In-depth Written Interview

James Ransome was interviewed in his home in Rhinebeck, New York, March 26, 2015.

TEACHINGBOOKS: You are an award-winning illustrator of children's picture books and your art has appeared in galleries and public and private collections nationwide. Did you have a creative streak as a young child?

JAMES RANSOME: I was a creative person among my friends, always drawing, making up comic books, or convincing them that we should make movies. But there was no art in my middle school or elementary school. So I was a kid who had a creative streak, but no way to really channel it.

It's a situation I often see in poor African American communities, where it's not that the people aren't interested in art, but they often don't have the resources to assist their children in taking that interest to the next level. There's no art school. There are no museums or galleries or other artists there.

My grandmother raised me and always supported what I did, but she didn't feel that you could make a living as an artist. She wished me all the best, but she feared for me, because she knew what it was like to have dreams beyond the circumstances you were born into, or the possibilities that were allowed. She grew up farming, and all my uncles and aunts worked in factories. No one in the family or community had a job creating art. It was a very foreign concept.

TEACHINGBOOKS: The Civil Rights Act was passed when you were you were a toddler growing up in North Carolina. What do you remember about that time?

JAMES RANSOME: The community I grew up in was a traditional segregated community, with blacks in certain parts of town and whites in others. My area was the first group to integrate with forced busing. There was a school in town that was basically elementary, middle, and high school all together. When they desegregated the schools, black kids were going to be bused into that school from all over the county. My group, which was going to middle school, was the first to go to this "white school." So I was part of that. And I remember it distinctly, getting off the bus that day.

I always felt that when Martin Luther King Jr. was talking about the children of the future, he was talking about my generation. He was talking to me. Barack Obama and I are born just a few days apart, in the same year. The people of our generation were growing up in a changing world, especially in the '70s and early '80s.

TEACHINGBOOKS: How did your love and talent for art develop?

JAMES RANSOME: My freshman year in high school, I moved to a suburban town in northern New Jersey. I went from this predominately African American rural community in North Carolina to a predominately white community, and it was complete culture shock. I was suddenly surrounded by people who were movers and shakers in New York City.

My high school had an amazing art program where some of the teachers were graduates of the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. They modeled a great system of teaching that had freshmen rotating through several weeks of different types of art: ceramics, drawing, painting, printmaking, metalsmithing, filmmaking, and photography. After those general courses you could do independent study and more specialized studying. It was there that I fell in love with filmmaking. I wanted to be Spike Lee before there was a Spike Lee.

TEACHINGBOOKS: Filmmaking was your first artistic passion but you shifted to illustration. What prompted the transition?

JAMES RANSOME: I had a lot of friends who would act in my films, but after a while they all started getting part-time jobs and were no longer available. Because I'd always drawn and I liked painting, I said to myself, "Well, why don't I start animating my films?" With animation, I could work independently. I didn't have to rely on having a live actor. So I said, "Okay, I'll go to art school, I'll go into animation; I'll do an illustration program versus a film program." I figured I'd go to work for Disney or something like that.

I attended the New York Institute of Technology for a year, where I majored in art, but I left to take a year off and wandered for a time. When I went back to school I went to the Pratt Institute—and I started all over again as a freshman. I wanted a Pratt education from the bottom up, and it was okay with me if it was going to take me another four years to graduate. I wasn't in a hurry. I was older, and more mature as well. I was ready to go to school at that point.

TEACHINGBOOKS: During your college years, you discovered an illustrator whose work and life would deeply inspire you.

JAMES RANSOME: When I arrived at Pratt, I knew nothing about illustration. I knew a little bit about art through my interest in filmmaking, but nothing specific when it came to illustration. My initial education began thanks to a contest held every year by the Society of Illustrators. Illustrators submit their artwork to the society, and a jury selects pieces to be exhibited and then put into a book. The Pratt library had those books in its collection, and when I heard about them I started going to the library to look at them. That was the first time I realized how vast the world of illustration is. I started falling in love with pictures; it brought me back to my comic book days.

A while later, while walking to class, I was having a debate with a friend about how important drawing is. Another kid joined the conversation. He said his name was Scott Pinkney, his father was Jerry Pinkney, and his father thought that drawing is very important. I knew I'd seen that name before in the Society of Illustrator books, and I immediately thought, "You're Jerry Pinkney's son?"

Of course, right after class, I went back to the library just to make certain, and sure enough, a lot of the work I'd been seeing in those books was Jerry Pinkney's. This artist was African American, and he sometimes came to Pratt to teach.

It was an amazing realization. All my life I'd been told I couldn't make a living on art, but here was Jerry Pinkney, who was in no way the stereotype of a crazy artist. His hair wasn't purple, he didn't have eight wives, he wasn't strung out on drugs or in any other way unstable. He was a working artist with a family. He was all the things I wanted to be.

