As a child and through high school, Giselle Potter sometimes resented that she never had a “normal, being home” summer: instead, she traveled around Europe with her family’s puppet troupe, performing in piazzas. The many fantastic elements in her illustrations, and their far-flung settings, may owe a debt to this unconventional childhood, which Potter has come to appreciate more as her career develops. Readers may also imagine a slight resemblance to puppets in the whimsical, oval-faced characters with skinny, bent limbs and tiny hands and feet that populate Mr. Semolina-Semolinus: A Greek Folktale by Anthony Manna and Christodoula Mitakidou (Athenuen/Schwartz), Potter’s debut children’s book.
Travel has played a large role in Potter’s education. After a year at a liberal arts college, Potter went to Bali, Indonesia, where she apprenticed herself to a painter of miniatures. She relished the concentration required for the work and says, “You have to be so focused to do that—to stare at this little tiny thing for so long.”
Back in the U.S., at the Rhode Island School of Design, Potter created a children’s book for teacher Dagmar Frinta. She had always made little books, but never created specifically with a child audience in mind. Potter found Frinta’s enthusiasm for drawing a refreshing antidote to the schools focus on career planning. Frinta took her students to beaches and greenhouses to draw, and even had them draw while listening to poetry.
Potter spent her senior year in Rome, where she fell in love with religious art. Since college, she has traveled to Turkey, Greece, and Mexico. She finds inspiration in medieval and Byzantine artwork, the Italian and Mexican religious paintings and folk art of all kinds. Among children’s book illustrators, Potter most admires Maria Kalman, because “it seems like she has the freedom to do whatever she wants,” says Potter.
Because she had been warned at RISD that it could take five years to get established as an illustrator, Potter was surprised to be able to make her living from her artwork upon graduation. Her first illustration job was for the New Yorker, for which she is a regular contributor, and where her work caught the eye of Anne Schwartz of Atheneum. Potter soon found herself working on the illustrations for Mr. Semolina-Semolinus with Schwartz, and art directors Angela Carlino and Ann Bobco.
Potter has two books due out this fall: Gabriella’s Song by Candace Fleming (Atheneum, Schwartz), and an adult book she wrote and illustrated for Chronicle books, Lucy’s Eyes and Margaret’s Dragon: The Lives of Virgin Saints. The book about woman saints grew out of a fascination with the story of Saint Agnes. Of the many scenes of martyrdom, “I picked really exciting and violent ones to illustrate,” Potter cheerfully remarks.
Potter will illustrate another book by Fleming for fall 1998, about “an ornithologist and her daughter, who has a special knack for making bird calls,” she says. She is also writing a children’s book for Anne Schwartz about a girl who wants to be a princess and so does “all the things from fairy tales that make princes come,” like kissing frogs and sleeping for eons, until she gets too bored.
Potter still depends upon magazine illustration work or pay her rent, but prefers creating children’s books: “I like having my own project to work on—it’s less like a job.” Overall, she’s happy with her lot. “I would be really content if my life just continued as it is now,” she declares.
