my childhood illustrated

As I sit here, basking in the sunshine of an early spring morning in the gleaming Emerald City, reading magical tales from many lands and feasting on its illustrations, I reminisce about the fantastical depictors of my favorite story tale pastimes that captured my heart and eye since and while I was a child. Let me share with you my favorite illustrators that contributed to my love of its story. I certainly will raise my children on these visual and story delights.

The whimsical Quentin Blake, illustrating for Roald Dahl’s Matilda, The BFG, and his other mad stories.

[The BFG]

[Matilda]

Garth Williams, illustrating for E. B. White in Charlotte’s Web (as well as Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House Series and many Golden Books)

Is this not how we remember Charlotte, Wilbur, Fern, and the other barnyard friends?

[Charlotte's Web]

And lastly but certainly not the leastly…

Pauline Baynes who took my hand and helped me remember moments of C.S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia like the meeting of Lucy and Mr. Tumnus, the bouncing dufflepuds on the island of Coriakin, and where we first find Puddleglum the marshwiggle.

[The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe]

[The Voyage of the Dawn Treader]

[The Silver Chair]

My imagination will indeed carry on, but many of these images will remain.

Early Spring

Once more the Heavenly Power
Makes all things new,
And domes the red-plowed hills
With loving blue;
The blackbirds have their wills,
The throstles too.

Opens a door in Heaven;
From skies of glass
A Jacob's ladder falls
On greening grass,
And o'er the mountain-walls
Young angels pass.

Before them fleets the shower,
And burst the buds,
And shine the level lands,
And flash the floods;
The stars are from their hands
Flung through the woods,

The woods with living airs
How softly fanned,
Light airs from where the deep,
All down the sand,
Is breathing in his sleep,
Heard by the land.

O, follow, leaping blood,
The season's lure!
O heart, look down and up,
Serene, secure,
Warm as the crocus cup,
Like snow-drops, pure!

Past, Future glimpse and fade
Through some slight spell,
A gleam from yonder vale,
Some far blue fell;
And sympathies, how frail,
In sound and smell!

Till at thy chuckled note,
Thou twinkling bird,
The fairy fancies range,
And, lightly stirred,
Ring little bells of change
From word to word.

For now the Heavenly Power
Makes all things new,
And thaws the cold, and fills
The flower with dew;
The blackbirds have their wills,
The poets too.

-Alfred Lord Tennyson

Image: Alphonse Mucha, Spring, From The Seasons series, 1896
This colour lithograph by the Czech artist Mucha depicts a fair lady beckoning in the new season of crocuses, cherry blossoms, and all things new.

Hello spring, We welcome you!