The mouse

Toys are made to look like them.

There are darling illustrated storybooks about them.

I bought the children's book, "The Tale of Fancy Nancy" years ago just because I thought this little mouse was so cute covering her boo boo with a cabbage leaf (a nut had fallen on her nose).

But then a real mouse moved into my house.

I had been hearing a racket in the kitchen at night for about a week and thought it was just Violet. But one night I had had enough and when I got up to see what the heck she was doing, discovered that she was fast asleep right next to me. Hmmm. Odd.

I couldn't see anything in the kitchen so all that noise must be coming from...a mouse! This was a first. I've never had mice in the house before because up to now, I've had a working mouse-catcher named Violet. But Violet's getting old.....so I guess she retired and forgot to tell me.

I bought a livetrap, set it, went to bed, and fifteen minutes later...the bold little thing had been caught.

(This photo was taken in the morning after the mouse spent the entire night trying to chew his way out of the trap.)

And now it was time to find a new home for that mouse fast because that hole in the plastic was getting bigger by the minute.

I got ready for work, put the mouse and the trap in the back of the car and then started driving. But that mouse was making such a racket, I made the decision to get him out of my car fast. Rather than release him into a nice park on my way to work, I made a quick right turn and found myself in a lower income neighborhood. I stopped the car, took the trap out and then after opening it just a smidge......that mouse suddenly leapt 8 feet in the air and scrambled up someone's driveway.

When I told this story to Dick he was just appalled. "Maria, those people have a hard enough time without you driving by and flinging vermin at them." Uh. I hadn't really thought that part out. :-/

The days and nights after that little event were nice and quiet. I felt bad for the mouse since it's winter and all but it was good to have him gone.

I then got this email via Meg:

hi maria...

no need ta worry 'bout me. i got me a gig playing the ivories down on
troost at the homeless shelter. i miss your pot roast something fierce
though, i tell all my stinky buds about it every night, as we crunch on our moldin' leftovers.

PSST...tell my cuzzins back at the okeefe dishwasher hotel, howdy for me, maybe ill hike back home in the spring with all my pals,...for our seasonal reunion.

miss ya.

lil'chewy

And sure enough, there soon was evidence of another mouse in the kitchen. Feeling smug about how easy and fast it was to catch the first one, I knew I could handle this. I made a little peanut butter sandwich on a toasted English muffin and placed it in the trap. The next morning?

The mouse had taken the sandwich out of the trap (without having the trap go off!) and carried the little repast about 18 inches away, untouched, no nibbles, all muffin pieces where they should be, and just left it. Left it! Like it was a message. A personal message to me.

I watched the news that night and one of the things they reported was that it was very cold outdoors so mice were moving indoors. Huh? There must be a lot of other local people having to deal with this same problem...which does lead me to think in a paranoid but informed sort of way......that that creepy mouse might have been caught and then flung back to my house during a drive-by.

And now he's baaaaaaaaaaaack.

And he's mad.

"Crictor" by Tomi Ungerer

"Crictor" is the story of a boa constrictor that was sent to a Madame Bodot (who lived in a French village) as a birthday present from her son (who studied reptiles and lived in Africa).

The gift of the snake was a total surprise to her but after going to the zoo and finding out the snake was not venomous, she decided to keep it and raise it.

She did all sorts of things to make sure Crictor was happy... such as decorate her home with palm trees so he'd feel more at home, bring Crictor with her when she went shopping, knit him a sweater...

...and let him sleep in a bed all of his own. 

Madame Bodot was a schoolteacher and would also bring Crictor to the classroom where he learned his lessons along with the other students. He would also play jump rope with the girls (he being the rope!), let the boy scouts twist him about to learn their knots and retrieve kites that got stuck in high places.

One day while Madame Bodot and Crictor were at the cafe (oh, I could see myself doing the exact same thing-ha ha ha), she was told about some burglaries that were happening in the neighborhood.

Sure enough, Madame Bodot's home was broken into that night and she was gagged and tied to a chair! When Crictor finally woke up from his sleep, he got right in there, surprised the burglar and then coiled around him so he couldn't get away. The shrieks from the burglar are what brought the police since Madame was still tied up and gagged.

Crictor was called a hero! He was given a medal, a statue was made of him, and a park was named after him too. And then he and Madame Bodot and everyone else in the village lived happily ever after.

