Books with you because this is as close as I can get to shouting out how much I love this book from the rooftop of my house. (And writing this post is way safer than climbing up on our icy roof too!)
A Splash of Red: The Life and Art of Horace Pippin, which goes on sale today, is a biography that tells about the life of self-trained artist Horace Pippin. The biography chronicles his childhood, his time fighting in WWI , and through his rise as an artist. Horace Pippin’s story is one that teaches us to be brave and giving. It teaches about perseverance since he overcame a battle injury that made it painful to create art, which was something he had always been passionate about. His life story can inspire one to be better person.
The story is told by an author-illustrator team, Jen Bryant (the writer) and Melissa Sweet (the artist). They’ve collaborated before on A River of Words: The Story of William Carlos Williams before. However, their collaboration on A Splash of Red: The Life and Art of Horace Pippin is unique since they worked together on the book, which is very rare in the picture book world.
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Biography was a genre I often read growing up. I remember writing reports about people, but they were mainly dry pieces retelling information I had learned from a variety of sources. Perhaps it was because I didn’t have quality biographies from which I could mentor myself. Books like A Splash of Red promise to inspire young writers by helping them learn what it means to craft a biography that tells an interesting narrative about a person’s life (i.e., determining importance about what events to include, presenting the information in a way that is interesting). I felt as though I was reading a story about a character, rather than a biography, when I read A Splash of Red. The writing is so extraordinary that I couldn’t even determine a favorite page spread (which I normally do when requesting interior images of a book to share when I write about mentor texts) since every page of this book is well-crafted and beautifully illustrated. Therefore, I hope you’ll take the time to read through the entire interview with Bryant and Sweet that follows below. It will give you a better sense of how A Splash of Red: The Life and Art of Horace Pippin was created, some strong craft moves I noticed, and some tips you can share with the writers in your classroom as they research people and write biographies of their own.
Jen: Yes, it was. In 2004, I submitted the manuscript for a picture book biography of poet William Carlos Williams to Eerdmans publishing. I’d already done five biographies with them (two Y/A and three picture books) and I knew if they took it, that art director Gayle Brown would put it in the hands of just the right illustrator. They did take it—and that illustrator was Melissa Sweet, whose work I was familiar with but whom I’d never met. Aside from my sharing information with her about my sources, we did not collaborate at all on the art/illustration process. I continued to tweak the text with the editor, and Melissa worked with Gayle on the design and layout. People are often surprised that a picture book comes together like that, but generally, that is how it’s done. Melissa: Yes, it was very typical, a very separate process. I recall quite a bit of back and forth with everyone at Eerdmans to ensure we were getting our questions answered. My dummy (a mock-up of the book including sketches and text) was notoriously loose, so there was a lot of trust this book would come together.
Stacey: Whose idea was it to collaborate on this book in a way that authors and illustrators rarely do? Tell me more about your process for creating this exquisite text.
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Jen: After Melissa received a Caldecott Honor for A River of Words: The Story of William Carlos Williams (Eerdmans, 2008), we got to know one another better and found that we had a dizzying number of things in common—from our love of birds and animals, to our New Jersey childhoods, to our affinity for bicycles and libraries. I honestly don’t recall if our decision to keep working together came about in one conversation or over the course of many, but at any rate, it just became clear that our lives and interests intersected in too many ways NOT to consider keeping our “team” intact. Once we established that, we discussed other biographical topics that might suit our next project, and Pippin was one of those topics. (I’d previously submitted a manuscript about Pippin’s life to my then-editor Joan Slattery at Knopf, with whom I’d worked on five novels but no picture books. Joan liked the idea very much, but after thinking about it, decided to pass because she felt it wasn’t kid-friendly enough.) I discussed Pippin’s life with Melissa, she did some research on her own, and we decided to go back to Joan and see if she’d consider the manuscript again, after I revised it. She agreed, and signed us up as a team to complete the book. When Joan left Knopf later that year, Allison Wortche took over as editor, steering us through the difficult final months of making everything fit together just right. Melissa: I concur, we were kindred spirits from the start. I think I just assumed we would find another project to do together.
