Meditations in purple
Children may have less height, vocabulary, and power than adults do. But children’s books are not a lesser art form.
Consider Crockett Johnson’s Harold and the Purple Crayon. At first glance, the book looks self-explanatory. What more can be said about a boy, a crayon, and the moon?
Quite a lot. The 1955 classic’s deceptively transparent aesthetic makes it an ideal case study in what we miss when we neglect the art and design of the picture book.
Paul Klee once described drawing as “taking a line for a walk,” and this is exactly how Harold and the Purple Crayon begins. Harold decides “to go for a walk in the moonlight,” draws a moon, and then an entire 64-page adventure in which no line is wasted, and nothing erased.
Johnson creates the illusion that Harold is just making this up as he goes along, but the book is actually one giant drawing, revealed one page at a time. Caught up in the narrative and the story’s apparent simplicity, we don’t notice Johnson’s meticulous design. The invisibility of his artifice makes it seem like we are witnessing artistic creation in real time, and is one reason why Harold and the Purple Crayon has captivated readers for the past 70 years.
…picture books are an ideal place to begin looking closely.
The book has held my attention for most of my life. I read it 50 years ago, began writing about Crockett Johnson 25 years ago, and published his biography 12 years ago. But you don’t need decades to look closely at art that interests you. You need only to focus and to ask questions.
If you read Harold and the Purple Crayon or any of its sequels when you were a child, how has your understanding of the books changed over time? Which left a greater impact on your memory—the books’ words or their images? (Former US Poet Laureate Rita Dove, who counts Harold and the Purple Crayon as her first favorite book, remembers it as wordless.) Why does Johnson give Harold a difficult-to-erase medium (the crayon) instead of an easily erasable one (say, chalk or pencil)? If Harold could erase, what might be the ripple effects of the erasures? Indeed, why does each Harold story conclude with our protagonist still in an imaginary realm, instead of returning him to a real bedroom—like Max in Where the Wild Things Are or the Darling children in Peter Pan—? Is the fact that Harold’s only home is the one he draws for himself a dream or a nightmare?
To ponder these questions (and others) is to accept an invitation to concentration, a practice that modern life discourages. The digital spaces of the social media multiverse thrive on immediacy, on the surprise of new information. They don’t grant us the distance from which to reflect, and to consider. We need to push aside that “heavy black rectangle of potentiality and dread”—to quote Jenny Odell’s description of cell phones—and pay attention to the world around us. Other people. Nature. Art.
And, of course, children’s books have much to say to those of us who are no longer children. Adults may discover insights unavailable to less experienced readers, just as children may arrive at interpretations lost to adults who have forgotten their own childhoods.
We need to push aside that “heavy black rectangle of potentiality and dread”
Though any art grows richer through the pleasures of sustained attention, I choose Harold and the Purple Crayon because picture books are an ideal place to begin looking closely. In addition to being many people’s introduction to visual art, a picture book is a portable art gallery. Perhaps because it arrives via a mass-produced object created for children, picture-book art does not always garner the respect that “fine art” does, even though fine artists Marc Chagall, David Hockney, Faith Ringgold, and Edward Lear (who made his living as a landscape painter) all created children’s books. And some of the finest artists have devoted their careers to creating picture books for young people: Maurice Sendak, Kadir Nelson, Beatrix Potter, Shaun Tan. But it is also fortunate that picture books are a more democratic art form, requiring only a library card, instead of, say, admission (and thus proximity) to a gallery.
Finally, as some of the first narratives we read (or have read to us), picture books show us how stories can make sense of the world and, in the case of Harold and the Purple Crayon, how we can create stories to guide us through that world. As Shaun Tan says of literature for children more generally, “Like a child daubing a paintbrush, it’s just enough to know that even the most modest scribble or wordplay can at any moment lead to a simple but profound realization: the world is just what you make of it, a big, unfinished picture book inside your head.”
The stories we encounter as children teach us whose stories are worth telling, which is one reasons I believe it’s important to explore the question of whether Harold is racially Black. Perhaps because his hands and face are tan, some readers have seen Harold as Black. His racial ambiguity is an inclusive choice—possibly also an intentional one, given Johnson’s early support for Civil Rights.
Since they enter our lives at such a formative time, the books we read when we are small can have a big impact on our imaginations. In this sense, children’s books are the most important books we read. They begin to establish the parameters for our dreaming, for the possible futures we can envision, and for the kind of life we might seek. As Ruha Benjamin puts it, “Who we imagine ourselves to be matters a great deal to who we become.”
Featured image by Townsend Walton via Unsplash.