PUTNEY-Beloved children's book author and illustrator Eileen Christelow told The Commons she saved her illustrations from her two "pig books" - The Great Pig Escape and The Great Pig Search - for a gallery show in Putney.
"I wanted Putney to have their story," she says. "I had thought about doing something with the two pig books because the first one takes place in Putney."
Her dream comes true this week with her show - "Eileen Christelow: Illustrations," which runs from Sunday, Feb. 23 through Sunday, May 11 at NXT Gallery at Next Stage Arts. The original illustrations from both pig books will be on display.
Christelow, 81, has written and illustrated more than 30 picture books that have become staples of children's literature.
She draws inspiration from over four decades of living and working in Windham County. Her subjects are often the creatures she finds on her windowsill (robins), on her grandmother's farm in Vermont (cows and chickens), and her late dog, Emma.
In addition to "the pig books," her titles include the popular Five Little Monkeys series, Where's the Big Bad Wolf? and Letters from a Desperate Dog, which features Emma.
The Commons met with Christelow at her home studio in Dummerston recently to talk about a wide range of topics, including her upcoming exhibit, her creative process (including her diving into digital illustration), and her deep Vermont roots. Here's an excerpt of the conversation.
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Victoria Chertok: Let's start with the two "pig books" - The Great Pig Escape and The Great Pig Search - which are the subject of your NXT Gallery exhibit. How did those books come about?
Eileen Christelow: Years ago, I read an article in the Cedar Rapids Gazette about a local farmer who was taking his pigs to market to become pork chops, and somehow the pigs got out. So there was this big story about it. I was visiting a school there and read about it over breakfast.
I thought, "Wow, this could be fun." I talked about it with some of the kids, and we did some drawings. I got home and thought I really should do something with that story.
I thought that the story could take place in Putney.
V.C.: You decided to set the scene in Putney and drew the downtown area with the General Store and the Putney [Food] Co-op, which was located there in the 1980s.
E.C.: The story slowly grew and became about a Putney farmer, and you see the pigs escaping here and there. The original Putney Co-op was there on Main Street, so that kind of dates the book.
A few years later I was searching around for a story and the pigs were still on my mind. So I thought, "What happens next?"
The original book ends with the pigs sending back all the clothes that they borrowed from various places, and they sent a postcard from Florida to Bert and Ethel - the Putney farmers - and all the postcard says is "Oink!"
I had to assume that people who read The Great Pig Search might not have read The Great Pig Escape, so I had to somehow, in very few pages, tell that story and then move on to Bert and Ethel in Florida.
Ethel had no interest in finding the pigs; she wanted to enjoy the beach vacation and wanted to dance in the stars. The second book sees pigs here and there. Bert and Ethel are pretty clueless, and kids enjoy seeing the pigs when the grown-ups don't.
V.C.: You loved books as a child and had a huge library and lent books out to your friends. Did you know you wanted to be an author/illustrator way back then?
E.C.: I liked stories. I do remember one book and my mother kept saying this illustration doesn't match the words. I would say, "Stop! I want to hear the story."
I really liked Madeline, and I totally related to that book. I liked Maurice Sendak - I discovered his work before my daughter Heather was born. He was one of the first. When I started thinking about picture books, I was thinking that I could do picture books with photographs. And then I thought not.
V.C.: You also had a professional photography career before you became an author and illustrator.
E.C.: I did some architecture photography since I majored in architecture at the University of Pennsylvania. I would have had to go to architecture school for three more years, and I didn't get in.
I did get into a few more architecture schools like Columbia, but I was much more interested in people. It was all for the best. It worked out.
V.C.: You told me you lived on North 19th Street in Philadelphia with your husband, Ahren, in a fantastic loft and photographed the neighborhood kids on the street.
E.C.: I did a lot of photos of kids in our neighborhood, street photography. I loved that. I went around selling some stories. I sold stock photos. It was a living of sorts.
We lived in Philadelphia for seven years in a sprawling neighborhood. I got to know the kids who played on the street. I did a lot of photos in the local school and did a playground photo exhibit for the parents to come see. That was kind of fun.
The book that I was starting in the Philadelphia neighborhood would have been a good book, but I didn't know anything about the publishing world.
V.C.: So the idea of becoming an author/illustrator grew each year.
E.C.: It was a germ growing when we lived in Pennsylvania, and then we went to England for a year when my husband worked with a potter there. We were in the countryside, and I didn't see a lot of children's books there [other than those by] Beatrix Potter.
Then we went to Berkeley, California. I would take my daughter Heather to the library, and she loved books. I learned a lot about telling a story and pictures.
V.C.: How did you find a publisher when you were starting out?
E.C.: I was very lucky, but I did work hard.
