As an illustrator, painter, printmaker, writer, folklorist, and storyteller, Ashley Bryan has crafted a vibrant and amazingly varied body of work for both children and adults. Bryan’s African-American heritage has inspired much of this remarkable output, including the lion’s share of the more than thirty children’s books he has written and/or illustrated since the late 1960s. Throughout his career, however, Bryan has also remained open to all sorts of other creative influences, including Japanese brush painting, medieval woodblock art, Mother Goose nonsense, and the thoughtful comments of his Maine schoolchild friends. Time and again, he has borne out the truth of the Tuscan proverb that “the story is not beautiful if nothing is added to it.” Something, that is, of the storyteller’s own deeply felt personal experience.

Perhaps no other living artist can claim to have both taught painting to kindergartners and chaired the art department of a major American institution of higher learning — Dartmouth College. To Bryan, however, there is nothing incongruous about his “range.” A wiry, tall man with a warm, booming voice and ready laugh, he approaches every aspect of his work as a learning experience and has therefore always felt a genuine sense of comradeship with his students and readers, whatever their age. Although Bryan no longer teaches, he spends half of each year on the road, giving poetry readings and storytelling performances for schoolchildren and other audiences throughout the world.

Bryan and I have been crossing paths at conferences, and catching occasional meals together, for years. For this interview, he spoke with me by telephone from his studio in Maine on October 30, 1999.

 

LEONARD S. MARCUS: How did you get started making books?

ASHLEY BRYAN: In the public school I attended in the South Bronx during the Great Depression years, we began early on making books about whatever we learned. As we learned the alphabet, for instance, we did pictures for the letters and then sewed them together, and our teacher would say, “You’ve just published an alphabet book!” That was the beginning. There was a lot of fun and play associated with our bookmaking. Our teacher would say, “You’re the author, you’re the illustrator, you’re the publisher. Take it home. You’re the distributor!” I got such a warm response at home from my parents and brothers and sisters and the cousins who were growing up with us that I just kept making books as gifts. I never stopped, and it was that initial satisfaction that sustained me later, when there was no commercial interest in my work. It took over fifteen years before my work was finally picked up on.

Q: Despite the Depression, you seem to have had a wonderful introduction to art and learning.

A: Thanks to the Works Progress Administration, there were free art and music classes in the community where we lived and throughout the country. My parents sent us children out to whatever was free. They said, “Learn to entertain yourselves.” That idea was behind it all. So my brothers, my sisters, and I were all painting, drawing, and playing instruments. The WPA teachers were very exciting for me as a nine-, ten-, and eleven-year-old. I might paint an apple red or green, for instance, and then the instructor would show us work of the Impressionists and explain how a fruit could be explored in many different colors while still giving the impression of its color. I was fascinated and would play around with these ideas.

Q: What was it like growing up in the Bronx during those years?

A: Our neighborhood and my public school were ethnically and racially quite mixed, with German, Irish, Italian, Jewish, and black people living on the same streets. There was a fairly tolerant atmosphere. Next to our school was a German Lutheran church, and it was so big and so pretty that we children said to our parents, “We want to go to that great big pretty church.” So my mother did take us. Services were both in German and in English. And we grew up in that church, which was always active in the community.

Q: Did you go to the public library in your neighborhood?

A: Oh, yes. Although we children could not afford to buy books, we borrowed books from the library and felt that they were our books for the time that we had them out. We used to clip coupons from the daily newspaper, and at a certain point, when you had enough coupons, you could trade them in for a book. It meant so much to me to have a book of my own. I can remember seeing listed among the books to send in for The Sketch Book, by Washington Irving, and thinking it was a book of drawings. So I did send in for it and was surprised to find a drawing only on the title page. At home we had orange crates on which to set our books. That was our library.

Q: Were certain books special to you then?

A: Oh, yes. Basically, it was poetry and folktales and fairy tales, which I read quite exhaustively. Poetry, from Mother Goose to Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses to Eugene Field’s Poems of Childhood to Christina Rossetti’s Sing-Song poems. I loved poetry and I began to explore poetry myself. I didn’t take to novels until later because I didn’t go for the long reading of a book. I loved stories that could be told within a brief span of pages. I relished the language and would go back over words that seemed nicely placed. I would read a paragraph that thrilled me with a sense of adventure or the beauty of words, and would stop, go back, and read it again.

Q: Were you a good student?

A: I was a very good student academically all the way through. I was in high school wondering whether I would be a doctor or lawyer or whatever when I decided that, having always drawn and painted, I wanted to study art. And so during my senior year, I put together a portfolio with the help of my teachers, all of whom were white and were very supportive of me.

Q: Did your parents encourage you, too?

