Wednesday, March 12, 2003

By Karen MacPherson, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

Children's book illustrator finds joy in her work

Trina Schart Hyman has been drawing ever since she can remember. When she was 4, she spent hours making her own "books" with text and illustrations. A few years later, when she finally understood that illustrating books was a job, Hyman knew that's what she wanted to do with her life.

Fast-forward 50 years. Hyman, now 63, achieved her childhood dream of becoming a book illustrator, illustrating more than 130 children's books so far. In the process, she has become one of the nation's top children's book artists, famous for her romantic illustrations of knights in armor, heroines with long flowing hair, gruesome monsters and storybook castles.

Hyman has won the Caldecott Medal, the Academy Award of children's-book illustration. She's also won three Caldecott Honors, given as a sort of runner-up award to a few children's books each year.

This Saturday, Hyman will give a rare public talk to children and adults at the Carnegie Library's "Black, White & Read All Over" program.

"I don't ever have a prepared speech," Hyman said in a telephone interview from her New Hampshire farmhouse. "I don't know what I'm going to say until I see who I'm talking to. I like to look at the audience to see if there are lots of kids or grown-ups, and I'll leave time for questions."

Hyman also will show slides of her work, including her illustrations for "Saint George and the Dragon," the book for which she won the Caldecott Medal in 1985. The text of the book was written by Margaret Hodges, a renowned children's book writer who is a Pittsburgh institution.

Hodges and Hyman have collaborated on two other books over the years: "Comus" and "The Kitchen Knight." Hyman's current project is another book written by Hodges -- a retelling of "Le Morte D'Arthur" by Sir Thomas Malory.

"It's called 'Merlin of the Sword,'" Hyman said. "It's not a picture book; it's an illustrated storybook. I'm about halfway done, and I'm having a blast doing this book. Margaret is fantastic; she's a dear friend. This is my book for Margaret."

These days, Hyman, who suffers from rheumatoid arthritis, works only on books that she's really interested in, and at her own pace. It's a contrast from the days 30 years ago when she was a struggling single parent and took any illustration work she could to pay the bills for the home she shared with her own young daughter plus another mother and her two children.

During these difficult years in the late 1960s and 1970s, Hyman created illustrations for children's textbooks and worked as the art director for the children's magazine Cricket while continuing to illustrate children's picture books.

"I would work all night, be there in the morning to pack lunches and get the children on the school buses, and then go to sleep," said Hyman.

It wasn't quite what Hyman had envisioned all those years ago when she first dreamed of becoming a children's book illustrator. Trying to prepare herself for the job, Hyman ended up attending three different art schools -- in Philadelphia, Boston and Stockholm -- but never graduated from any of them.

Hyman published her first children's book in Sweden, where she lived for two years in the early 1960s with her then-husband. The book was written by a Swedish author in Swedish and took Hyman months to translate before she could do the illustrations.

Yet she was thrilled to have a published book to her credit and even more thrilled with the editor with whom she worked -- Astrid Lindgren -- now known to the world as the author of the "Pippi Longstocking" books.

Back in the United States, Hyman won her first American book contract -- illustrating "Bow Wow, Meow," a book published by Golden Books in its "Little Golden Books" series.

"They paid me a flat fee of $800 for a 32-page picture book," Hyman said. "That book is still in print and just went into its 28th printing. If I had been paid royalties, I would be a millionaire. But in those days, I would have paid someone to publish my illustrations."

Hyman continued to find work now and then, although it wasn't always easy. Her daughter, Katrin, was born in 1963, and five years later she and her husband split up. Hyman left New York City, where the family had lived, and relocated to a small New Hampshire town.

"I thought I'd just be a waitress or something. But, as a matter of fact, as soon as I left New York, the jobs [in illustration] started coming."

Over the next decade, Hyman produced books such as "Snow White," "Sleeping Beauty," "Rapunzel," and "Little Red Riding Hood," which she wrote and illustrated and which won a Caldecott Honor in 1984.

Although best known for her fairy tales, Hyman also has illustrated other books, including "Swan Lake" and the Caldecott Honor book "Hershel and the Hanukkah Goblins."

An essay on Hyman in "Children's Books and Their Creators" notes that she "has been hailed as one of the great romantic illustrators of our time" who has "captured the essence of fantasy."

In recent years, Hyman's work has become more colorful and multicultural, a direct result of her daughter's marriage to a man from Cameroon. Hyman now has two biracial grandchildren, and she wants her work to reflect a world that is welcoming to them.

In 1991, Hyman persuaded her friend writer Lloyd Alexander to set his original folk tale, "The Fortune-Tellers" -- which Hyman illustrated -- in Cameroon. Hyman also included her family in the illustrations for "A Child's Calendar," a book written by John Updike that received a Caldecott Honor in 2000. And she has illustrated a Cameroon folk tale retold by her daughter, Katrin Tchana. The two have collaborated on another book and are planning a third, focused on goddess tales.

"Before I went to Africa, I didn't know that there could be such color and such vibrancy," Hyman said. "It's so visually beautiful that it just blew me away. That's when I started to see things in living color. Before that, I put everything under a veil of Presbyterian brown."

Hyman's battle with rheumatoid arthritis, as well as a frightening recent bout with breast cancer, also have made her see her work in a new way.

"My work used to be a struggle for me because I think I was very competitive with myself and others in the profession. I was always anxious about deadlines, about how my books would be received by others," Hyman said.

"I needed a kick in the pants to realize that being an artist is a gift and a joy, and you should treat it like that."

Hyman will speak at 10:30 a.m. Saturday at the Carnegie Library's Lecture Hall. Tickets are $6 each. For more information, call 412-622-8866.

Karen MacPherson can be reached at kmacpherson@nationalpress.com or 1-202-662-7075.

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