joyce to the world

Los Angeles Reader

DURING THE LAST DECADE, the area of publishing devoted to children’s picture books has turned from frog to prince, becoming the fastest-growing segment of the entire industry. Before 1981, a title was considered successful if it sold five thousand copies. Now some sell six hundred thousand. Perhaps baby boomers are spending more on their kids, or maybe it’s related to the current popularity of narrative painting or to advances in printing technologies that have allowed for unparalleled vividness in color reproductions. Whatever the reason, the increased sales and higher profile of picture books have caused a variety of artists to rediscover the magic of the genre and add to it, creating what amounts to a renaissance in the field. Children’s book illustrations have never been more engaging.

Abbie Phillips and Lois Sarkisian are well aware of this. Two-and-a-half years ago, they opened their Every Picture Tells a Story... gallery, the only place on the West Coast devoted exclusively to this genre. One of the first things they discovered was that grown-ups responded to the art as strongly as children did; they weren’t necessarily buying paintings to hang in the nursery. Consequently, while many galleries are folding owing to the recession, Phillips and Sarkisian are living happily ever after. Single-handedly they’ve created a thriving fine-art market for original art from children’s books, whereas five years ago many picture-book illustrators simply stuck their work in the closet. At the same time, Phillips and Sarkisian have promoted the talents of lesser-known artists, drawn attention to the incredible breadth of the field, and chronicled the evolution of the present flowering. Their current show spotlights another step forward.

“Oh, special egg, oh, roundy egg,
Oh, splendid, artful Bently egg,
I painted you with feelings too
Mysterious to say to you.”

—William Joyce’s BENTLY & Egg

William Joyce is one of the superstars of the renaissance. His work’s nostalgic-yet-fresh feel, his playfulness with detail, and his enveloping use of light and shadow make his illustrations irresistibly charming. Many emerging artists look to his work for inspiration.

The most noticeable aspect of Joyce’s paintings is their 1920s and ’30s feel, derived from both style and subject matter. A major influence is Edward Hopper; though Joyce brings a whimsical stylization to Hopper’s brand of realism. At the same time—ironically, for someone who now competes with it—Joyce is eternally grateful to TV. “I didn’t realize it at the time,” he says, “but the first generation of kids who grew up with television—despite the bad press TV gets now, and I think it’s deserved—in those days they needed so much stuff to broadcast they’d get all this stuff from other eras, and it was glorious....” He views the period between world wars as a more innocent era when technology was a cure-all and everything was gonna be okeydoke. Thus, Joyce’s illustrations are full of the kinds of friendly looking gizmos you’d find in Flash Gordon’s garage.

Another characteristic of Joyce's paintings is his inclusion of details that aren’t in the text. In A Day With Wilbur Robinson, we follow the narrator as he visits his best friend’s house (“the greatest place to visit”), complete with grandfather’s dancing frog band and an uncle perfecting an antigravity device. A group of uniformed birds appears in several of the illustrations, and Joyce eventually decided Wilbur had a trained army of birds keeping an eye on the grounds. But he never mentions this. His goal is to stimulate the imaginations of his young readers. “That’s the sort of thing that a child can look at and go off on their own tangents with.... All they need is a catalyst—I mean, if you’ve got a kid with a stick, that kid can go anywhere.”

Finally, Joyce’s paintings are so marvelously atmospheric you wish you could throw open the window of the page (or the glass of the frame) and tumble inside. In this sense, his work comes close to Laurent de Brunhoff’s classic Babar illustrations.

The current show features, primarily, paintings from Joyce’s most recent book, BENTLY & Egg. It’s a departure from his other work, not only stylistically but also in the way it came about; there’s quite a tale behind its creation.

While working on the sequel to the popular Dinosaur Bob, Joyce discovered his wife was pregnant. He dropped the Bob book and “out erupted this other thing called BENTLY & Egg. It took over and became a book before I even knew where it came from or what it was about. But when my wife read it, she knew."

Bently the frog loses the attention of his best friend, Kack Kack the duck, when she lays an egg. He agrees to babysit when Kack Kack goes to admire her sister’s ducklings. Staring at the egg, Bently decides he “just doesn’t like it,” so he paints it. But a boy mistakes it for an Easter egg and takes it, and Bently, of course, must get the egg back.

Obviously, somebody was a bit nervous about becoming a father. The imminent arrival of a little in-house critic changed Joyce’s storytelling, a fact he was initially apprehensive about.

“It almost made me mad,” he laughs. “I prided myself on writing purely escapist children’s fiction. I didn’t want any overt lessons in my stories, just euphoric adventures that left kids buzzing with the possibilities of their imaginations. And then we got pregnant ... And everything’s different now: the book is a lot more emotional, and it has something of a lesson. It infuriates me. I thought I was above that.”

But BENTLY marks a huge leap forward in Joyce’s work. Now, in addition to entertaining children, Joyce has begun, as Bruno Bettelheim would put it, to “enrich” their lives.

In his award-winning study of fairy tales, The Uses of Enchantment, the well-known psychologist championed these age-old children’s stories for the way they “deal with universal problems, particularly those which preoccupy the child’s mind, [speaking] to his budding ego ... while relieving unconscious pressures,” especially those of the id. “To hold the child’s attention, [a story] must entertain him and amuse his curiosity [something Joyce mastered long ago]. But to enrich his life, it must stimulate his imagination; help him clarify his emotions; be attuned to his anxieties....”

Bettelheim continues: “Fairy tales enrich the child’s life and give it an enchanted quality just because he does not quite know how the stories have worked their wonder on him.” Ironically, this perfectly describes Joyce’s own feeling toward his latest creation. (Perhaps to create an enchanting work, one must be enchanted?) In working through his own anxieties about fatherhood, Joyce has managed to create his most deeply textured work, one that is surely enchanting (and Joyce likes that word) and will no doubt be helpful to many kids. (BENTLY would be perfect for a child expecting a younger sibling.) Many grown-ups will certainly find it intriguing as well.

The depth is also apparent in the style of the illustrations. Joyce’s approach has been more like that of Beatrix Potter this time—softer and more traditional—yet the shadows are still there, as when Bently looks out of the reeds at everyone rushing by while he sits chained to the egg. It’s an image of mixed emotions, gentle yet melancholy.

Visually, as mentioned, Joyce’s work has already influenced a whole new generation of children’s book artists. Hopefully, his turn toward deeper meaning will influence them as well. The renaissance will continue, and children’s books will become ever more enchanting. +