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osprey_archer) wrote2025-06-02 12:16 pm
osprey_archer) wrote2025-06-02 12:16 pm
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Picture Book Monday: World More Beautiful and Because Barbara
In the process of exploring Barbara Cooney’s oeuvre, I discovered that not one but TWO picture book biographies of Cooney were published in 2024: Angela Burke Kunkel’s World More Beautiful: The Life and Art of Barbara Cooney and Sarah Mackenzie’s Because Barbara: Barbara Cooney Paints Her World.
The title of World More Beautiful comes from Barbara Cooney’s Miss Rumphius, in which the main character resolves to see faraway places and make the world more beautiful. The text draws inspiration from Cooney’s own voice, the sort of chanting cadence which you find not only the books she wrote but also in some books she only illustrated, like The Ox-Cart Man and Roxaboxen, whose “amethyst and sea-green” is echoed here in loving color lists: “sapphire and cerulean, azure and ultramarine.”
Becca Stadtlander’s gouache illustrations also echo Cooney’s style, particularly the breath-taking final illustration of Barbara Cooney standing a field of lupines gazing out at the water in her beloved Maine. A gentle and loving tribute to a beloved artist and author.
Then I went on to Sarah Mackenzie’s Because Barbara: Barbara Cooney Paints Her World, illustrated by Eileen Ryan Ewen, who went the opposite approach of making her illustrations not at all like Barbara Cooney’s even when illustrated some of Cooney’s favorite subjects, like lupines and the Maine coast. As I adore Cooney’s illustrations, this was a bit of a letdown at first, but upon reread it grew on me: I like all the little details Ewen wove in, cats and spilled glasses of juice and leaves blowing in the wind alongside ideas.
Also enchanted to discover from this book that Barbara Cooney was “a picnicker of the first water.” Who among us would NOT want to be remembered as such? I really need to raise my picnicking game.
The title of World More Beautiful comes from Barbara Cooney’s Miss Rumphius, in which the main character resolves to see faraway places and make the world more beautiful. The text draws inspiration from Cooney’s own voice, the sort of chanting cadence which you find not only the books she wrote but also in some books she only illustrated, like The Ox-Cart Man and Roxaboxen, whose “amethyst and sea-green” is echoed here in loving color lists: “sapphire and cerulean, azure and ultramarine.”
Becca Stadtlander’s gouache illustrations also echo Cooney’s style, particularly the breath-taking final illustration of Barbara Cooney standing a field of lupines gazing out at the water in her beloved Maine. A gentle and loving tribute to a beloved artist and author.
Then I went on to Sarah Mackenzie’s Because Barbara: Barbara Cooney Paints Her World, illustrated by Eileen Ryan Ewen, who went the opposite approach of making her illustrations not at all like Barbara Cooney’s even when illustrated some of Cooney’s favorite subjects, like lupines and the Maine coast. As I adore Cooney’s illustrations, this was a bit of a letdown at first, but upon reread it grew on me: I like all the little details Ewen wove in, cats and spilled glasses of juice and leaves blowing in the wind alongside ideas.
Also enchanted to discover from this book that Barbara Cooney was “a picnicker of the first water.” Who among us would NOT want to be remembered as such? I really need to raise my picnicking game.
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In conclusion, yes! I would like to be picnicker of the first water!
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Sometimes in antique shops I'll come across picnic sets where there's an entire picnic dish set packed into a picnic basket. They always appeal to me in their neatness, but would I be able to get together enough picnickers to do such a set true justice? Not to mention the necessity of bringing at least one more basket to carry the actual food.
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