A: I was very fortunate in that it never occurred to them that I would not go on doing what I loved to do. The point my parents always made was that if you are doing something creative and constructive, there is no reason not to continue. And so, as a teacher, I found a way to keep doing what I enjoyed while also continuing to make art. Now when I speak to schoolchildren, I tell them, “You need encouragement. If you can’t get it at home, knock on the door next door and keep on knocking all the way down until you come to someone who will encourage you in the constructive, creative work that you are doing.”

Q: Tell me about your grandmother, the one who spent time with your family when you were growing up.

A: She was such a wonderful person. Granny Sarah Bryan was my father’s mother. Both my parents had left Antigua at the end of World War I and settled in New York City. My grandmother had not seen my father, or all but one of her other children, in many years when she came to visit us in the Bronx. I just loved being with her and got to talking with her and asking her questions. I would sit with her, drawing all the time. I can even remember once drawing her when it was evening and she was in her nightgown sitting on her bed. I was sitting in a nearby chair when a friend walked in and my grandmother, who was very quick, looked up and said, “Ee oh me husbend”—“He is my husband.” She was so witty, and she loved to dance. My book The Dancing Granny (1977) is an African tale collected in Antigua and it has as one of its two main characters a spider called Anansi the trickster. I did that book to bring out the spirit of the dance that my grandmother had in her. She would outdance the great-grandchildren. She used to say, “The music sweet me so!” I used that phrase in retelling the story. In the original, the spider continually gets away with his tricks. That, of course, is generally the point of trickster tales — that the trickster gets away with mischief. But when I was basing my story on the motif, I thought, Well, he might trick my grandma a few times, but she’s eventually going to figure out what he’s up to, and she’s going to get him! So that is why in my version I worked it to the point where she waits for him and catches him before he can get up into that tree, and then they have to dance together, and “As the lead bends / The dance goes on, but the story ends.”

Q: Is that your grandmother pictured in the drawings of The Dancing Granny?

A: Well, it’s her spirit. Children ask: “Could your granny really do that?” And I say, “Listen, my friends, if you don’t exaggerate, a story won’t come true to life.” I used swift brush paintings in the spirit of the Japanese brush painter [Katsushika] Hokusai, in his scenes of everyday life, to capture the swift spirit of the moving figure. When I look at those pictures I can still see my granny alive and spinning. She was about ninety-four when she died.

Q: You served in the army during World War II. Would you tell me about your experiences during those years?

A: I was in my third year in the Cooper Union Art School when I was drafted. It was a time of segregated armies and most blacks were in transportation corps. I was assigned to a stevedore battalion responsible for loading and unloading cargo at docks. I was first stationed in Boston, then sent to Scotland, where we were stationed in Glasgow. Then we went in as part of the Normandy invasion. The beaches were heavily mined, many lives were lost, and I was fortunate in having survived that experience.

Q: It must have been emotionally complicated to be fighting for freedom in a segregated army.

A: It was very difficult when you were finally in it because you went in with ideals but they were quickly weighed down by what you were experiencing. We were continually facing restrictions in both Boston and Glasgow because the army did not want the black soldiers to go out and meet with the white population.

Q: Were you able to continue to draw during those years?

A: I always had drawing materials with me, which I stuffed into my gas mask. Whenever I had an opportunity, I would take out my drawing materials and sketch whatever was going on. In Glasgow, I went to the battalion commander and got permission to attend the Glasgow School of Art. The other fellows, who were faced with the usual restrictions, always supported me when I went off to class because they thought I was putting something over on the officers. I thought I was fighting for my right to keep growing as an artist.

When I returned to Cooper Union to complete my studies, I had an exhibition of the drawings and paintings I had done during the war. But because of the experiences of the army and the war, I found I could not go on directly in art. So instead I did my undergraduate work all over again, as a philosophy major at Columbia University. I was trying to get some understanding of why it is that we continually choose war. Of course there were no answers but I became very caught up in the way the mind works, how man constructs philosophical systems of ethics and politics and aesthetics. Summers, I would come up to Maine, to the Cranberry Isles, which I had discovered while at Cooper Union. I was awarded a scholarship to the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine in its founding year of 1946. I would paint through summer and when I returned to my studies in New York I would always keep a sketchbook at hand. Sketchbooks for me are always the connection to the mystery and wonder of marking a blank space and seeing something emerge from it. And so I would draw but was not able to go more deeply into the work. But as soon as I completed my work at Columbia I went to Aix-en-Provence, in the south of France, where, under the G.I. Bill, I began to paint all day.

Q: Did your interest in philosophy merge with your early interest in folklore? Characters in folk stories so often represent universal types — the trickster, the fool — that add up to a kind of inventory and philosophy of human potential.

A: The mind tends to make connections, and I have always felt that whatever I learn becomes integrated with everything else. And yes, I came to feel that the stories of the world tend to bring us together. I speak of folk stories as a “tender bridge,” as a way of connecting past cultures and times to the present.

