For Everett

My family has never been short on imagination.  I was lucky to grow up before the rise of the video game, the iPod, the iPad, the smartphone, and the internet.  My mom filled our rooms with shelves of books and art supplies and games that made us think.  When we were bored, she'd tell us to read a book, but just as often as not, we would be outside playing some made-up game that was desperately fun.  To this day, walking in to a children's book store, especially magical ones like Books of Wonder in NYC, makes me feel nostalgic and sad and yet very happy, all at the same time.  My youngest brother had, and still has, an especially developed imagination, and he would spend hours fighting dragons and roaring like Godzilla as he pretended to battle Mothra or Gidorah or some other nasty Japanese monster.  My oldest brother once made a drawing of Josh as he pretended to be Godzilla. Now that my oldest brother has a son of his own, I thought I'd reimagine that scene.

My baby nephew is awesome. He's perfecting animal noises and will soon be at that age when he'll enter the world of dragons, dinosaurs and giant mutant lizards from the sea.   For a birthday present for my brother, I've drawn his son, now about twenty months old, dressed up for trick-or-treating.  He's wearing his trusty dragon costume, designed to impart courage and to elicit monstrous roars.  Hearing a step behind him, he starts to turn.  What's that behind him?   I was  influenced in equal measure by Chris van Allsburg, Bill Watterson, and Maurice Sendak...three of the 20th century masters of drawing and storytelling.  It's an homage to children with imagination and to that perfect age when a backyard can become a place of wonderful adventure.

"Boy vs. Dinosaur" Pencil Copyright 2011 Jessica Boehman

Detail, "Boy vs. Dinosaur"                 

Silliness for my little brother

I made this marker and ink drawing (it's a tiny thing, maybe 5" high) while I was living in Rome. My friend Emily and I had taken a day trip to Viterbo, where we encountered this 12th-century church with an altarpiece with Jesus.  Jesus was oddly perched on the altar, as if he were sitting in a tree.  I may have cracked a joke about it, but the gears started whirring.

It reminded me of a poem called "The Goblin" by Jack Prelutsky, from his book "It's Halloween!"  Read below, it's delightful and evocative.

"The Goblin"
There's a goblin as green as a goblin can be.
Who is sitting outside and is waiting for me.
When he knocked on my door and said softly,
"Come play!"
I answered, "No thank you, now please, go away!"
But the goblin as green as a goblin can be
Is still sitting outside and is waiting for me.

In this poem, a spectacled, pale green goblin perches on  the tree branch outside of a kid's window at nighttime. It was a picture brought to life by the delightful Marylin Hafner.  Her drawings are the very essence of Halloween to me.  It always gave my brother Chris the creeps, but he loved it, too.

"A Goblin as Green" Marylin Hafner

I had a green marker and a red marker on hand (pitiful, but when you pack for a year out of two suitcases, this is what happens) and I began conceiving of the picture.  I imagine Chris as a child, peering out into a green-sky night.  Instead of the goblin, it's that weird Jesus from the altar, only with green skin.  Of course, our toy Godzilla, complete with ejectable fist, stands on the windowsill.  It's one of my odder pictures, but I love the weirdness of it.

"Green Jesus" Pen and Green Marker. Copyright 2011 Jessica Boehman

The Kangaroo and the Elephant

The next two images for the Delacorte series were the Kangaroo with her kid playing the horns and the Elephant with Accordion.  When I was a child, I had a powerful desire to ride in a kangaroo pouch. This was, undoubtedly, spurred by the movie "Dot and the Kangaroo", where one of the songs is called "Riding in the Pouch of a Red Kangaroo".  This little kid seems so contented to be carried by his mother and joins in the music-making. 

