Full Circle

✍✎ It's Freewheelin' Friday! ☄✒

Dedicated to Artistic Endeavors of all Sorts

     To bring my ramblings on (click 'em ☛) Scribner's, ◆ Maxwell Perkins,◆ Treasure Island & N.C. Wyeth full circle, here's my secret:

Once upon a time I wanted to illustrate children's books.

Osmosis had a lot to do with it. 

Andrew Wyeth    North Light

     For two years before I left home for college & what passes as my adult life, I studied painting with Carolyn Wyeth in her father N.C. Wyeth's Chadds Ford, PA,  studio.

Carolyn Wyeth         Brandywinemuseum.org

      As her only teenaged student, I also fed the dogs, crawled through the window when she locked us out, (sat outside on a bench for half an hour the day of my portfolio review when she forgot my interview) painted, memorized her critiques, & listened. 

"Old Pew" N.C. Wyeth
for R.L. Stevenson's Treasure Island
Scribner's Illustrated Classics 

     Her father reigned as America's preeminent illustrator during its Golden Age &  his birchbark canoe still hung in the rafters. He'd been dead for 20 years by then but his bottles, busts & palettes, saddles ~~props of every kind~~ leaned in corners & filled musty shelves as if he'd just gone over to the family house down the path.  
                         
               Osmosis


  On my last day at the studio, Carolyn gave me the Dundee Marmalade jar she & her father~~& I~~had used to mix that linseed oil and turpentine. 

Now it holds pens & pencils on my desk.

                 

As it turned out, I don't illustrate books, I write them. 

                                         
                                             But my friend & cohort Brian Lies does both.
  
     It didn't take long for us to discover our mutual love of "Old Pew." Look closely. Brian's homage to Wyeth's masterpiece appears in his NYTimes best seller 
                                                               BATS AT THE LIBRARY    

Bats at the Library   carlemuseum.org 

     When Brian discovered I have the Treasure Island poster in my office, he surprised me with his pencil study.

My homage to two beloved  illustrators... 

☟☟☟

Homage for me.
Pilgrimage for you?

Maxwell Perkins CT house &  
The Snapdragon Inn, Windsor, VT

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings' homestead Cross Creek, FL

N.C. Wyeth's house & studio via 
The Brandywine River Museum, Chadds Ford, PA

The original Charles Scribner's Sons bookstore 

597 Fifth Avenue 

between 48th and 49th Streets

New York, New York