In-depth Written Interview

Insights Beyond the Movie

Chris Raschka, interviewed in his studio in New York, New York on July 25, 2001.

TEACHINGBOOKS: In your books, you blend words, images, sounds, colors, shapes into vivid expressions. For instance, readers can feel the rhythm of Charlie Parker's music in your book about him.

CHRIS RASCHKA: I wanted Charlie Parker Played Be Bop to embody some of the rhythm and some of the music in be bop and in Charlie Parker. The rhythm of the text is based on the rhythm of some of his music, particularly a piece called, "A Night in Tunisia." It goes, "bop-ba-da-bop-bop-a-du-bop, za-ba-da-bop-bop-a-du-bop" — "Charlie Parker played be bop. Charlie Parker played saxophone."

TEACHINGBOOKS: And in Mysterious Thelonious, you again bring the melody to life.

CHRIS RASCHKA: Mysterious Thelonious is a story about Thelonious Monk and his music. It's based on a piece called "Mysterioso" that is a beautiful, very classical melody on a twelve-bar blues. The book is my translation of that music into paint.

The twelve tones of music — there are generally twelve tones in a scale of music — can be changed into the twelve colors on a color wheel. In Mysterious Thelonious, you can simply go note by note and represent each of those notes in a piece of music as a spot and shape of color on the book's page.

TEACHINGBOOKS: The Coltrane book is another translation of music into color.

CHRIS RASCHKA: With John Coltrane's Giant Steps, I tried to create a book using sheets of color. I have layered color the way the music and the different instruments are layered in a piece of John Coltrane's music.

Here's how the book begins: "Good evening, and thank you for coming to our book. We have something very special for you tonight. It's John Coltrane's marvelous and tricky composition 'Giant Steps,' performed for you by a box, a snowflake, some raindrops, and a kitten. Why not stay and see it?"

TEACHINGBOOKS: You have a stylized way with your paintbrush that seamlessly translates motion and expression. How do you create the images the way you do?

CHRIS RASCHKA: One way to express something in the world on a piece of paper or in art is to allow the paintbrush to express itself. So, rather than trying to copy the expressions of people, I just try to let the paint and the ink and the paper do the expressing.

TEACHINGBOOKS: You illustrated e. e. cummings' Little Tree. What inspired this work?

CHRIS RASCHKA: Little Tree is based on the poem by that name by e. e. cummings. Ken Geist, a friend and editor of mine, wanted me to do it, and he also saw it as a project possibility for Saks Fifth Avenue's Christmas windows. I worked on and developed it, in some ways, to be those windows. I was kind of thinking of it graphically as well as sculpturally, in three dimensions. As a result, it was quite a challenge and a lot of fun.

TEACHINGBOOKS: How did the secondary story within Little Tree emerge?

CHRIS RASCHKA: Initially, I illustrated this beautiful, quiet, comforting, soft, gentle poem about a family and a Christmas tree. Because we were making this book more of a theatrical story, I decided to add kind of a counterpoint story of the tree coming to the family, and the notion of this tree finding its special place in the world.

TEACHINGBOOKS: Little Tree is laid out in a different way from your other books. The right pages are angular and colorful and energized. The left side is much more clear and simple, with text and a few helpful drawings. It seemed like a visual break for you.

CHRIS RASCHKA: Yes, the layout of the book is more in pieces, in a sense, than most of my books. Most of my books are more kind of all over the place. Little Tree is in some ways a more traditional kind of picture book, with text on one side, on the verso, and paintings on the recto.

TEACHINGBOOKS: You and Vladimir Radunsky have done a few books together. Explain the premise of your first collaboration Table Manners, and why you created it.

CHRIS RASCHKA: Table Manners is a book with two sort-of clueless characters. Chester thinks he knows proper table manners, so throughout the book he explains them to Dudunya — that table manners even exist, what you need to eat with good manners, how to eat a baked potato, whether or not you should chew, things like that.

I wrote and illustrated Table Manners with a friend of mine, Vladimir Radunsky because we had been having breakfast regularly together, and we both noticed that each of us needed a lot of work with table manners. We learned a lot of things about table manners in the process — where the forks go, what to do with napkins, all those things that we had no idea about up to that point.

TEACHINGBOOKS: What is it like to create a book in close collaboration with someone else, instead of on your own?

CHRIS RASCHKA: Vladimir and I worked hand in hand; we would write almost at the same time. Then one of us would take what we had written home and rewrite everything, and then the other one of us would take that and rewrite that. We kind of just struggled back and forth, deciding who was the better artist every day until we came up with a page of a book that we liked.

TEACHINGBOOKS: Explain the poems in A Poke in the I, an anthology of concrete poetry that you illustrated.