"Kangaroo and Kid with Horns" Pencil. Copyright 2011 Jessica Boehman

The Elephant drawing immediately followed the "Walking the Dog" drawing seen below, so it was at once familiar and unusual.  Having just realized a very elephantine elephant, it seemed a bit strange to make one more human, playing the accordion.  Both the animal and his instrument remind me of moving to northern Germany.  My memories of this time are childlike, as we moved there five days after my tenth birthday, and are generally colored grey in my mind, likely due to the cool, cloudy weather that predominated there.  Our first house was in a German neighborhood, not within the large American complexes where many of my friends lived.  We lived a short walk away from a beautiful, sprawling forest park where we spent hours upon hours riding our bikes and pretending to be Robin Hood.  We also were a short walk from the cobblestoned downtown area with its tiny shops.  Of particular interest to a ten year-old child were the bakery that served these delicious, swirled meringue-type cookies, and the toystore.  German toystores were a thing of wonder (even if we weren't very welcome there as part of the army of Americans in town). Filled with puzzles and detailed plastic figures and trains and stuffed animals, we spent many hours gazing, wishing and making Christmas lists.  Since we arrived near Thanksgiving, I knew I had a good chance of getting my favorite toy in the shop for Christmas.  It was a blue baby elephant stuffed toy, whose fur was so soft and cuddly. I fell in love with him and couldn't bear the thought of a month of waiting to see if he would be mine.  On Christmas morning, when I found him waiting for me under the tree, I was the happiest a child could have been on that day.  It's still one of my all-time favorite gifts.  The accordion also reminds me of Germany, and not for stereotypical reasons.    After we had moved to our second house, there was this old German man who would come door-to-door with his accordion.  He would play without ringing the bell until we answered the door.  When offered money, he would always decline, asking instead for a Coke.  I always wanted to write to the Coca-Cola company with this idea for a commercial.  So as it is, that elephant with accordion must have been made just for me.  That's how I see him, in any case.

"Elephant with Accordion" Pencil. Copyright 2011 Jessica Boehman

The Delacorte Clock

My absolute favorite part of NYC is Central Park. It's where my husband and I first got to know each other, where we spent beautiful fall days, and where we got engaged.  Now, we live within a 10 minute walk to the park and to my favorite spot there, the Children's Zoo and Delacorte Clock. The area around this part of the park is all for children. There is a petting zoo and a larger zoo with pandas and penguins and monkeys.  There are statues of Alice in Wonderland and Hans Christian Andersen reading to children.  There's that famous lake with remote-controlled boats.  My favorite animals in the zoo are the sea lions, which you can see without entering the zoo.  They always make the kids laugh with their belching noises.  As you stand watching the sea lions (which I've named Edgar, Oscar and Lucy), you can also listen to the nursery book rhyme music coming from the Delacorte Clock.

The Delacorte Clock, Central Park, New York City

Its dancing animals making music are a wonder to behold. It makes me feel like a kid again, standing in Germany, watching those old clocks turn in the squares of medieval towns.  I've dedicated a series of drawings to these animals; in fact, they were much of the inspiration for my shop's theme (a whimsical menagerie).  I'll be sharing them one by one. My favorite is the bear.  If you look closely, you can see him; he's the right-most figure. He is joyous, lighthearted and delightful, and he makes me smile.

"Dancing Bear" Pencil. Copyright 2011 Jessica Boehman

Lucas, or, how inspiration strikes

Last night we visited family in Long Island as part of our first attempt of dividing the holidays between families.  An unexpected delight was meeting a little boy named Lucas, the son of my sister-in-law's sister.  Lucas is half (full) Irish, half (full) German, but speaks with a brogue (and I imagine that he speaks German with a brogue as well).  He was four, blond, curly-headed, and delightfully grumpy in a very grown-up sort of way.  I quickly won him over with a game of thumb war that I threw (though he didn't know that.)

We began our conversation telling each other things. He couldn't tell me the name of his hometown but could tell me how to get to school.  He told me his favorite color (light green), about going to Germany for visits and about how he could turn into a monster.  When I replied I had also lived in Germany, he remarked (in brogue), "I know that already! I know EVERYTHING!"  I asked him if he had any pets. He replied, "Of course I do! I have a cat, a dog, and a bear."  A bear? And not just any ordinary bear, but a bear that was ten, no, fifteen, well actually, infinity, but not so old that he needed a walking stick. His name was Jen. I heard a lot about Jen that evening (and eventually about the bear's friend, Jennifer). I left town with images of kindly, elderly bears (of an infinite age) who have finally needed that cane.  To the drawing board I go!

