Art
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Synopsis
A rhyming tribute to a budding young artist.
Publishers Weekly
Art serves as a boy's name and favorite pastime in this cheerful sequence, which echoes Crockett Johnson's Harold and the Purple Crayon. McDonnell (The Gift of Nothing) lures readers along with antic visuals and a catchy rhyming text about "Art and his art/ Can you tell them apart?" The boy stands about an inch-and-a-half tall in the squarish pages, and in one Jackson Pollock-esque spread, he is indeed covered in his medium. Wearing his blue baseball hat backward and attired in Dennis the Menace fashion, he reaches with a brush to fill the vast white space all around him with red, yellow and blue daubs and spatters, zigzags and spirals, drips and dots. Then he grabs a thick black pencil and doodles a flat house, a basic tree and a cartoon dog. All this activity wears him out, and when he wakes from a nap, he sees his creations tacked to the fridge: "Held there by magnets/ (stars and a heart)/ Put there by mother/ 'Cause mother loves Art." The hero, drawn neatly in a clean black line, with his compact body, shock of hair and giant smile, recalls everybody from Richard Outcault's Yellow Kid to Bill Watterson's Calvin. McDonnell takes a familiar topic-an imaginative boy who loves to draw-and injects this volume with an exuberant comic-strip sensibility. Ages 3-6. (Apr.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.
Editorials
Publishers Weekly
Art serves as a boy's name and favorite pastime in this cheerful sequence, which echoes Crockett Johnson's Harold and the Purple Crayon. McDonnell (The Gift of Nothing) lures readers along with antic visuals and a catchy rhyming text about "Art and his art/ Can you tell them apart?" The boy stands about an inch-and-a-half tall in the squarish pages, and in one Jackson Pollock-esque spread, he is indeed covered in his medium. Wearing his blue baseball hat backward and attired in Dennis the Menace fashion, he reaches with a brush to fill the vast white space all around him with red, yellow and blue daubs and spatters, zigzags and spirals, drips and dots. Then he grabs a thick black pencil and doodles a flat house, a basic tree and a cartoon dog. All this activity wears him out, and when he wakes from a nap, he sees his creations tacked to the fridge: "Held there by magnets/ (stars and a heart)/ Put there by mother/ 'Cause mother loves Art." The hero, drawn neatly in a clean black line, with his compact body, shock of hair and giant smile, recalls everybody from Richard Outcault's Yellow Kid to Bill Watterson's Calvin. McDonnell takes a familiar topic-an imaginative boy who loves to draw-and injects this volume with an exuberant comic-strip sensibility. Ages 3-6. (Apr.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.Children's Literature
Talented cartoonist Patrick McDonnell, whose comic strip Mutts is widely syndicated throughout the country, has produced a simple but thought-provoking picture book for young readers. The title is a double entendre, both the name of the young protagonist and his obsession. Yes, Art is an artist, whose brush produces graceful pastel-colored squiggles, dramatic splatters, intricate repetitive lines, and a myriad of other shapes. He races from page to page with dizzying energy, producing abstractions that ultimately resolve themselves into doodles illustrating a dream almost as energetic as Art himself. And when Art wakes up, he finds his pictures displayed on the refrigerator because, as McDonnell endearingly puts it, "MOTHER LOVES ART." This would make a delightful read-aloud book for the very young, with its play on words and simple, rhyming text, as well as the engaging illustrations in the artist's signature style. 2006, Little Brown and Company, Ages 3 to 5.—Michele Tremaine