Allsburg has published...
...also marks the culmination of a career that never pointed toward children's books in the first place. Van Allsburg, the son of a Grand Rapids dairy owner, set out to be a sculptor after studying at the University of Michigan and the Rhode Island School of Design. But he also sketched continually, and his wife Lisa, then an art teacher, showed some of his drawings to children's book editors. "Everybody else called them odd," he recalls. "I didn't." The editors liked the oddness. In 1979 Van Allsburg made his debut with The Garden of Abdul Gasazi...
...Allsburgs, who have no children, now live in Providence, where he teaches illustration at the Rhode Island School of Design. He says his academic immersion in the subject had nothing to do with it, but the 13 pictures he produced for Swan Lake are stylistically among the most orthodox of his career. They could trace their lineage to the Scribner's children's classics of half a century ago, when the pictures of nonpareils like N.C. Wyeth and Maxfield Parrish graced the tissue-covered plates. Still, Van Allsburg retains his special dream aura in the brooding shadows in which...
Author-illustrator Chris Van Allsburg would rather puzzle kids than teach them, and his 2 million sales suggest he's right. His latest: pictures for a retelling of Swan Lake. -- A Vargas Llosa novel...