A bit about me and Hans...

I came to art as a very young child.  I remember asking for a sketch book for a birthday or Christmas present when I was maybe six or seven. My mom bought me a small, grey-covered ringed sketchbook. In fact, I still have it. It's filled with marker drawings of superheroes of my own design and pencil sketches of my dog.  Though it was the first of many, I will always keep the first evidence of my love of art close to my heart.  

One of my first memories about art was during the brief appearance of Halley's Comet in the winter of 1985. I had just turned eight.  I remember my dad waking us from our beds in Killeen, TX, to bring us outside in the cold winter air. (Even in Texas, it did get cold in the winter). We peered up into the clear night sky with my dad's binoculars, looking at that fuzzy-tailed smudge of light a million miles away. At that time, I was head-over-heels in love with astronomy. I had read every book in the elementary school library about the stars and planets. I remember being so excited to have seen a comet that I stayed up for an hour or more after seeing it to draw a pastel image of it, seen through the black borders caused by the binoculars. I wish I still had that picture, because that was the day that I knew I wanted to be an artist. After that, there was no stopping me from drawing.  I eventually graduated with a degree in Studio Art and Art History, with a concentration in Illustration.

In contrast to my early discovery of art-making, I came to be an art historian much later, but it really started with a love affair with Bernini and Michelangelo in the ninth and tenth grades. I didn't know it then, but flipping through some art books was going to change my life.  The love intensified in college under two wonderful professors who encouraged me and taught me to teach through their own actions.  After many years of toil, a year abroad in Rome, and after meeting many wonderful friends, I eventually earned my master's degree and my Ph.D. in Art History. I now teach college-level students in New York City to find the beauty and humor of art. 

Though I work by day as a professor of Art History, my first love will always be creating art. When I'm drawing, I feel like that child again.

As for Hans, our story is twenty years old.  I had always loved fairy tales and myths as a child.  One of my favorite books is still the compilation entitled, "The Magic Tree and other Tales."  I was first introduced to "Hans My Hedgehog" through Jim Henson's The Storyteller series that briefly ran on TV. The script was so gorgeous and the visuals left an indelible mark on me.  The next year, we moved to northern Germany with my father, who was stationed there. One day I was playing with a friend at a nearby park and we saw something moving in the grass. It was a little, spiked ball.  I knew immediately what we were seeing, and at that moment, I do not think I had ever been more excited. We picked up the tiny hedgehog and carried him home. Looking back on it, we never should have done that, for a myriad of reasons, but he was soft and adorable and I was 12 and didn't know any better.  We only kept him for a few days before returning him to nature. Ever since then, I have loved those prickly little creatures.

"Hans-My-Hedgehog" Pencil. Copyright 2011 Jessica Boehman

This illustration came to life in Rome. I had a pad of paper and a pencil and no other art supplies except for a pen and one red marker. Here, I rediscovered my love of drawing, and decided to illustrate a scene from my favorite Grimm's tale:

"When Hans-My-Hedgehog had them, he said, "Father, go to the blacksmith's and have my cock-rooster shod, then I will ride away and never again come back." The father was happy to get rid of him, so he had his rooster shod, and when it was done, Hans-My-Hedgehog climbed on it and rode away. He took pigs and donkeys with him, to tend in the forest.  In the forest the rooster flew into a tall tree with him. There he sat and watched over the donkeys and the pigs. He sat there for years, until finally the herd had grown large. His father knew nothing about him. While sitting in the tree, he played his bagpipes and made beautiful music.  One day a king came by. He was lost and heard the music. He was amazed to hear it, and sent a servant to look around and see where it was coming from. He looked here and there but only saw a little animal sitting high in a tree. It looked like a rooster up there with a hedgehog sitting on it making the music."

So that's how I've rendered him, in that moment of making magic with his pipes, up in the tree, calling a siren song and a lullaby to donkeys, pigs and kings.