CHRIS RASCHKA: A Poke in the I is a collection of concrete poetry, also called shape poetry. These are poems that derive much or some of their meaning through their representation on a page. They're very visually oriented poems. They're not so much poems you want to listen to; they're poems you want to look at. I've always loved poems like that, and I've tried to use principles of concrete poetry in my own books. So I was delighted to be asked to do the illustrations of these poems that Paul Janeczko chose.

Paul has a great knowledge of poems from throughout the world. Concrete poems come from pretty much every corner of the world, some from South America, some from the United States, some from England, Germany, Austria.

TEACHINGBOOKS: Can you elaborate on how you used the principles of concrete poetry to illustrate this book?

CHRIS RASCHKA: With concrete poetry, you always try to embody the ideas of the poem in the poem, in how the poem looks, like sort of a visual version of onomatopoeia. Concrete poetry is the yoga of words. It's what words and sentences actually feel and look like. If you want to write a poem about what it feels like to be big, for instance, you might just write a poem and make it the size of a building or something — the idea is big; the poem itself is big. If you want to write a poem that's fast, you could use fast words.

In concrete poetry, you feel the connections of the words themselves. They're no longer in a long stream of text like we're used to. Good concrete poetry shakes up your world of words and letters, just like doing a headstand does.

Because the shape of these poems is so crucial to their meaning, we wanted to change what we found as little as possible. So the typefaces and the spacing and the size, the boldness and thinness of all of these letters and words in the poems are as close to what they looked like in their first published forms as possible.

TEACHINGBOOKS: What were you trying to accomplish with Yo! Yes?, your 1994 Caldecott Honor book?

CHRIS RASCHKA: Yo! Yes? is a book about expression and means of expression, use of language and body language, in its most slimmed-down form. I was trying to get as much out of a single word, with a single punctuation and a single image of body posture, as possible on each page and see what might happen.

TEACHINGBOOKS: Your Doggy Dog, Lamby Lamb and similar early independent reader books are their own style for you.

CHRIS RASCHKA: My Thingy Thing books provide something fun to read when you're just starting to read. They're very much based on my own son's interests, pleasures and jokes. I hope they are worth reading. I hope that these are books that a four-year-old might want to read.

TEACHINGBOOKS: Most of your books are not text-heavy. What was like to illustrate Fishing in the Air, which has more words than do your other books?

CHRIS RASCHKA: I wanted my illustrations in Fishing in the Air to simply decorate Sharon Creech's text. It's a beautiful story that could very well be a short story without illustration. I just wanted to kind of highlight and lovingly wrap up her words on the page with paint.

TEACHINGBOOKS: What do you do when you get stuck?

CHRIS RASCHKA: Well, I do something else. I do something that I've been meaning to do and haven't — for instance, seeing an exhibition that I've been meaning to get to or looking at a building that I've always wanted to see. That often enough gets me through those bad moments.

TEACHINGBOOKS: Describe your typical workday.

CHRIS RASCHKA: My work habits are always changing, but some things I do maintain. When I walk in the door, I turn the radio on first. I do like to have music playing. I like to listen to a particular couple of shows, a wonderful jazz show on Charlie Parker, which is how I start my day. Because music is one of my most profound interests, it's something that I generally surround myself with.

After I have changed my shoes, I sweep the floor. Then I take care of my cactuses. Then I brew a single cup of coffee. During all that time, I'm pretty much planning my day. I tend to try to balance every day, so that I don't paint all day. I might paint and then I might write a letter and then I might ride my bicycle down to a publisher. So I try to keep it a little bit balanced so that I can fit in more things in a given day.

TEACHINGBOOKS: Were you influenced toward a career of writing and illustrating books when you were growing up?

CHRIS RASCHKA: I was always surrounded by books when I was growing up. There are still a lot of books in my parents' home, and there are plenty of books in my home. But, I never thought of myself as trying to be an artist. It was just something that kind of was a background to everything else I did, which was, more consciously, music and biology. But then, art slowly bubbled to the surface.

TEACHINGBOOKS: So how did you come to write and illustrate children's books?

CHRIS RASCHKA: I have done a lot of things as a student and as an adult. Probably writing and illustrating children's books has knit together some of those various things that I've done. I almost went to medical school, but the morning of the first day, I called the registrar and said I wasn't coming. All of that time, I was working in art in one way or another. Then, that broad topic of art finally has become children's books, maybe fifteen years later.

I think of books as ideas someone has had that get shaped by designers and editors and printers, and then go into the hands of other people — teachers and students and children and parents. These books then have little lives of their own, and it's lovely to hear where they've been, what they're up to and whom they've seen. I just try to be my part in the sequence. It's fun to watch it from here.

TEACHINGBOOKS: What artists do you admire and how have they influenced your work?

CHRIS RASCHKA: Artists like Ludwig Bemelmans and Roger Duvoisin have an approach to painting that is very direct and immediate. It happens quite spontaneously, quite graphically. There's a certain quality of line in both of those artists that I strive for.

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