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New York Times
23-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
The Beauty of Imperfect Children's Book Art
I can't draw hands. Or horses. If horses had hands instead of hooves and I had to draw that, I'd be in serious trouble. I'm more comfortable drawing fields or cats. But I had to draw a child's hands — big and up close — for the cover of a book. My first attempts looked like fleshy mittens. When I get stuck, I turn to other children's book artists for inspiration. Barbara McClintock is my go-to artist. I leafed through her books. Her drawings of hands in 'Adèle & Simon' were beautiful but too small. Next I turned to Kevin Henkes and his Caldecott Medal-winning 'Kitten's First Full Moon,' but his drawings of cat paws were no help at all. As I kept messing up — my wastebasket filling with crumpled paper — I felt like I was 6 years old again, trying to draw cows. I grew up on a farm. Cows roamed the fields outside our kitchen window. When I drew them, and their weird bony legs, frustration rose inside me — my cows didn't look right — then burst into a red-faced, paper-destroying tantrum. I would run away from home, up into the apple tree outside the back door. Now when I get frustrated, I head to museums. So I biked to MoMA and wandered the galleries, looking for big hands. I found Picasso's 'Two Nudes,' the women's hands captured in a few quick brushstrokes. Then I biked to the Whitney, where there was a Ruth Asawa exhibit with an ink study of hands. Her line was bold, effortless. How did she do that? Artists often have that reaction to others' art. We look for clues. This is also true for children learning to draw. On author visits to schools, I lead drawing classes. As students sketch the trees outside their classroom window, I look over their shoulders and offer encouragement. 'You call that a tree? Come on!' I don't say that. But I have the urge, especially when the students' teacher says, 'Emily, that's a perfect tree!' I don't think that's helpful when Emily is furiously scowling. I recognize that scowl. I say, 'Look close. Keep drawing.' There's always one child who sticks with it. She makes me think of Simone Biles. Biles was the same age as these grade schoolers when she started tumbling in a gym. Falling down, getting up. All that practice and grit. Now when we see her take flight into a ridiculously difficult twist, we ask how did she do that? Well, easy. That vault took decades. Biking home from the museums, I thought about training. Picasso started drawing as a young child (his father was an art teacher). He was an excellent draftsman before he became the Simone Biles of art. Asawa drew flowers and plants as a child, and studied with professional illustrators. Even when she turned to abstract sculpture, she drew every morning, as exercise. I went back to my bookshelf and leafed through more children's books. The artists I admire all share a certain looseness. Quentin Blake's scratchy ink lines bursting with motion in the Roald Dahl books he illustrated. Christian Robinson's colorful cut-paper circles in 'Another,' bouncing across the page. Sydney Smith's brushstrokes in 'Small in the City,' radiating light. Underneath their looseness is craft. Blake drew countless drafts before finding his fluid line. Robinson's bouncing art was arranged with serious deliberation. Smith's brushstrokes look like a moment's thought but — my goodness — the years it must have taken for him to achieve that. Carefree art takes great care. There was a paradox here. All the training and discipline built up, then came out on the paper in an almost unconscious act of letting go. A splotch of ink, a wayward wash of color. Imperfect but right. Finding beauty in the flaws, and acceptance. As if the artist knew when to walk away. By now there were more books in my lap than on my bookshelf. I saw the same pattern in all the children's book art I loved — in all art really — from Picasso to Sophie Blackall. Craft, imperfection, grace. Before I went back to my desk, I looked hard at one painting in 'Hello Lighthouse' by Blackall — an ocean of waves rendered in exquisite detail and technique, before it exploded into a wild storm of watercolor clouds and her art took flight. How did she do that? Maybe even she didn't know. I still had to draw the hands for my cover. Here's what I did. I stopped thinking of hands as hands. There were other things I could draw. Landscapes. So I painted the hands as if they were fields. Vertical fields, in burnt sienna and burnt umber. An hour later I was done. The hands weren't great, but I didn't rip them up. I wanted to keep some roughness. I love the whole messy process of making children's books. Starts, stops, odd hacks. I appreciate how technology improves books, but I'm also wary. About how it smooths rough edges. Makes art a little too neat. Too perfect, maybe. What gets lost if we don't hold onto the necessary frustration of the handmade? Thinking about the answer to this question makes me sad. When I'm feeling low, I go to the water. So I biked to the Hudson River, took the ferry across it and climbed to the cliffs of Weehawken. It's beautiful up here — Manhattan a mountain of glass and steel, held by the river, with clouds racing above. Sometimes, when I look at our city, I imagine forests. How it must have been. Oaks, deer, Lenape villages. Then fields, Dutch cattle, masts of ships. Centuries of stories and lives, pain and beauty, on this island. Standing at the edge of these cliffs, I close my eyes. Daydream backward, crossing oceans and epochs, to the walls of the Lascaux caves and the famous drawing of a prehistoric horse. Rough, charcoal. Perfectly imperfect. A drawing that looks like it's straight out of a good children's book. I think we know that artist. How she looked at the world, how much she desired to capture it. Her unpolished line, communicating with us across time, connecting us with our past, then forward to our children, to all of us who open a book and hold it in our hands and say yes.
