“This is the whole secret—this is an alphabet,” children’s book creator Ed Emberley has told Cambridge artist and writer Caleb Neelon about the philosophy behind his celebrated how-to-draw books.
Take a triangle, a circle and rectangle, some letters and numbers, arrange them in various combinations and, Emberley argues, you can draw almost anything.
“We can write so easily because we have an alphabet with a small number of letters,” Emberley has said. “Everything is made of that small number of letters. The same is true of imaging. If you can reduce things to a simple alphabet, then all you do is take those ‘letters’ and put them together.”
Emberley’s ideal of making drawing accessible to anyone is at the heart of the exhibition “I Could Do That! The Picture Book Art of Ed Emberley,” curated by Neelon, on view at the Eric Carle Museum in Amherst from Dec.18, 2021, to June 12, 2022. The exhibition features sketches, handmade book dummies, woodcut blocks, color separations and other original art from more than 20 picture books, including his Caldecott Medal-winning 1967 book “Drummer Hoff”; his popular “Drawing Book” series, which began in the 1970s; and his 1992 hit “Go Away, Big Green Monster!”
Emberley, now 90, was born in Malden, Massachusetts, on Oct. 19, 1931, and grew up in Cambridge’s Central Square during the Depression. Beginning in 1950, he studied at Massachusetts School of Art in Boston (now Massachusetts College of Art and Design, where he met a fashion design major named Barbara who would become his wife), then Rhode Island School of Design in Providence. He painted signs and dug ditches in New Jersey and New York State for two years in between as a member of the U.S. Army.
After college, he became a paste-up artist, then cartoonist at American Mail Advertising in Boston. He launched his own shop on Boston’s Boylston Street with three other designers in 1961 and drew his first children’s book, “The Wing on a Flea,” a playful introduction to shapes.
“Mr. Emberley does a marvelous job in making sure they [shapes] are seen, setting off, by the use of bright color, each shape from the rest of the page,” George Woods wrote in The New York Times. “Only a real square would deny that here is a wonderful, lively way to learn.” The book was named one of the 10 “best illustrated children’s books” of 1961 by The New York Times Book Review (coming in tenth, in case you’re wondering).
The growing Emberley family moved into a three-century-old house overlooking the river in Ipswich, Massachusetts, in 1962. Barbara wrote several books that Ed illustrated. She and later their daughter and son made drawings to fill in the books’ colors. (As the kids became adults, they followed their parents into the children’s book creator business.)
Emberley’s work ranged from cheery primers (shapes, ABCs) to folk tales (Paul Bunyan, Noah’s ark) to American history (inventions, colonial life, “The American West,” Yankee Doodle) to science (marine life, ladybugs, birds). His illustration style shifted from rough-hewn woodcuts to blocks of flat color and fine crow quill pen lines in his “cartoon modern” drawings. At the time, publishers would usually only publish one book from him per year—not enough to survive on, considering the modest pay advances. Multiple styles helped him line up more work.
In 1967, “One Wide River to Cross”—Barbara’s rendition of the biblical tale of Noah’s Ark animated by Ed’s illustrations—was a runner up for children’s publishing highest honor, the Caldecott Medal. “Emberley puts the verses into illustrative form with masterly woodcuts, inked on brightly colored soft-grained pages that are a perfect mix of idea and image,” Barbara Novak O’Doherty wrote in The New York Times.
Emberley won the Caldecott the following year for “Drummer Hoff”—a rhyme about readying a cannon to fire (“Kahbahblooom”). The book is a tour de force of old time woodcut illustration merging into psychedelia. “Barbara Emberley adapted this old folk verse, and husband Ed produced the stylized full-color illustrations. Irresistible for reading aloud, for memorizing, for pointing out all sorts of jolly details in the drawings,” Eve Merriam wrote in The New York Times.
Throughout the 1960s, Emberley produced at a furious pace. “Drummer Hoff” is just the most famed of at least three books he published in 1967. He thought he’d earned the privilege of taking his time on his next book (which would become 1973’s “Suppose You Met A Witch” by Ian Serraillier). But as the project dragged on, his editor nudged him to get back into print, so Emberley quickly drafted a basic how-to book. “Ed Emberley’s Drawing Book of Animals” appeared in 1970, followed by “Ed Emberley’s Drawing Book of Faces” in 1975, “Ed Emberley’s Great Thumbprint Drawing Book” in 1977, and so on—a long line of drawing books that have gone on to sell more than a million copies.
“The opening page shows the simple elements—triangles, squares, circles and combinations of the three—from which whole worlds of nature, agriculture, transport and high jinks can be constructed,” Selma Lanes wrote in The New York Times about a 1973 entry in the series. “…They should be snatched up by every child or adult who ever wished he could draw more than a straight line.”
“It makes kids feel good,” Emberley tells Neelon in an essay for the Carle Museum exhibition. “The most important thing for me when I made a book is that you, the reader, would succeed, get a habit of success. … That’s the point, not to turn you into an artist, but to give you the habit of success.”
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If this is the kind of coverage of arts, cultures and activisms you appreciate, please support Wonderland by contributing to Wonderland on Patreon. And sign up for our free, occasional newsletter so that you don’t miss any of our reporting. (All content ©Greg Cook 2022 or the respective creators.)