Q: When did you begin telling stories before a live audience?

A: It was a natural extension of my work as a teacher. I have always been teaching — at universities, in after-school programs for elementary school children. At the Dalton School in New York I taught drawing and painting to kindergartners and first-graders. All of my work as a teacher has involved story. The most important aspect of story is the way one person speaks to another. Children pick up on story simply from all the things that other people say to them, the answers their parents give, for example, to their questions: “What was it like when you were growing up?” “Would you tell me that story again about when you were on the boat coming over from your country to this country?” All of this is oral tradition to the child. It becomes a part of their lives. If they become writers, they will draw upon those sources. If they don’t become writers, they will still pass those stories along, with their own additions to them. In that sense, story is always going on. When I’m teaching a class in painting and drawing, there’s a kind of storytelling that plays an active part in it as well. I’m not talking now about the literal sense of working from a story in a book, of interpreting visually a tale about a king or queen or a princess. It is also a kind of storytelling when a student, coming to terms with an exercise, finds an inventive way, for instance, of relating a series of straight lines marked across a page to the trunks of trees.

Q: What did you like best about teaching?

A: When I have taught college students, I have loved in particular to work in the introductory courses, teaching basics. Students who had not been drawing or painting for years would begin to make discoveries through the exercises offered. So, for instance, if we worked with straight lines — with divisions between one straight line and another, with questions of spacing and rhythm — we would then go outdoors and draw the trunks of trees. Our goal would be to relate the reality of the trees to the abstraction of lines on a page. I have always tried to connect up with the essentially abstract nature of any art, whether it be dance or painting or poetry.

I would always give my college students set exercises and set limits. I would say, “This is an 8 × 10 paper. This is a pencil. The exercise is to draw these apples on the table. They’re your challenge. When you understand their limits and work with all that you are, then you will be able to surpass those limits.” I would tell them, “A Rembrandt drawing was done on a piece of paper of a certain size and shape and it was because Rembrandt gave of himself that he surpassed the limits of that paper and he was able to create something invaluable with it. That is what we are after.”

Q: How did you approach teaching art to very young children? What did you like to do with them?

A: With the young children it was a question of what they did with me! I enjoyed their absorption in what they were doing. They would become so absorbed that it would be as if time no longer mattered. At the Dalton School, where I taught for many years, I would simply have materials ready for the children — brushes, paper, and a muffin tin for each two children with paints, the primary colors plus green, black, and white. I never said, “Today we’ll do this or we’ll do that.” The children would come in and simply get to work. They would have their ideas. They would go on and on with what they were doing. If a child didn’t have an idea, I might say, “Maybe there were some horses . . .” or some such thing, and right away the child would say, “Don’t tell me, don’t tell me. I know what I want to do!” And they’d go right ahead. My goal was to create a situation in which the children would not be dependent on me but would rather come with a tremendous sense of excitement about whatever it was that they had to offer. I remember one child who day after day painted columns of starlike forms in different colors. The other children said to him, “You’re always painting stars!” And the child kept on painting stars. After a while some of the other children began painting stars, too. But I never said to him, “You’ve already done that,” which is so often what happens to a child. You let the child go to the limit, the exhaustion of possibility, which is what art is about. Any motif is absolutely endless in its possibilities of exploration, and you don’t know beforehand how far a child might like to go with an idea.

Q: Tell me about meeting Jean Karl, the editor with whom you have worked now at Atheneum for more than thirty years.

A: Jean, who founded the children’s-book department at Atheneum, came up to my studio one day in the Bronx. I wasn’t sure what she was interested in, so I brought out paintings to show her of my family and other subjects. She went over to the table where I did my book projects, however, and when she saw the things of that kind that I was doing, she simply decided to send me a contract to illustrate Richard Lewis’s anthology of poems by Rabindranath Tagore, Moon, For What Do You Wait? (1967). Then she asked if she could publish some illustrations I had done for African folktales. I had originally done these paintings, which are often mistaken for block prints or silkscreen paints, for a folklore research project for Pantheon Books. Later the project was bought by the Bollingen Foundation, but my illustrations had, in the end, not been used. I had done the paintings in red, yellow, black, and white — the colors of the ancient rock paintings. I painted them so strictly that I almost felt I was carving an African mask or sculpture as I did them. I then wrote my own retellings of the stories, based on the ethnographers’ summaries. As I did my own research, I realized that I wanted to do what storytellers have always done, to flesh out the story motifs by bringing into them any connections from my own life that I felt might help make the stories, when printed, approach the spirit of the oral tradition. That has been my challenge in all that I have done. The stories of The Ox of the Wonderful Horns and Other African Folktales (1971), for example, follow that pattern. I research the background of the tribe from which the African tale comes. I always acknowledge the source of the story and then set out to make the story my own.