San Francisco Chronicle
10-05-2025
- Entertainment
- San Francisco Chronicle
Ruth Asawa inspired S.F. with her art, but can she help me understand myself?
Earlier this month, I stood in front of the redwood doors of Ruth Asawa 's house and realized I loved her — as much as I could love someone I'd never met. The doors led nowhere, standing off their hinges in a white-walled gallery at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art's new retrospective of the late Bay Area artist's work. But examining the circular hollows she'd carved by hand into the doors, I realized I'd been looking for her my whole life so that I could ask her a question. Like the underground creeks that run through my Oakland neighborhood, Ruth has been my constant, unseen companion. Her art backdropped my most tender memories. Drinking tea with my grandmother at our favorite garden in Golden Gate Park while Ruth was there as a bronze plaque molded to a stone. Sketching taxidermied predators at a natural history exhibit in Oakland as Ruth took the form of a wire sculpture on the wall. Waiting for my high school best friend on the Embarcadero on the weekends with Ruth standing by as an origami-esque circle of folded steel. I told all of this to Ruth's youngest daughter, Addie Lanier, in the back corner of a San Francisco cafe, that Ruth had been like a shadow attached at my ankle since childhood. 'That's appropriate that she was a shadow in your life,' said Addie, 66. 'She said, 'The shadow reveals the form' of her work because the shadow shows you there's all these layers inside.' But it wasn't until last winter, when I saw a photo at the Oakland Museum, that I realized who cast that shadow. The image haunted me for months: A butt-naked baby sat in the foreground, two woven sculptures hanging above him like gourds, while three other children busied themselves with their own tasks. In the background, face and body partly obscured by the sculptures, was a woman. She leaned forward, elbows propped on her knees and a spool of wire by her sneakers. 'Ruth Asawa and Children,' read the description. It was the most beautiful photograph I'd ever seen. And it also made me feel a bit nauseous, which happens when I've forgotten something important like my passport or to call my dad on his birthday. Only the something I'd forgotten was Ruth — her name embedded deep in my conscience alongside memories of wandering around the library after school and listening to the local radio station from my car seat with acorns in my pockets. On the internet, I finally saw Ruth's face. In black and white, her dark hair and broad cheekbones reminded me of the photos of my great-grandparents after they, and other Japanese and Japanese American citizens, were shipped out of California and incarcerated in Arkansas during World War II. Her face reformed in my mind as I boarded a plane to our shared ancestral homeland of Japan. While reading her biography, 'Everything She Touched: The Life of Ruth Asawa,' during the 12-hour flight, I learned that we both shared a love for matzo ball soup, the children's book 'Make Way for Ducklings' and Zen Buddhism. We each cut our college classmates' hair and studied watercolor. Ruth was also incarcerated at a WWII prison camp in Arkansas and later moved to San Francisco in 1949. I sat in my favorite cafe in Kyoto with an egg yolk over a bowl of rice while the Ruth in the book made rhubarb cake for her Bay Area community, carved her own doors from redwood trunks, organized funding for public arts programming and voiced her solidarity with Muslims after 9/11. Critics exotified her as 'oriental' and domesticated her as a 'housewife and mother.' The public speculated on the deeper meaning of her work. But Ruth seemed to pay no attention to any of it, never offering an explanation. She kept weaving, and mothering. 'Ruth was no fan of any labels — female, Asian, modern — preferring to stand on her own, as an individual 'minority of one,' her biographer wrote. She was fiercely unbothered, titling most of her sculptural works 'Untitled.' I, meanwhile, on the verge of turning 26 while reading about her, was having an identity crisis. What kind of writer am I? An Asian American writer? A writer who sometimes writes about Asian America? Should I also be an artist? Should I be a parent? Should I move to Japan? I quietly panicked on the train to Osaka, where Ruth has a sculpture mounted to a wall at the National Museum of Art. The bundle of wires that fanned out at its edges like a cross-section of a dandelion was immediately familiar. There's one just like it at the entrance of the Oakland Museum that, as a kid, I'd imagined as the symbol of my home city for all its tree-like bifurcations. But this time I saw its shadow, too, which blurred its frayed edges beyond definition. Back at SFMOMA, I sat in a recreation of Ruth's Noe Valley living room that faced a photo of her real living room like a mirror. Woven sculptures hung from the museum ceiling in the same orientation she'd once arranged them in. A week later I told Addie about my identity crisis, that I didn't know who I should be. 