  

Until yesterday, I had not seen this book since I was a little kid. The scene of Crictor in bed is exactly how I remembered it. However, the one thing in this book that really stood out for me (and my sister Laurie) were the letters and numbers that Crictor was able to shape himself into. Although I had remembered an entire elaborate alphabet, when I looked at the book fresh from the library yesterday, Tomi Ungerer only illustrated eight letters and only seven numbers. Whatever. They still made a heck of an impression on me. :-) The idea that you can make letters and numbers from a snake's body? I owe Mr. Ungerer my introduction to type and graphic design.

Click on the images to see them a little bit bigger since they're kind of hard to see otherwise. :-)

Arthur Szyk and "Andersen's Fairy Tales"

This was another book that I studied real hard when I was a little kid because the drawings were so elaborate and scary. Although we had the 1968 Encyclopedia Britannica in the house, there was nothing in it about monsters or ghosts. I looked. And unfortunately I was born before every little kid got to study dinosaurs in school and become an expert paleontologist. I knew the names of the dinosaurs of course, but monsters....those were the exotic creatures I really wanted to learn more about.

This illustration is for the story, "The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf." I can't quite recall the story but I think this little girl decided she'd rather step on the loaf of bread to cross a puddle rather than ruin her shoes. I'm not sure why pride is considered a deadly sin but pride is what caused this kid to sink into the puddle permanently attached to that loaf of bread, to be carried down, down, down, to be surrounded by lots of monsters in a black, cold cesspool......I think forever. When you're a kid, what's not to like in a story like that? And even better, an illustration like this to look at?

Personally, I think she was just being smart but I'm sure there's a moral message in the story somewhere. And apparently the moral had no effect on me since I think of this story with a weird sort of fondness.

And then there is this one. That pink faced devil still just gives me the creeps.

This illustration for "The Snow Queen" shows three demons holding a mirror that when it reflected anything that was good, would make it look bad and if it reflected anything horrible, would make it look even worse. Sort of like what you find in  a modern day fitting room, you know?

Arthur Szyk did have some illustrations in the book that were really pretty but even the pretty ones had a certain sense of ugly or weird in them. Which I liked.

Dick said one time he wouldn't want to work in a place where everyone was happy. And when I draw, I have to make sure I don't make everything pretty (...because I can really get carried away with that. An art director once told me that I could make anything look pretty and it wasn't meant as a compliment. Ha ha ha.). When things are all calm and happy, or things are all pretty and sweet, you have to have some sort of an edge to make it interesting...although  I think Arthur Szyk used the opposite proportions of pretty and ugly than what I do. :-) But he did make me notice that ugliness or exaggeration or caricature is something really dynamic and will make a character come alive. Also, that a little bit of ugly can make the pretty really stand out.

The Golden Book of Fairy Tales

This is another book that had a big influence on me when I was a little girl. I found the book again in my 30s and was just as smitten with the art. The artist is Adrienne Segur and I think from her, I learned how important the eyes are in the expression of a character.

The one thing I remember from this book was that there was a lot of crying, made more so because of the really large eyes.

Lots and lots of tears. Even the animals had large, soulful eyes (the swan in the above illustration has a falling tear too). Personal journeys were long and hard but eventually rewarded at the end with the life that was meant to be.

People and animals worked together and sometimes the animals became people and sometimes the people became animals. I had such a crush on this drawing of Kipp the falcon boy when I was little. :-)

This one illustration is so beautiful. I love how the little girl in the center has a glow around her. I also appreciate the accurate depiction of wild flowers around her and the accidental insect or bird that manage to get themselves into such scenes. As always, click on the image to see a larger version.

Some of the illustrations in the book are in full color and others are done just in pencil. I think the paintings started out like the detailed pencil drawings but then a watercolor wash was applied over each area that needed color. 

The book was originally published in France in 1956 but was republished in the U.S. a year or so later as "The Golden Book of Fairy Tales." However, it was republished again in its original large size in 1999 and is still available.  :-)

"Parsley" by Ludwig Bemelmans

Most people are familiar with Ludwig Bemelmans because of his Madeline series of books. My sister Laurie and I were more smitten by his book Parsley (not that we didn't love Madeline too).

