Classic illustrations from children's books
Works from Caldecott Medal winners spanning seven decades are at the Brandywine River Museum.
Taken together, the 65 works by 35 artists in the Brandywine River Museum's exhibition "Drawing from a Story: Illustrations by Selected Caldecott Medal Winners" suggest both a celebration and a critique of contemporary American values.
Being celebrated are seven decades of book illustrations that have received the medal for American children's book illustration, the most prestigious award of its kind. The range of subject matter is impressive - from animals mentioned in the Bible (1938, the first medal) to European, Asian, and African folk tales, American history, myths and fables, everyday life, and, of course, fantasy by a roster of artists of varied backgrounds (among them three married couples). Represented are slightly more than half the complete tally of Caldecott Medal winners.
The classics are well represented. Maurice Sendak has three handsome drawings from Where the Wild Things Are (1964), both his breakthrough and his signature book. Also on hand are works by Ezra Jack Keats, illustrator of 85 children's books, including 1963 medalist The Snowy Day; Robert McCloskey, who illustrated eight books and won for two, including 1942's Make Way for Ducklings; and the Philadelphia area's David Wiesner, a rare three-time medalist for Tuesday (1992), The Three Pigs (2002), and Flotsam (2007). And on May 22, the 2010 medalist, Philadelphia's Jerry Pinkney, will sign copies of his prizewinning The Lion and the Mouse.
Have we tried hard enough to get these glorious Caldecott books into our children's hands? To its credit, Brandywine is doing just that for interested readers 12 and under, with its Reading Reward Program. It offers free admission to children whose parents sign a form attesting that the youngsters have read eight Caldecott winners. The book list and form are at www.brandywinemuseum.org.
Clay stretching
Three well-known retired art teachers - Robert Winokur of Temple's Tyler Art School, Paula Winokur of Arcadia University, and Ken Vavrek of the Moore College of Art and Design - now are giving undivided attention to their own artistic endeavors. Exhibiting new clay work at Rosenfeld Gallery, they seem to be reaching further into time and space for images and meanings.
Humor and intelligence wedded to sensitivity to form - often that of a house or barn - mark Robert Winokur's approach to blocky shapes, angular wedges, and boxed spaces, notably his Asparagus Uphold the House in salt-glazed stoneware.
Paula Winokur's fascination with craggy, mountainous geological sites seems to have moved beyond the American Southwest and its vastness to a newer, deeper concern for the melting of the polar ice caps. For these, she favors the luminous flat vacancies of their whiteness in the exacting medium of porcelain.
Ken Vavrek has deep personal feelings about abstraction that he broadly patterns in a direct way, building thick, twisting, clenched shapes that don't lose their absorption in mood to decorative detail. His first-ever large platters are promising in glazed stoneware.
Lay of the land
The 20th anniversary exhibit at Bucks County's Travis Gallery features 10 regional painters the gallery represents, mostly landscapists. Dan Anthonisen tends toward sweeping assurance in the show's largest painting,
Bowman's Tower
. That meticulously studied Delaware River view mostly sidesteps the sinewy underpinnings of nature captured by Ray Hendershot and his son Bradley; the father is unsurpassed as a painter of old stone walls, as one watercolor plainly shows.
Pastoral pleasures beckon in skillful open-air painting by Kenn Backhaus, Peter Fiore, and Greg Bennett, with effective results. Meanwhile, the technically skillful Don Patterson fills one wall with four paintings that range in tempo from a dramatic landscape to wintry quietude and his capable, reserved boat-dock overview, Back Bay, Ocean City, N.J. Anthony Thompson is moving from conventional landscapes to more decorative, high-key, flat images of nature. And while Michael Budden heads for cozy New Hope nightlife scenes, gallery owner Lauren Travis trumps them with a gentler domestic still life.