| Children’s books can be an adult’s guilty pleasure – bright colours, charming characters, refreshers on morals and life lessons, and a return trip to your childhood, all packaged together in a cute bundle of 32 pages.
This is especially true of the books by Calgary illustrator and children’s author Carolyn Fisher. And once again she treats us to her sprightly illustrations in her latest picture book Two Old Potatoes and Me, which is being launched June 14 at McNally Robinson.
The book, written by U.S. author John Coy, tells the story of a young girl who finds two old potatoes in the cupboard at her father’s house. Instead of throwing them away, he suggests they try to grow new potatoes from the old ones. In the end, not only does the father-daughter team harvest 67 new spuds, they also grow a beautiful relationship in the face of her parents’ divorce.
Random House sent Coy’s manuscript to the 34-year-old Fisher to illustrate just a few months before the release of her authorial debut, A Twisted Tale (Knopf, 2002). That children’s book, which she also illustrated and designed, tells the story of a cyclone that shakes up the identities of a group of farm animals. After six years of working with farm-themed illustrations, Fisher saw the potato book as a welcome opportunity to move her artwork away from the country and into the city garden.
Told from April to September – the potato-growing season – Two Old Potatoes and Me includes all the basic steps for growing potatoes.
"Last year, I planted potatoes at the same time I was working on this book," says Fisher, "because I wanted to take photos of them and draw them… but because it snowed here on the 24th of May, I couldn’t plant until the sixth of June." Thanks to Calgary’s unpredictable weather, Fisher’s potatoes were at least a month behind author Coy’s, "who lives in Minneapolis, which is not southerly at all!"
Fisher is one artist equally qualified to deal with rural and urban – and Canadian and American – subjects. After spending part of her childhood on a farm just outside of Warner, Alta., Fisher moved to the U.S., first to Utah to pursue a fine arts degree at Brigham Young University, then later to New York, where her cowgirl personality was regarded as something of a curiosity. In fact, the tongue-in-cheek cowboy images that appear in her work are a response to those city slickers, she says, and are just one example of her playful cultural references on both sides of the border.
Fisher and her husband lived in New York for three years and then moved to his college town in Montana, a strategic ploy on Fisher’s behalf. "Bozeman, Montana was sort of in between New York City and Canada," she says, "and my idea was that if I got him used to living there, then I could bump him up over the border." They finally settled in Calgary in 1997.
Fisher’s diverse portfolio includes a coveted list of clients. She has created T-shirt designs for MTV, logo lettering for Esprit and has illustrated articles for Rolling Stone, Disney Adventures, Sports Illustrated, Time, The Village Voice and The Wall Street Journal. Instantly recognizable, Fisher’s illustrations are zany, colourful, detailed, energetic and full of comic exaggerations. As one of her New York friends once remarked, "This is a girl who looked at too much Marc Chagall when she was a child."
It was while she was touring Canada talking about art and books that Fisher first got a sense that children’s books might be a suitable medium for her work. She says her illustration of a frenzied cat with a serpentine body always provoked immense laughter from children. Not only did she find it rewarding to get such a visceral response from six-year-olds, it also made her realize that children’s books would provide her with a bigger, freer space for "going all out" with her illustrations. In 1997, she illustrated her first picture book, Fifty-five Grandmas and a Llama (Gibbs Smith), written by B.C.’s Lynn Manuel. Fisher’s husband, Steve Arthur – the art director of WHERE Calgary – designed the book, marking the couple’s first official collaboration.
Although Fisher’s illustrations have been exhibited in galleries in Florida, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Calgary, she’s aware that they aren’t always considered serious art. In 1999, she held a group show with friends in Calgary that poked fun at the "soiled reputation" of illustrators among the artists of the world. It was wittily titled Hors D’Oeuvres and Art Whores. "People think illustrators are somehow selling out, prostituting their art for commercial reasons," she says. "If we do (a show) again, I think we’ll have to have Art Whore II out on the street corner where it belongs!"
These days Fisher leads a busy life. In addition to her book projects, she has been working as a part-time instructor at the Alberta College of Art and Design, teaching illustration, children’s-book illustration and the business of freelancing. And she recently completed a 1,000-square-foot mural in the Old Kensington Firehall. Her map of Alberta with its wildlife, flora and provincial icons graces the floor of the historic brick building, which opens in July as a City of Calgary parks resource centre.
Meanwhile, response to Two Old Potatoes and Me has already been good, with Publishers Weekly giving it a starred review. Fisher’s illustrations for the gardening tale simulate texture and, as Publishers Weekly writes, she "hand-prints the text for a casual, crayony look, and her unique multimedia compositions feature loamy dark browns, rich greens and denim blues."
While the book is recommended for children from ages four to eight, ages four and up would be far more accurate. Once again Fisher has produced a work that adults, as well as children, will want to savour. |
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