Stacey: From the very beginning of the book, which also corresponds to the first day of Horace’s life, you made him into a character. You built the world of the story around him in this biography that you crafted so well. Would you talk more about how your research about Horace Pippin influenced the way you developed him as a character?
Jen: Whenever possible, I try to immerse myself in the physical and emotional life of my subjects; in this case that was easy because I live a few miles north of West Chester, PA where Pippin was born and where he spent most of his adult life. I knew that town well already, but I explored more closely the neighborhood where he lived, visited the art association where he first exhibited his work, and went to as many museums as I could to view his original paintings and burnt-wood panels (see the back matter of ASOR for more on this.) I sifted through hundreds of files in the archives of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the Chester County Historical Society, spoke with art historians, and read exhibition catalogues and letters written by Robert Carlen, his art dealer, and N.C Wyeth, the illustrator who first helped discover him. Perhaps the most helpful material in rendering his true “Character” was his own words. He wrote little about himself, but the few first-person documents that remain, reveal a man who was physically large, yet gentle; who loved children (though he had no biological children himself), his community and his country; who valued equality and personal freedom; and who felt supremely confident in his own artistic vision. A deeply religious man, he also longed for a world where people of all races and beliefs coexisted peacefully.
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Stacey: You used the phrase “Make a picture for us, Horace!” (or a variation of it) to anchor different parts of the story. Would you call this repetition or something else? Also, what effect did you want this to have for the reader?
Jen: I’ve learned that the real challenge with a “big” life such as Pippin’s is knowing what details to focus on. As was the case when I wrote about the poet-doctor William Carlos Williams, the sum of the more ordinary “parts” of Pippin’s life make for an extraordinary tale. In other words, what seems run-of-the-mill-ordinary to the person themselves–i.e. quitting school at 14, working a number of very different jobs, hearing stories from a grandmother who’d been a slave, fighting (and surviving) the awful trench warfare of WWI, wandering the back alleys of West Chester and scavenging paints, trading your art work for a haircut, etc., becomes dramatic material when strung together in a lyrical way. So—I do an awful lot of rough drafts (many are VERY rough!)—and as I write those, there’s usually an image or two that emerges organically from the material and lends itself to a kind of refrain. I was a poet before I was a picture book author, and that poetry training helps, I think, when I’m drafting a picture book biography. Once I have that refrain, I look for places where it seems to want to occur naturally in the text—and that helps me to shape the different scenes of the story into a coherent whole.
Stacey: The final page of the book includes so much incredible craft (e.g., satisfying ending, power of three, rhythmic feel). Talk about how you were able to weave so many elements into the concluding
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Stacey: You used the phrase “Make a picture for us, Horace!” (or a variation of it) to anchor different parts of the story. Would you call this repetition or something else? Also, what effect did you want this to have for the reader?
Jen: I’ve learned that the real challenge with a “big” life such as Pippin’s is knowing what details to focus on. As was the case when I wrote about the poet-doctor William Carlos Williams, the sum of the more ordinary “parts” of Pippin’s life make for an extraordinary tale. In other words, what seems run-of-the-mill-ordinary to the person themselves–i.e. quitting school at 14, working a number of very different jobs, hearing stories from a grandmother who’d been a slave, fighting (and surviving) the awful trench warfare of WWI, wandering the back alleys of West Chester and scavenging paints, trading your art work for a haircut, etc., becomes dramatic material when strung together in a lyrical way. So—I do an awful lot of rough drafts (many are VERY rough!)—and as I write those, there’s usually an image or two that emerges organically from the material and lends itself to a kind of refrain. I was a poet before I was a picture book author, and that poetry training helps, I think, when I’m drafting a picture book biography. Once I have that refrain, I look for places where it seems to want to occur naturally in the text—and that helps me to shape the different scenes of the story into a coherent whole.
Stacey: The final page of the book includes so much incredible craft (e.g., satisfying ending, power of three, rhythmic feel). Talk about how you were able to weave so many elements into the concluding
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