Customer Reviews

One Hole in the Road

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My 2 1/2 year old son loves this book. The pictures are colorful, and tell a great story. It is one of those books that is simple, yet filled with action - easy to animate as you read it and look at the pictures.

Trying to fix a small pothole is apparently no easy task. Nor, according to Dan Yaccarino, was illustrating this book. He regards it as a turning point in the way he approaches his work which includes creating images for magazines, newspapers and ad campaigns in the United States and around the world. However, as Julie Cummins points out in Children's Book Illustration and Design (II), his free-wheeling and light hearted illustrations are natural for children's books, and in 1992 he wrote and illustrated his first picture book, Big Brother Mike. Using gouache on water color paper, Yaccarino shows us what its like to be the younger sibling and the trials and tribulations of being 'the baby'. But he also hoped to show all the good things that go along with having an older brother (also called Mike) and he succeeded!

A comparison of the style Yaccarino used to make these points, and later to capture the rhythmic sounds and shapes of demolition in BamBamBam, with that emerging in Circle Dogs and achieving maturity in Deep in the Jungle, reveals the extent to which this picture book is, indeed, a 'turning point':

"It took great pains for me to pare the illustrations down to their most essential elements: shape and colour. What appears to be the simplest of images is the result of much deliberation and discarded illustrations."

One hole in the road is an early result of an artist's struggle to derive form from the pure shapes of very generic visual concepts. Recognition that young children do this naturally in their own drawings is reflected in Johnathan Fineberg's fascinating exploration of the subject. In each case, people are reduced to the alternative of frontality and profile which provides the most informative sight for each single person or object -- four spotlights flashing, five sirens blaring. Young childlren understand these translations from model to picture and recognise an artist's image as an equivalent of the former created within the condition of the medium, in this picture book, paint.

Increasingly, Yaccarino's art captures the two most important features of the kind of art that appeals to young children: on the one hand, freedom from dependence on the shapes of nature; on the other, the basic shapes and colours whereby things are visually understood. These include the geometric primaries and black, white, reds, blues and yellows from which the world composes itself.

These results are not achieved by many pcture book artists, and not easily as Yaccarino makes clear in his account of the process recorded by Jill Bosset in Children's Book Illustration: Step by step technique - a unique guide to the masters.