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.
