Few childhood memories compare to the experience of sharing a well-loved picture book. First, there’s the settling in process, as child and reading partner find a comfortable way to sit that allows both to see the book. From this intimate point of departure, the pair takes off on an imaginative journey that’s guided by whatever is on the page but is certainly not limited to it. The book becomes a point of departure, a place from which child and adult leap together into a world that is as much a place they make as it is one they perceive.
In the impressive new exhibit David Wiesner & the Art of Wordless Storytelling at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art (SBMA), one of the preeminent figures in contemporary picture book making gets a show that explores the process and the influences behind his powerfully fertile imagination. As the exhibit’s title indicates, Wiesner operates beyond illustration in a territory that’s primarily defined by what can be told through images alone. Among his three Caldecott Award winners, for example, only his sublimely surreal take on the tale of The Three Pigs (2002) employs the traditional composite art of images complemented by words on the page. The other two Caldecott winners, Tuesday (1992) and Flotsam (2007), deliver their stories without recourse to written language.
A graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design and a prolific artist in multiple media since early childhood, Wiesner blends the wide-eyed enthusiasm of a kid who loves comic books with the educated sensibility of an art historian and the craftsmanship of a technical illustrator or a precisionist painter. His heroes include Charles Sheeler and Salvador Dalí, but he also learned a lot from the artists at DC Comics and from Chuck Jones and Friz Freleng, the animators behind Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, and the Road Runner.