Q: How, more specifically, have you gone about trying to capture a sense of the spoken word on paper?

A: I work from poetry. I use the devices of poetry — close rhyme, rhythm, onomatopoeia, alliteration — to slow the reader and make the reader feel that he or she is hearing a storyteller.

Q: How do you go about deciding on your visual approach to a given book?

A: The art that I have drawn upon comes from many different sources depending on the text. In the case of my books of spirituals, for instance, starting with Walk Together Children (1974), I used block prints in the spirit of medieval European religious block-printed books. I worked from that tradition in order to connect up the spirituals — which a great many people sing but which very few people realize were the creation of black slaves — and the European tradition of religious music and art. I was stirred by the realization that the slaves had created these songs as a way of being free. The slaves were in chains, they suffered, but they had to give forth something rich and beautiful of themselves. There are thousands of these songs, and they are considered our finest contribution to world music. And yet they were completely overlooked in introductory books for children, which is why I began my series.

Q: As a child, did you meet older people living in your neighborhood who remembered the days of slavery?

A: No, and I’m not sure to what extent that history would have been a part of my knowing, and of my asking of questions as a child. You see, in our studies anything about the black world had to come from family or from the community. It wasn’t taught at school. What I got to know of any of the black writers and artists or of black history came from a special reach for it. It was when I was in junior high school or in high school, searching out through my love of poetry, that I first became aware of the poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar, Countee Cullen, and others. Today as I travel around I find that, even though some books are more readily available, a special reach is still needed. Teachers generally still seem unaware of most of the black poets I talk about when I visit schools. They may know of Langston Hughes. My point has always been: They are writing in English; their work is accessible. I illustrated a book of Nikki Giovanni’s poems, The Sun Is So Quiet (1996), which is firmly in the tradition of the childhood poems of Stevenson and Field. Her poems are so fresh and unaffected and yet they are not all that well known.

Q: Tell me more about your interest in the poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar. You edited a book of his work, I Greet the Dawn: Poems (1978).

A: He was pursued constantly for the poems he wrote in black dialect. Those are the poems for which he became well known, but they represent only a small percentage of his work, the rest of which is in standard English, in the tradition of Keats and Shelley. I compiled my collection in order to help bring that other work, which is so very touching, and so accessible, to young peoples’ attention.

Q: Would you talk about the illustration style you have used in recent years for full-color books such as Turtle Knows Your Name (1989) and The Night Has Ears (1999)?

A: I am a trained artist, but a strong feeling for the untrained artist has always endured in me. So I am a sophisticated artist working, at times, within the folk tradition. Working in that way, there is a sort of lessening of ambition, of wanting to be good. You just know it’s going to be — and what is done is going to be right. It’s wonderful to lose yourself in that kind of approach.

Q: Why did you dedicate Turtle Knows Your Name in part to your editor Jean Karl?

A: It was her persistence, I suppose, in keeping after me to do my books, in much the same way that that grandma keeps after the little child in the story to learn his name. Jean has been so wonderful over the years. I doubt that my work would have reached a wider audience than family or friends without her. The book is also dedicated to a little boy who was living on my island here in Maine, where I myself have lived now for over fifty years, and seen whole generations grow up. In some ways, the community atmosphere on the island reminds me very much of the neighborhood in which I was raised.

Q: I’ve read that you like to paint by day and illustrate by night. Why do you divide up your time in that way?

A: Painting is at the center of what I do. As a painter, I love to work directly from the landscape. In Maine, from spring until late October I can be outdoors painting in my garden or down by the ocean. My books are a natural outgrowth of my love of painting. You’ll find that throughout the history of art, painters have loved working from texts. Much of the art in museums comes from books, whether it is the Bible or mythology or history. Everyone who reads is seeing images. The artist wants to draw them down. So I have always to find my balance between painting and books.

Q: Have you ever revisited your old South Bronx neighborhood?

A: On visits to New York, I do. I have family and friends still living there. About ten years ago, there was a fire at St. John’s Evangelical Lutheran Church, where I spent so much of my childhood — that beautiful big church we talked about earlier, with the high vaulted ceilings and stained-glass windows from Germany or Italy with their depictions of Bible stories acted out by blondes and brunettes. In that fire a major window, a resurrection panel over the altar, was destroyed. I have always supported the church from a distance and after the fire the church contacted me about designing the replacement window. I had been working for years with beach glass that I pick up here, making my own little windows, but had never done a stained-glass window before. I was thrilled to have this opportunity. I designed a black Christ rising from the tomb with the three Marys — each a different shade of black, to indicate the range of colors of black people in the United States — bearing their ointments. And so my window is up there in the church now, glowing along with all the others.