When he taught, sometimes I'd sit in on his class, just listening, and I was excited to take his course when I was a senior. Unfortunately, it turned out he wasn't teaching at Pratt that year, but around that time, my then-girlfriend, who is now my wife, was working at the Brooklyn Museum. One day she brought home this book called The Patchwork Quilt, illustrated by Jerry Pinkney. Up ‘til that moment, I hadn't really connected with picture book illustration. My work was mostly sports-related, with lots of sports imagery, and that's what I thought I'd do when I graduated. But when I saw that book, I thought, I would love to do one of these.

TEACHINGBOOKS: Jerry Pinkney ultimately became a mentor to you. How did that come about?

JAMES RANSOME: Once I graduated, I went to a workshop where Diane Dillon was showing some of her preliminary drawings, and they blew me away. After seeing her and her drawings, I started working on my first book, Do Like Kyla, and I wrote Jerry asking him if I could come to his studio to show him what I was doing. He invited me up, and kept on inviting me for many years after that. I went as often as I could, once every month or two. That's when I learned how to really become a children's book illustrator, through those visits. I had Jerry Pinkney to myself for two, three hours at a time. He was really wonderful. He's a very gentle man.

He would critique my work, and then he would share what he was working on. And then he would treat me to lunch. And at lunch we would talk about what he was doing, where he was going to speak. He was preparing me for the next level, dealing with art directors and the publishing business itself, maturing me in a lot of ways. He never asked me for anything in return and I can never thank him enough for his time. I try to give that type of time to students, or young people who approach me now, but I'm not sure I could ever do it quite as routinely as Jerry did with me. I was probably fortunate in that it worked out to be the right time for both of us.

Around that time I took other classes, too, and met with other artists like Burt Silverman and Robert Cunningham after I graduated. I call that my graduate school. I often tell students that the education you receive after you graduate can be as or more important than the one you get when you're an undergraduate.

TEACHINGBOOKS: Do Like Kyla was the first book you published, and it's done in a different style than many of your other books.

JAMES RANSOME: Yes, that loose, painterly style was my early passion. John Singer Sargent was an influence on the work. It was all done on canvas.

TEACHINGBOOKS: The year after Do Like Kyla was published, you won the Coretta Scott King Illustrator Award Honor for Uncle Jed's Barbershop, and the next year the Illustrator Award for The Creation. That's quite an impressive start to your career.

JAMES RANSOME: I was so lucky. I started off with Do Like Kyla, which was written by Angela Johnson, and then Aunt Flossie's Hats by Elizabeth Howard came to me, and The Creation by James Weldon Johnson. I also illustrated Sweet Clara and the Freedom Quilt and Uncle Jed's Barbershop, which were sort of a one-two punch. They were all great stories from great authors, some first-time writers at that point, so no one knew how they'd be received. Also, I was still pretty young and new at this. Those five books helped define the early part of my career and push me forward, and I'm very fortunate that they came across my desk.

TEACHINGBOOKS: How did your artistic style evolve as you began illustrating more books?

JAMES RANSOME: In the beginning, I pulled a lot from my filmmaking days, when I gathered people around and had them act in something. I'd say, "This is what's going on around you, this is the mood I want." I had more of a pure painter's take on things. Over time, I started pulling away from that. I started caring more about subtleties. What's funny to me is that I was never very interested in facial expressions, but publishers wanted that in my work. So I started concentrating more on faces, and suddenly I became known for doing facial expressions, which I always chuckle about now.

You can see an example of that shift if you look at Do Like Kyla. You can see I'm less interested in their expressions in that book; it's more of a mood I'm trying to capture. But with Uncle Jed's Barbershop and Sweet Clara, you can see connections when the characters look at each other. You can read their expressions. They're sad, and they're happy, or something else entirely. The characters in my art are mostly real people, from models who are friends and family members.

TEACHINGBOOKS: You frequently collaborate with your wife, author Lesa Cline-Ransome. What is it like, working on books with your life partner?

JAMES RANSOME: It's wonderful. I have my studio, and she has her office. We meet for lunch. We talk about things. I'm always pitching ideas to her. It's funny; in terms of illustrating, the way I work is the same whether I'm doing a book with Lesa or any other writer. The only difference is I'm aware of what she's working on before it officially comes to me. During the course of her writing, I am privy to her process. She'll read me her manuscript in various stages, so if she mentions something I think can be useful research material, I'll store it away. But she never comes to me and says she wants the pictures to look like this or that, or be done a certain way.

TEACHINGBOOKS: Many of your books center on elements of African and African American history.

JAMES RANSOME: Some of the books I've illustrated more recently are about slavery, which is a tough subject. And because I've done a few books on the subject, some people think it's one of my favorite topics. It's not. I'm probably more interested in the Great Depression, the 1930's and 1940's.

Lesa is working on a series that spans many years and focuses on African Americans' quest for knowledge, for information. Her first book, Light in the Darkness, is about slaves who actually dug pit schools, holes in the ground, so they could hide and educate each other there. That was followed by Freedom School, which is about African Americans going to the first school after slavery ended. The next book will cover the migration of African Americans, and again, their quest for education.