'My mom didn't really talk about identity,' she said. 'To her, identity was what you do, how you live.' I imagined Ruth sitting there on the floor, surrounded by spools of wire but also her friends and family. I saw myself, too, writing on my green rug, surrounded by the people I love. When Ruth was granted permission to leave the Arkansas prison camp and attend college, Ruth's mother bowed to her, Addie said, and told Ruth who she should be. 'Be lucky,' she said. I didn't fully understand what she meant and neither did Addie, who shrugged. But I felt myself taking this to heart, like a cell accepting a much needed nutrient. I asked, and Ruth answered.
New York Times
09-04-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
Corrections: April 9, 2025
An article on Tuesday about the Trump administration's plans to spend tens of billions of dollars to expand immigrant detention misstated the location of Delaney Hall, a detention facility in New Jersey run by the Geo Group. The facility is in Newark, not Elizabeth. An article on Monday about the U.S. tariffs on Switzerland misstated the comparative scale of U.S. tariffs imposed on Swiss imports. Swiss products would face tariffs that are more than 200 percent higher than those imposed on British goods, not 20 percent. An article on Friday about the Japanese American artist Ruth Asawa, using information from a museum catalog, misstated the location of a farm Asawa grew up on. It is southeast of Los Angeles, not southwest. Errors are corrected during the press run whenever possible, so some errors noted here may not have appeared in all editions.
South China Morning Post
01-03-2025
- Entertainment
- South China Morning Post
This week in PostMag: Hong Kong's art month, Ningxia's wineries and more
Art month is officially here. As a newcomer to the city, it's my first go-around on this hamster wheel of event madness. They weren't wrong – it's a lot. We've barely begun and already I feel like there's art coming out of our collective ears. Advertisement Even if you think art isn't your 'thing', I entreat you to momentarily suspend your disbelief and embrace a new persona. Stop by a gallery, see a show. Hong Kong makes it easy. Last weekend, I finally sauntered over to a gallery in Central and was surprised at how effortless it was to see world-class artists. This is likely not a revelation to you but indulge my fresh-face, wide-eyed self and let it serve as a reminder. I was kicking myself for not doing it sooner. The work – intricate wire sculptures by Ruth Asawa – was even more stunning in person than in the images. To that end – helping you tackle all the art Hong Kong has on offer – we're including a selection of shows to visit in each of our March issues, starting today. I'm particularly excited to see Michele Fletcher's evocative paintings and the group show 'Unsold ≠ Worthless: Shifting Perspectives'. In our cover feature, Belgian musician Bolis Pupul tells Vincent Chow how his family's roots in Hong Kong and Wenzhou were the springboard for his latest album Letter to Yu. It's a story that resonated for me, as someone whose own family emigrated from China and who later found a connection with my ancestral homeland. Regardless of your own history, I think you'll find it a powerful piece. Also compelling are the tremendous efforts expended by anyone participating in Hong Kong's Four Peaks Race, discovers Martin Williams. The race celebrated its 40th anniversary this year, and reading it, I was impressed that anyone has committed themselves to 170km of sailing and running – at times, in pitch darkness no less. But it turns out, over the past four decades, there have been many souls braver than me. One is our photo editor, Alexander Mak, who accompanied the racers to document their journey. Advertisement Now a wine tour? Certainly more my speed than hoisting a sail in inclement weather. Marco Ferrarese heads to Ningxia to explore the region's wineries. It's China's most established area for grape growing and I'd hazard a guess that you've heard of it – or even had a sip of a Ningxia wine. But post-pandemic, it's also evolving into a destination for wine tourism, with tours to lead the way and estates opening tasting rooms. I'll raise a glass to that.
