My Havana for Nonfiction Monday

My Havana: Memories of a Cuban Boyhood by Rosemary Wells with Secundino Fernandez (illustrated by Peter Ferguson; Candlewick, 2010) encompasses the decade of my own parents' childhoods, and the city young Dino describes in it is almost as familiar to me as if I remembered it myself:

Until I [Dino] am six years old, in 1954, my world is sweet. "We live in a city built by angels," Papi says. There is no cold in Havana, only sunshine and warm rain. The city's avenues are lined with arcades of coral stone archways, ancient doors, and window frames....

The architecture of the colonial capital fascinates Dino (he grows up to be an architect), and he fills his sketchbooks with drawings of buildings, windows and doorways. As if taken from Dino's sketchbook, pencil drawings of architectural details are overlaid on a view of the rooftops in this wordless double-page spread:

Peter Ferguson's painterly illustrations, done in oil with spot art in pencil, capture a city suffused with golden light: very different from both Madrid, where Dino lives with his maternal grandparents from 1954-56, and New York City, where he and his family settle in 1959 after Castro comes to power in Cuba. They're an integral part of this relatively short (65 pages), yet surprisingly rich book.

Rosemary Wells was inspired to write My Havana after hearing an interview with Secundino Fernandez in which he described his intense homesickness for Havana, and his attempt to alleviate it by building a cardboard model of the city on the floor of his bedroom in New York (that episode makes it into the book, too). It's a beautiful and evocative example of the power of place in childhood memory, and one for which I am especially grateful.

A note on politics: The text of My Havana touches on the repressive Franco regime in Spain as well as on the Batista dictatorship and the Cuban revolution under Castro. I only wish the author's note had not.

Delicious: The Life and Art of Wayne Thiebaud

One of my favorite paintings in the East Building of the National Gallery is Wayne Thiebaud's Cakes (1963). Kids tend to love Cakes, too: the subject (of course), the number and variety of cakes in the painting to choose from, the ribbons and swirls of paint like icing on each one. It does look delicious.

Thiebaud paints more than just cakes, though; and Susan Goldman Rubin's Delicious: The Life and Art of Wayne Thiebaud (Chronicle, 2007) is an appealing introduction to both.  It's also ideal for upper elementary and middle school students looking for something more substantial (at just over 100 beautifully designed pages) than a picture book biography of an artist.

Rubin's text--like Thiebaud's life, it would seem--is simple and straightforward, punctuated with quotes from the artist in oversize block letters and illustrated on almost every facing page with carefully chosen examples of his work (many of which are from private collections). I especially appreciate Rubin's attention to these individual works of art: in just a few sentences, she models how to write about art in a way that kids can understand and appreciate.

For example, in Chapter 6, "From Farms to 'Fantasy City'," Rubin focuses on Thiebaud's landscape and cityscape painting. Here's Rubin's description of Dark City (1999):

Dark City portrays San Francisco at night. Tall skyscrapers painted in deep shades of purple and periwinkle blue create a mood of excitement. The colors, though not true to life, give the feeling of nighttime. Little dabs of yellow and red suggest lit windows, street lamps, and cars driving up and down a hill that seems to go straight up into the air. The painting is huge--over 6 feet high--and is all verticals. Even the steep hill rising up in the middle like a roller coaster is shaped like the rectangular buildings on either side. (84)

[Me again.] Dark City is also gorgeous, all the more so for being a bit of surprise (to me, at least). Thiebaud's landscapes of the Sacramento River Delta, too, are strikingly beautiful.

But he always returns to Cakes, and so will I. At the gallery, I like to ask kids to sketch just one cake, making it fill the whole page. Next time I might ask them to describe it in words as well. Which cake would you choose?

Me, Frida

Amy Novesky's picture book biography of Frida Kahlo, Me, Frida (illustrated by David Diaz; Abrams, 2010), encompasses only one year--from 1930 to 1931, when the newly married Frida accompanied her husband Diego Rivera to San Francisco--but it's a critical one in Frida's development as an artist. Rivera, already an established artist himself, had been commissioned to paint a mural for the city and set to work almost immediately.

Novesky's elegant text delineates Frida's initial sense of loss and isolation (she had never traveled outside of Mexico and didn't speak English or have friends in San Francisco); her growing self-confidence as she explores the city on her own; and her arrival at what would become a distinctive style of painting--very different from Rivera's--intimate and inspired by 19th century Mexican folk art and portraiture.

The book culminates with the painting of this portrait, now in the collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (and reproduced in the Author's Note):

"That night, Frida painted something great: a colorful wedding portrait of herself and Diego. She painted Diego big, and she painted herself small, just as the world saw them.

But Frida knew she was more than this. And she put herself first. In the beak of a pink bird, she wrote a tiny note on violet ribbon:

Here you see us, me, Frida Kahlo, with my adored husband Diego Rivera. I painted these portraits in the beautiful city of San Francisco, California...in April of 1931."

David Diaz's paintings for Me, Frida are gorgeous, glowing works of art themselves. They were done in acrylic, charcoal and varnish on primed linen; in vibrant colors (acid yellow, turquoise, red-orange and hot pink) evocative of Frida's Mexico, and of San Francisco, too. I especially love their composition, the way Diaz's final painting, in which Frida stands in front of the wedding portrait at the opening of her first show, neatly reverses the scale of the two figures to herald Frida's arrival as an artist in her own right:

Diaz includes the pink bird from Frida's wedding portrait in almost every double-page spread, perched beside Frida or peering over her shoulder as she works. And although Novetsky's text doesn't mention the childhood illness and injuries that made walking painful for Frida (so often the focus of books about her, such as Jonah Winter's Frida--I should review that one next), she is sometimes shown, statuesque and beautiful, carrying a cane.

David Diaz and Me, Frida won a 2011 Pura Belpre Illustrator Honor.  Richly deserved, and highly recommended, for everyone.

Dave the Potter

I'm looking forward to Dave the Potter by Laban Carrick Hill; illustrated by Bryan Collier (Little, Brown, 2010), and reviewed in today's Shelf Awareness (9/15/2010).  Dave was a 19th-century potter and poet from South Carolina, where he was enslaved for most of his life.  He inscribed some of his pottery with two-line poems, practical ("put every bit all between / surely this jar will hold 14," indicating that the jar would hold 14 gallons) as well as personal ("I wonder where is all my relation / friendship to all--and, every nation").  In any case, reading and writing, even signing his name (which he also did, in beautiful script, "Dave") was forbidden to slaves, making Dave the Potter's work even more powerful and rare.

Hill's text, fittingly, is also a poem about making a pot, crafted of short, strong lines; Bryan Collier's earth-toned watercolor and collage illustrations provide the larger context (the pairing is described in Brown's review as "a glorious collaboration").  The back matter is thorough and includes some of Dave's poems (I quoted my favorites from them) as well as photographs of his work.  You can even peek inside Dave the Potter using BookBrowse.

Grownups like me who want to know more about Dave should try Carolina Clay: The Life and Legend of Slave Potter Dave by Leonard Todd (Norton, 2008).  Todd is a descendant of one of Dave's owners; he began his research after finding out about his family's connection to Dave in this New York Times article ("In a slave's pottery, a saga of courage and beauty," 1/30/2000).  Finally, local folk can see an alkaline-glazed stoneware jar made by Dave the Potter in 1862, on display in the Civil War collection at the National Museum of American History in Washington, DC.