We did also a series of books on African American athletes, starting off with Satchel Paige, which is the first book she wrote and I illustrated. We also did Major Taylor, about the champion cyclist, and Pelé, about the soccer player. I was especially happy to do these books because they touched on my interest in sports.

Sometimes a topic comes to me when I start thinking about my own childhood and what I would have wanted to read as a kid. I illustrated Sweet Clara and the Freedom Quilt and then Under the Quilt of Night, both by Deborah Hopkinson, about the Underground Railroad, and I contacted her after watching a really compelling program about the history of New York State. When I saw these stories of the Empire State and Chrysler buildings being constructed I thought, "Oh my goodness, this is amazing." I got in touch with Deborah and said, "Hey, how would you feel about doing a book about the Empire State Building?" And we did Sky Boys.

TEACHINGBOOKS: Please talk about the different media you've used for your books.

JAMES RANSOME: I started off as an oil painter, and I couldn't see myself doing anything else at the time. But after talking with Jerry Pinkney and being influenced by other artists, I started working with acrylics. The first book I did in acrylics was Satchel Paige and I loved the flatness of it, so I stuck with acrylics until I started illustrating a story collection called How Animals Saved the People. For that book, I just didn't see it working with either oils or acrylics—it seemed I'd be locking myself into a look that was too heavy a rendering. Because it wasn't a traditional picture book, I felt this book needed to be done in a different way. So I did it in watercolors.

I continued with watercolors, and eventually I just started choosing the medium based on the type of book I was working on. If I were dealing with animals and fantasy subject matter, I would use watercolors. If I wanted it to look very modern and contemporary, I would use acrylics. If I wanted something to have an older feel to it, I would do it in oils.

I recently did a book in pastels, which hasn't come out yet, about Robert Battle, the new director of Alvin Ailey.

TEACHINGBOOKS: What are your thoughts about the We Need Diverse Books movement?

JAMES RANSOME: When I was growing up, The Snowy Day was probably one of the only diverse books I saw. I think diverse books are very important. There are a lot of wonderful ones out there now, and we need to publish even more.

But then, we also need to read them. Something that really upsets me is the lack of actual reading that's being done in communities. I find that a lot of the time, whenever I talk to my relatives and their friends and their friends' friends, no one is saying, "Hey, I love that book you wrote. That's a great story; I was reading it to my kid the other night. We really enjoyed that." It's the same story with the town I live in now, which is predominately white. Not a lot of my friends are telling me they read one of my books, or any books, to their kid last week.

When I talk to other African American illustrators and writers, they say they have the same experience. So it's not just the African American community, it's communities at large, where getting diverse books, and books in general, into kids' hands is somehow solely the responsibility of schools and librarians and teachers. But rather than focusing only on what other people are or aren't doing or publishing, we need to hold a mirror up to ourselves and ask, what are we doing to help?

We need to be more proactive about bringing these books into the home for our children, and then making the effort to read them. We need to support our children that way, too.

TEACHINGBOOKS: What do you like to tell students when you visit schools?

JAMES RANSOME: My overall message to students is that whatever you want to be, or dream of doing, you can achieve it if you're willing to work hard to pursue it. I say this not only for the budding artists—I'm speaking to everyone, from the perspective of someone who grew up in an environment that is really far removed from what he ended up doing. So if you're interested in insects and you want to be a scientist who studies insects, you can do that, even if no one understands or shares your interest.

I'm always impressed by kids who draw and want to draw. And sometimes it's heartbreaking when I see a kid who's in the same situation I was in, and I'm always afraid he or she will not be fortunate enough to come across a school or a teacher who will continue to encourage them. Nothing breaks my heart more than when I talk to the janitor who tells me he used to like to draw. That just crushes me.

TEACHINGBOOKS: What do you tell educators when you speak to them?

JAMES RANSOME: They're in the trenches, and that can be tough. And sometimes when things get tough, you can lose focus. So I try to be very positive when I speak to educators, and remind the group that we're all here for a reason—we're here for these kids, to support them, encourage them, and sometimes that means stopping or slowing down to give them the time that they need. I also share that I was that kid in the back of the class, who maybe scribbled during a lesson or looked out the window too often. Still, there was hope for me, and there is hope for each and every one of these students growing up now.

TEACHINGBOOKS: What do you do when you get stuck?

JAMES RANSOME: Often I'll dive into movies or books about the subject I'm working on to help me along, or I'll try a new style. Actually, one of the reasons why you might notice a variety of styles and looks in my books is that I've sort of given up this idea about having a signature look. I'm not concerned with that any longer. I don't mind if you pick up a book and look at it for a minute and then say, "Wait a minute, this is Ransome. This looks nothing like Ransome."

That's okay by me; I want you to do that. I'm excited about the challenge of different styles and encouraging new ways of seeing my art. I want people to look at my books and say, "Wow, he's doing something different each and every time," whether it's printmaking, painting, drawing, mixed media or digital. And more than anything, I want them to see the joy I feel doing this work.

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