Showing posts with label William Steig. Show all posts

Saturday, September 25, 2021

William Steig / Love and Laughter

William Steig

William Steig: Love and Laughter

Norman Rockwell Museum Exhibition to Showcase Donated Illustration Art Collection

from “The King of Cartoons”

William Steig: Love and Laughter

on View June 12 through October 31, 2010

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OvaT9ZrJVkE

Stockbridge, MA, May 10, 2010- Once named the “King of Cartoons” by Newsweek magazine, William Steig (1907-2003) is renowned for his uproarious comic art, and such best-selling illustrated books as the

Caldecott-winning Sylvester and the Magic Pebble, and Shrek! (the inspiration for the blockbuster DreamWorks animated films). A new exhibition explores the breadth of this true American master’s inspired career, from his earliest New Yorker cartoons to his buoyant magazine covers and brilliantly funny reflections on love and life. Accompanying the artist’s work will be a collection of three-dimensional sculptures and assemblages created by Jeanne Steig, a gifted artist and author, and William Steig’s wife of 35 years. The installation reveals the joys of their creative co-habitation and the emergence of themes in both artists’ work which speak to their shared vision. William Steig: Love and Laughter is on view at Norman Rockwell Museum from June 12 through October 31, 2010.

THE NEW YORKER

Covers

The Amazing Bone: Scrabboonit!

The Amazing Bone
William Steig
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1976

Helen Duthie
22 September 2013

The text

A book that gets away with featuring a small bone (look inside the piggy's handbag on the cover) as not just a character but a hero deserves attention just for the gall of it. But then we are talking of the same author with a story where the main character turns into a rock (yes, a rock) and remains a rock for a large part of the story (Sylvester and the Magic Pebble), the same author who wrote a story about a rabbit who can turn into a rusty nail at will, and includes the angst-ridden question 'Do nails die?' (Solomon the Rusty Nail), the guy who wrote a story about a man becoming a dog and not being able to communicate to his wife who he really was (Caleb and Kate), the very same man who introduced young readers to the art of abbreviation well before mobile phone texting was invented (CDB!) and the same dude who manages to conjure up a nightmare scene in which the nightmarishness of it all is the sickly niceness of some disgustingly loving children (Shrek!).

Solomon The Rusty Nail: Do nails die?

Voice: Helen Duthie

Saturday 26 April 2016

Solomon, The Rusty Nail.

William Steig.

Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1985.

Today is World Book Day and we're celebrating by sharing one of our favourite read-alouds ever.

Solomon, The Rusty Nail is the story of a rabbit who has the intriguingly useless power of turning into a rusty nail and back into a rabbit at will. What starts off as a seemingly fun and fairly innocuous party trick, turns out to be life-saving first and existentially anguishing later, before a happy ending the reader is kept from expecting until the last moment.

You can read more about what we like about William Steig in our review of another all-time favourite, The Amazing Bone where I also mention Solomon, and other Steig stories about transformation and angst in inanimate objects.

WE READ IT LIKE THIS

DRAGON

William Steig / Love and Laughter

William Steig / The New Yorker / Covers

The Amazing Bone by William Steig / Review

William Steig / Solomon The Rusty Nail / Do nails die?

My hero / William Steig by Jon Klassen

RIMBAUD

A la Une du New Yorker / William Steig

DE OTROS MUNDOS

William Steig / El rey de las caricaturas
William Steig, creador de 'Shrek', dibujante de borrachos y sátiros
Cantos al Riesgo y al Misterio / La obra para niños de William Steig

Friday, June 27, 2014

My hero / William Steig by Jon Klassen

William Steig

My hero:

William Steig by Jon Klassen

There's no copying Steig, no map to follow. The only common thread I can find in his stories and illustrations is a gentle, empathetic voice saying: 'Just keep going. You'll figure it out'

William Steig / Love and Laughter

William Steig / The New Yorker / Covers

The Amazing Bone by William Steig / Review

William Steig / Solomon The Rusty Nail / Do nails die?

Friday 27 June 2014

illiam Steig is a mystery to me. Most of the time, when you find someone whose work you admire so much, the impulse is to try to parse it, to find some seams, to open them up a little and see how the thing is put together so you can admire it from the inside, and probably steal a little from the inside, too. But Steig's books are like perfect smooth stones, complete in themselves, with no seams to be found. The only thing you can do is hold them and enjoy the holding.

William Steig

I think the reason his design is so elusive is that he doesn't seem to have thought of it as design at all. His books are about any number of things, sometimes about donkeys that get turned into rocks, sometimes about island-stranded mice, sometimes about people's marriages, sometimes about wandering good samaritan dogs. Sometimes they involve magic, sometimes they depend on the harshness of the real world. There is a sense of him following his nose in what he decides to write about, and in the storytelling itself. You can't guess which way any of it is going to go, and you can feel him enjoying that. This is rare on its own, but then he always has the skill to bring together what seems to be a lot of spur-of-the-moment choices and make them into stories that land so perfectly and satisfyingly and feel so inevitable in their endings.

His illustrations have the same quality. The drawings are made up of small marks and dashes and look as if he just kept coming up with small areas of detail until he thought he had enough on the page. There's never one clean lyrical line, but a series of small quick ones that are making up the shape. This kind of drawing suggests an unorganised mess, but when you step back and look at it all at once, it's a living, breathing place, and the small marks and dashes are all serving to make one cohesive thing.

There's no copying him, there's no map to follow. He didn't need one. The only common thread that I can find in his stories and his methods is a gentle, empathetic voice saying: "Just keep going. You'll figure it out."