Carson Ellis

I’m done illustrating Under Wildwood!  I’ve been working on it around the clock for months and now I’m done and it’s summer and I’m going outside.  Here’s the final illustration (it’s not the final illustration in the book, but it’s the last one I worked on.)

Corporal Donalbain in The Great Hall

Battle at the Plinth

Are you a fan of Wildwood?  A supporter of 826 and their writing programs for kids and teens?  Both?!  Well, feel free to bid on the above illustration as part of this charity event for 826 LA.  (Even though, if I were you, I’d bid on this.)

I’ve been working on this illustration for four days; painting one tiny piece of garbage at a time.  It’s leaving me with the gross sensation that I’m wading through all of this stuff.

I loved Sendak’s books when I was a little kid but, when I rediscovered them as a miserable teenager, I loved them more.  When I unearthed Outside Over There – that angsty, surreal, forlorn, gorgeous book – it was like being struck by lightning.  It walloped teenage me.  It didn’t seem to be a book for kids.  It didn’t seem to be a book for anyone.  It just seemed to be a work of art.  Outside Over There revealed to me the strange power of picture books – what they could do and be, who they could reach – and it kicked off a lifelong obsession with them.

Twenty-some-odd years later, I’ve read a lot of Sendak books.  I study them endlessly with the aim of becoming better at what I do and I read them to my son (who went through his own Outside Over There phase).  When my husband yelled upstairs to say that he had died this morning, I wailed.  I wailed!  And then I sat on the bed and cried.  And I’m actually still crying right now.  I didn’t know I’d be this torn up when he died, but there it is.  I’m unexpectedly, totally bereft.

I won’t get into why I think Maurice Sendak was a genius and why he’s been a guiding light to me for much of my life.  Other people will say it better.  I just want to thank him for making books, for taking them so seriously, for raising the bar impossibly high and for baring his soul in a medium where people seldom do.  Alas, I wish I’d had a chance to do it in person.