Tomie dePaola has been a wonderful, prolific writer and illustrator of children's books for decades. He died a few days ago at the age of 85 and of course the sad news is pushed into the background by...you know.
His work covered a wide range of topics and many of his roughly 200 books are playful and light-hearted. But he seemed to have a fondness for the bible and Christian figures. Both St. Francis and St. Patrick are subjects of his creativity and there is a book of bible stories as well. Learning about his early years offers an explanation. This is from a Boston Globe piece from 2007.
After graduating from Pratt in 1956, he decided to become a Benedictine monk - the Benedictines are specialists in art and liturgy - and spent enough time (a few months) at Vermont's Weston Priory to know he was not monk material. Still, his religious sensibility is everywhere in his work, largely at the intersection of art, legend, and devotion. Besides his books, he has created liturgical art in churches, including several wall paintings at the Benedictine Glastonbury Abbey in Hingham. His house is filled with images of the Virgin of Guadalupe, which he collects along with other Spanish/Indian folk art. As he showed an interior room adorned like a small Mexican chapel, he mused, "I have kept the beautiful things from the Catholic Church."
Jonah
Depoala did marry, but divorced a couple of years later. Eventually he came to an acceptance that he was gay, and in the late 70's wrote a book, Oliver Button is a Sissy, which was autobiographical in a sense. I'm glad that he was able to maintain and sustain his faith through the years and express it through his books. He was a gift to people of all ages.
Do you know his books? Do you want to find some at the library?...oh, wait...
Two April fools went for a long walk on the beach and into the woods. Read more about it in my Groundling blog, please.
https://groundlingearthyheavenly.blogspot.com/2020/04/healing-for-two-april-fools.html
No comments:
Post a Comment