When I started, I had two stories going at once. We had been living in California for a while. And then I took a course with Betty Bacon, who had been an editor at Harper & Row, which was really useful. I learned a lot from her.
Then we moved to the East Coast. She told me to talk to James Cross Giblin at Clarion Books. She said, "He's just wacky enough to like your work!"
Jim answered the phone - amazingly - and said, sure, come on in. So I took the work in and he bought the first book on the spot. I made appointments to show to a whole bunch of editors. He wanted to buy the second one as well.
Three years before, I got encouragement for my alphabet book but no one wanted to buy it.
Jim took them, and that was wonderful. He was a terrific editor, and he is no longer with us. He worked on almost all of my books.
V.C.: How do you begin your creative process when starting a book?
E.C.: I start with sketches. Who are the characters? What are they doing? As I change the words, I change the pictures. As I change the pictures, I might decide to change the words again. It's an evolving process that can take months.
V.C.: You told me that your transition from traditional media - like watercolor and acrylics - to digital tools like Photoshop and Wacom tablets revolutionized your process, giving you flexibility to move characters, experiment with colors, and refine every detail.
E.C.: Photoshop is fabulous. A lot of illustrators are moving on to that. One reason is that you have those original sketches and they are on one layer. And then you make another lawyer of your actual drawing and you can make the sketch invisible. But if you want to see it again, it's there.
One picture in The Great Pig Search shows Bert and Ethel at the beach, where Bert is looking for pigs and Ethel is enjoying herself. I redrew that one how many times. I kept moving it around. If I had the computer then, I could have moved them around where I wanted them without having to redraw the entire picture.
This is probably one of the last books I did that way. It's so laborious.
V.C.: Tell me about your process for creating original illustrations.
E.C.: All pencil and lots of sketches. I think about the story. It's sketching and words, sketching and words. Picture books should fit into 32 pages, so you have to tell the story in 32 pages. You work out how the pictures will tell the story. And you want to design it with surprises when you turn the page.
In those days I would take the sketch, put it on a light table, and start working out the actual line. I would do it with a Hunt's point pen. Then I would add color, usually watercolor or gouache, which comes out of a tube and is a little less opaque, less watery.
At the dummy stage, I would take my book into the editor in New York. It would be black-and-white with maybe a bit of color, with lots of words. That's a dummy. When I have two or three dummies, then I'd get to the point of doing the finish work.
V.C.: Where do you get your best story ideas?
E.C.: What's fun is thinking about where the story idea can come from. Stories are all around us. Another example would be when I was listening to public radio who told a story of an old guy who was in Putney. As it would get colder and colder, he'd call it a "one-dog night." So I did The Five Dog Night, and I sent a copy of the book to him.
V.C.: You have deep roots in Vermont, and your mother's family goes back generations.
E.C.: My family goes back in Vermont. My mom - Dorothy Beal - was born in Springfield, and my grandparents had a farm. They retired to in Windsor. My grandmother was born in Springfield. The Beals and the Coburns. We visited Vermont every year and loved it!
We went to the farm, and there were 10 cousins. My grandfather said when my husband Ahren and I were thinking of moving here, "Don't move to Vermont - you will die on the vine."
It was a very different place then in terms of opportunities. When we came back, we already had skills. I was a photographer and had published these books. I developed certain graphic design skills, and my husband learned a lot of carpentry and landscaping, so we both had skills.
My grandfather had a vast vegetable garden, and he had cows for a while and lots of chickens. I remember the slaughter of the chickens. He figured that all of us needed to know where our meat came from.
V.C.: The subjects of your books are sometimes members of your household.
E.C.: Our dog Emma, who is no longer with us, was the subject of two books: Letters from the Desperate Dog and The Desperate Dog Writes Again. She and my husband had a sort of tense relationship at times. They didn't understand each other, so I used a couple of those [true stories] in that book. Toward the end of the book, Emma locks him out of his truck, and that actually happened.
I would say that after the first book, my husband understood the dog a little better. I don't know if she understood him better.
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NXT Gallery presents "Eileen Christelow: Illustrations," an exhibition celebrating the work of the acclaimed children's book author and illustrator. The opening reception is on Sunday, Feb. 23, from 3 to 5 p.m. at Next Stage Arts, 15 Kimball Hill in Putney. Light refreshments will be served. The exhibit will remain on view through Sunday, May 11.
For more information, visit nextstagearts.org.
To learn more about Christelow's work, visit christelow.com.
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Editor's note: Stories presented as interviews in this format are lightly edited for clarity and readability. Words not spoken by interview subjects appear in brackets.
Victoria Chertok is a contributing writer to The Commons and The Keene Sentinel. She has lived and worked in Windham County since the mid-1990s.
This Arts item by Victoria Chertok was written for The Commons.