Patricia MacLachlan (Sarah, Plain and Tall; What You Knew First) imagines the childhood influences that might have shaped the artist Henri Matisse in spare, poetic text that gives flight to Hadley Hooper's (Here Come the Girl Scouts!) relief-print compositions.
Hooper pictures the "dreary town in northern France where the skies were gray" in dove-gray tones with only a couple of lighted windows along the street. But inside, the walls of young Henri's home brighten thanks to the painted plates his mother makes. Hooper depicts birds on trees that resemble Matisse's later cutouts, and a cheery palette and patterns that mimic the swirling fabrics in the artist's paintings. MacLachlan lays out the facts that may have played out on Matisse's canvas: in his mill town, "people wove silks with colors all tangled." Looms stretch from side to side and from foreground to background in Hooper's artwork; her delightfully unevenly applied paints give her relief prints added texture and depth.
MacLachlan explains through context the idea of "iridescence" (explaining that the pigeons' colors "changed with the light as they moved"), and connects this with Matisse's later works, as "light and movement" come into play with Hooper's rendering of a segment (roughly the lower two-thirds) of Dance I (1909). From the moment MacLachlan poses the question, "Would it be a surprise that you grew up to be a fine painter...?" Hooper represents Matisse as adult-child twins. They first appear on opposite sides of the same ladder, and always in the same space. An enchanting meditation on the making of an artist. --Jennifer M. Brown, children's editor, Shelf Awareness