Parsley is the story of an old twisted tree and stag who both lived together in a forest. The two had grown old together having survived many lumbermen and hunters who had entered their forest.

But one day a hunter spied the old stag and was just about to shoot it when the tree pushed the hunter down the mountain with the result that the hunter would "hunt no more." But before the hunter fell over the cliff, the tree grabbed his binoculars (supposedly the hunter was based on Ernest Hemingway).

Parsley was a very old stag. The reason he didn't see the hunter was because his eyesight was not as good as it used to be. But now that he had those binoculars always available, all Parsley had to do was look through them to see if any hunters entered the forest to cause him or his family harm. And you know the rest, everybody lived safely and happily ever after.

Besides being drawn to a story of nature triumphing over people's evil (Laurie and I will still side with the animal's point of view on things every time), we were both in love with all the detail in this book. I haven't seen the actual book since I was a little girl but I remember that each page with the text on it would have a border of some specific flower, usually with some bugs and things crawling in there somewhere too. Laurie and I loved that sort of detail. Here's what's going on behind the stag in the above illustration. To a little kid, it was a lot of fun to search for all this hidden stuff.

I found a republished softcover version of the book in the 80s and bought it for my sister. We were astonished at our memories because the illustrations were incredibly moire-ed and the detail? I think the illustrations used in this particular book must have been reproduced from an old "Woman's Day" magazine (or something similar) because there was no detail. I didn't think my perception of art was that off when I was little but I didn't think to question it because of my experiences with the Kirchner painting. 

I recently found a Bemelmans Parsley painting on a gallery site and am happy to discover that his painting is just as beautiful to me now as what I remember from when I was a little girl. I am relieved to know that the reprint I picked up was not what the original looked like.

My sister and I both grew up to become illustrators and to live with lots and lots of animals. Happily and safely ever after. And with much detail. The end. :-)

Madalene and Louisa Pasley, Victorian Entomologists

I'm not sure how I feel about having a checkpoint list to confirm whether I'm legitimately drawn to something or not. Independent thinking and slightly naughty kids? Check. Art created by kids? Check. Insects? Check and check. I might bore myself with my newly discovered predictability but I still like what's on my checkpoint list. :-)

I bought the book "The Adventures of Madalene and Louisa, Pages from the album of L. and M. S. Pasley, Victorian Entomologists" a long time ago. It was published in 1980, is out of print, but you can still find it at some on-line booksellers.

The two girls who created the stories and drawings were sisters and created this album from ages 12-16 (they were born in 1847 and 1848). No relative seems to know why the two girls chose to portray themselves as "middle-aged spinsters"-just one of those odd private jokes between sisters that would set them off in laughter I suppose. I think these two girls were absolutely brilliant (and goofballs at the same time). I love to find evidence of silliness like this from the past.

These girls loved to "entomologize." That's all they wanted to do but sometimes they were forced to hang out with their older sister Georgie who they said "had been sent away to a school where she was made to drink quantities of calomel which had made her SOUR." The album was drawn and written by the two sisters (not Georgie) and tells their stories of chasing insects despite their sister Georgie and Mr. Mitchell (their drawing instructor) messing with their plans. Those kids were on a mission with their bugs. They were just as determined to go after the bugs as the bugs were determined to thwart their plans in unexpected ways. Reminds me of my summer. :-)

The story of "The Rare Larva"

We discover a beetle larva in a dead tree,

with great effort it is secured

in a collecting case.

It however bursts the ends out

and another method

has to be adopted.

I think it's really funny that one of the sister's faces turns red with all the exertion...but not the other. :-)

I also think it's funny how CONSUMED they are with the chasing of bugs. And that Mr. Mitchell (in the above illustration) is totally unaware of being surrounded by insects (for him, he could only see Lake Windermere, that was apparently the only thing he thought worth drawing). He has no idea that there is a big mosquito thing drilling a hole in his head. When you're aware of insects, they look just like this illustration- they become huge and they are everywhere. What is bewildering to me is that there are so many Mr. Mitchells out there, people who just don't see that there is a whole other world being lived around them.

I'm thinking owning a camera might have something to do with it too. Sherry said that once I started taking pictures, I would soon be looking at the world with a photographer's eyes. When I get a better camera, I am going to be insufferable.