Artist/author Ashley Bryan has donated twelve pieces of original art from his famous picture books to the Arne Nixon Center for the Study of Children’s Literature, a department of the Henry Madden Library. The gift includes bright tempera paintings from The House with No Doors and The Story of the Three Kingdoms and watercolors from The Story of Lightning and Thunder and All Night, All Day. Pen and ink studies and paintings for The Dancing Granny show dancers in motion—their depiction so dynamic that they seem likely to shimmy right off the paper. The gift also includes a crayon pencil sketch from The Cat’s Purr, selected by the artist in honor of the Center’s Helen Monnette Amestoy Collection of Books on Cats.
Ashley Bryan, who writes most of the books he illustrates, is the winner of three Coretta Scott King awards for illustration. In 2009 he won the American Library Association’s Laura Ingalls Wilder Award, a lifetime achievement award for substantial and lasting donations to children’s literature. In 2010 he won a Golden Kite Award from the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators for the best non-fiction book of the year, for his amazing and unusual picture book autobiography Ashley Bryan: Words to My Life’s Song.
Ashley Bryan was born in New York in 1923 to parents who had moved there from Antigua, in the British West Indies. Even when he was denied a chance to study art because of the color of his skin, he kept drawing and painting until he found a school (Cooper Union) that was more interested in the colors on his canvases. He lives now on Cranberry Island, off the coast of Maine, in a house filled with art, sea-glass, puppets, and stained glass windows.
The artist, who was a longtime friend of Arne Nixon’s, sent a letter with his art to the Center’s curator Angelica Carpenter:
“Dear Angelica, It was a joy meeting you at the SCBWI conference. . . . I have always thought of Arne Nixon and am donating some of my work to his Center. It was the news of my friend Aliki’s donation [of original art] that inspired me to act NOW.”
Earlier this year, author/artist Aliki paid a tribute to Ashley Bryan in her new picture book Push Button. The Arne Nixon Center thanks Ashley Bryan for these wonderful pictures and for the tribute to his friends, Aliki and Arne Nixon.
2 comments:
How wonderful for ANC! His art is vivid and alive, what a treasure, congratulations!
@geotech -- It is great! You should come up to the Center and take a look at them in person, next time you're in town.
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