In her new picture book about Georgia O'Keeffe, the artist focuses on the creative impulse
"When I was twelve years old, I knew what I wanted -- to be an artist." So begins the text for Jeanette Winter's My Name Is Georgia (Harcourt/Silver Whistle), an intimate picture-book portrait of Georgia O'Keeffe published this month. Winter could have been talking about herself. Like O'Keeffe, she knew from an early age that a life spent drawing and painting was her heart's desire. There are some other similarities between Winter and her subject: both studied at the Art Institute of Chicago, and both display a passion for the Southwest in their art. And Winter, like O'Keeffe, has single-mindedly pursued her artistic vision.
Winter's distinctive style is immediately apparent to anyone entering her New York City apartment, where she and her husband spend half of the year. Although she works on her book illustrations at their home in the Texas hill country, there is much evidence of the working artist in her city environment. Inside the doorway is a tin wall hanging that she made, portraying Josefina Aguilar, the young artist from Ocotlan, Mexico, whom Winter portrayed in Josefina (Harcourt, 1996). Suspended above a drafting table are cards reproducing favorite images and photographs, as well as various objects that bring hints of the Southwest into the small apartment. Winter and her husband lived for a while in Maine, but raised their two now-grown children in Dallas, and she considers the Southwest her "creative center."
Born in Chicago to Swedish immigrants, Winter spent her childhood absorbed by her love of drawing and color. Although her parents were encouraging of her decision to make a career in art, she says, "It was my own drive that was most important." While in high school she took classes at the Art Institute of Chicago and then attended the University of Iowa, where she received her BFA. She was already dreaming about illustrating books but, Winter says, the university "didn't have illustration classes, so I tried to teach myself." One of her favorite artists at the time was painter, illustrator and photographer Ben Shahn, whose work placed a spotlight on immigrants and the poor. "I'm still crazy about his art," she adds.
After graduating in the mid-1960s, Winter spent a few years experimenting and teaching herself how to illustrate stories. Her first book, published by Knopf in 1968, was The Christmas Visitors, a Norwegian folktale that she both retold and illustrated. In the approximately 30 books Winter has subsequently done, providing illustrations for her own stories and those of others, she has taken on a wide variety of subjects, including the Mexican Day of the Dead, a cotton mill town and a 19th-century Shaker community.
Paula Wiseman, editorial director of Silver Whistle Books at Harcourt Brace, who has worked with Winter on four books in addition to Georgia, explains that Winter approaches each new project with "an incredible sensitivity to the subject matter. She feels truly challenged in every book to make the form suit the subject," with the result that Winter's books frequently use unusual trim sizes or page designs.
Describing how she finds the "right" form, Winter says that her selection of story, image and palette is mainly intuitive. "Now it just has to feel right. Sometimes I think it should be easier at this point, but with every new book, it's like starting over." And, she continues, it often takes a while -- and many false starts -- to hit upon the final approach.
Such was the case with Georgia, as well as with Diego (Knopf, 1991), which was a New York Times Best Illustrated Book of the Year. But, in fact, Winter did not originally intend to do a book about Rivera. "I wanted to do a book set in Mexico," she says. "I read every folktale I could get my hands on, but couldn't come up with anything. My husband, who is a painter, suggested doing a book about one of the muralists." Once she decided on Rivera, the project finally came together when her son, Jonah, provided a clear, child-friendly text that focuses on Rivera's early life and his will to honor his heritage. To make the powerful and vast representations of Mexico found in Rivera's murals more immediate to young readers, Winter chose to do small-scale, acrylic illustrations "framed" with borders and ample white space.
"Rivera's art is all about the country," Winter says, attempting to connect Diego with her other titles that focus on artists. That devotion to the land can also be found in her Cowboy Charlie: The Story of Charles M. Russell (Harcourt, 1995). For this book about the famous Western painter, Winter recreated the setting with large expanses of dense, contrasting color: the inky black night skies, majestic purple mountains and undulating plains in various shades of green she discovered while doing research in Montana.
Research and travel are important to Winter. She went to Sweden when she was working on Klara's New World (Knopf, 1992), which tells of the journey made by thousands of children during the great wave of migration to America in the 19th century. And she did research for the illustrations she created for Tony Johnston's Day of the Dead (Harcourt, 1997) while she was in Mexico working on Josefina.
For the O'Keeffe book, however, Winter did not travel to New Mexico. She explains that she has been there and didn't feel the need to return because this book "is more about an inner journey." Nevertheless, Winter connects O'Keeffe's inner journey with the physical landscape that captured her imagination.
One breakthrough along her own artistic journey, according to Winter, came in the early 1990s when she was working on Follow the Drinking Gourd. "I gave up line," she says. "That's when color took over." The pictures in Follow, which weave together the history of the Underground Railroad with a folksong that directed slaves along the escape route, are bold creations reminiscent of primitive painters such as Rousseau. Instead of beginning the process by making black line drawings, Winter went straight into painting. The illustrations draw on the simplified shapes and unusual perspectives that are common in folk art. Published in 1992 by Knopf, the book stands as a turning point in her career, Winter says.
At the moment, she is working in a format that is new to her: a series of board books based on nursery rhymes (Harcourt will publish two of them next fall and two the following spring). She says she is enjoying the process of refining her style of strong images and bold colors for the smaller format and younger age group.
As Winter herself declares, her life is in her work, and with each new book her vision becomes clearer. "It's a little bit like O'Keeffe," Wiseman explains. "Jeanette has stayed true to who she is, creating and selling books in a solid, steady way. She's defined her own territory."
Winter shows all the signs of continuing to define that territory. In the spring, Harcourt's Browndeer imprint will publish a picture book about Johann Sebastian Bach (Winter frequently listens to Bach while she works), and after that comes a picture book for Hyperion about Benny Goodman, which her son Jonah wrote. Looking toward the future, Winter says, "I have a drawer full of unfinished projects, and things I want to start on." So, like many of the subjects that Winter has dealt with in her books, she'll continue working to make the visions in her head a reality.
