On Monday, Oct. 21, children’s book illustrator Bryan Collier gave a speech at Stoddard Hall. The talk, titled “You Can Never Outgrow a Picture Book,” was sponsored by the Campus School and was open to students as well as the people of Northampton.
Collier went through various topics throughout the lecture, detailing how his love for art began as well as his breakthrough into the publishing world. “At age 15, I walked into an art class at a high school,” Collier said. “[The teacher] just gave us art supplies — she gave us watercolor paper and watercolor sets, and I just started playing with the water and the paint and letting [them] bleed into each other, and I was just having fun, and… I became mesmerized by that act. Every day I came home and I just painted.” Collier tried for years to get his first illustrating job and when he finally did he was ecstatic. “I just picked up five books from the bookstore and I wrote down the addresses to the publisher, and I put my portfolio together and I went to do what is called a portfolio drop-off,” Collier said. He went to a different publisher every week for seven years before he was offered his first deal for a book called Uptown. “When I got Uptown’s contract, I signed that on the subway home,” he said.
Growing up, Collier was influenced by some of his favorite children’s books, one of which was The Snowy Day by Ezra Jack Keats. “I can’t outgrow it,” he said. “I remember what this felt like when I saw a boy that looked like me. I remember what it felt like when I realized I had the same pajamas on that he had. I knew about snowy days because I grew up on the Eastern shore of Maryland. All this stuff resonated with me, even the simplistic way Ezra Jack Keats created and constructed the landscape and the scenes… I couldn’t articulate it then, but I was drawn to the color, the starkness of it. Even the way he created the bedpost. Really sophisticated, in a lot of ways.”
Collier brought copies of all of his books as well as some of his original artwork to the lecture. Using his work as examples, he described his designing process as well as his unique collaging technique, where he would paint a figure, cut it out of the page and place it onto a different background. Given the level of detail that this work requires, it takes Collier about six months to finish an entire book.
Near the end of his talk, he read through the book Knock Knock: My Dad’s Dream For Me, which used words from Daniel Beatty’s poem and Collier’s illustrations. Collier pitched this story as a picture book to a publisher, having heard Beaty read it on TV. “It was so powerful that I thought, ‘Aw, man, we have to make a book out of that,’” Collier said. He displayed the art on the screen as he narrated the story, stopping at certain points to explain the process behind his art or to ask the audience a question.
Collier also spoke about a book he had illustrated called Dave the Potter: Artist, Poet, Slave, and how that story brought up the idea of literacy as freedom. “The book is about poetry, pottery, American history, and slavery, but it’s also about literacy,” said Collier. “The fact that if you can read and write, you can go anywhere, do anything. There’s no bounds, there’s nothing that can bound you, not even shackles.”
