The children's book sub-rudder of the book reviewer "Beijing News Children's Book" has opened a column of "Winning Award Picture Book Review" for friends who pay attention to children's books. Written by Wang Shuainai, a researcher of children's literature, gender and contemporary literature and culture, the column combs through and reviews the Chinese edition of the Cadick Gold Medal picture book one by one, looking at what perspectives a picture book can appreciate in addition to its functionality, as well as the changes that the award has undergone over the past 80 years.
Beginning with the 1939 Cadick Gold Medal Picture Book, the column has published seven issues of Commentary (click to view previous issues). In the eighth issue, we will open the 1948 gold medal picture book "White Snow, Bright Snow". Its Chinese version was introduced by Love Tree in 2010.
The English version on the left is the English version. On the right is the Chinese version introduced by the Love Tree.
The book was written by Alvin Tresselt, illustrated by Roger Duvoisin, and translated by Baby Anne Chinese. It is not a story picture book, but is set in a rural town in the United States, depicting the seasonal changes from the early snow falling in winter to the first melting of ice and snow in spring, the recovery of all things, and the soothing and comfortable daily life of the townspeople.
When it snows, we will shoot a lot of beautiful snow scenes and post them on social media with a text, and there are also many literary and film works that use snow scenes to set off the protagonist's mood, so why is Roger Divason's white snow so different that he can win the Caddick Gold Award? It starts with our comprehensive experience of snow.
Written by | Wang Shuainai
Returning to man's original experience,
Restores a brief tremor sensation
Art is the "trembling" of "catching" those superficial worlds alive.
As the transliteration of words, images, musical notes, and other symbols describes these vibrations, our hearts are soothed again and again, and again and again we are told that we are not living in separate lives.
Looking at the evaluations written by readers on the American book review website to "Snow White Crystal", two of them can be called "moving". One is to say that I like the curves throughout the work, they "have a sense of roundness and softness — the images that make me living in Southern California understand the phrase 'a layer of snow'"; the other is "Few picture books so beautifully capture the feeling of the world when it was first covered in thick fluffy snow." ”
I think these two short comments capture and describe certain "trembling" moments in a straightforward and simple way. They remind me of an interesting passage from the painter Cézanne, one of the "Three Masters of Post-Impressionism", reading Balzac's novels. In the 19th century, when realist writing emerged and literature became more visual, Balzac wrote in Donkey Skin that a tablecloth was "as white as a layer of freshly falling snow, and the things placed on it rose symmetrically, and the top was a pale yellow bread roll", which Cézanne said led to his entire youth "wanting to paint that, that new snowy tablecloth".
Fully able to understand Cézanne's obsession with this tablecloth, Balzac associates the fluffiness of the bread, the unique and seductive yellow and aroma of the coking and maillard reactions, the warm white thickness of the cream (which is not explicitly written but often associated with bread), the texture and aroma of milk (not explicitly written but necessary for making bread), the delicate layer of powdered white sugar that is often spread on bread (unspecified), and the taste of all the above substances, all of which are related to snow and tablecloth. All the above explicitly written objects and all the "unspecified" daily life experiences, through association, together constitute the reason why we feel "trembling".
Our perception of things is not the result of a single sense, but a comprehensive experience of sight, hearing, and touch. Many writers and painters realize that what they need to express is also an inseparable "whole.".
So, how is this sense of wholeness constituted?
In the lower right corner of the room, the wife is applying mustard cream to the police husband.
Taking "White Snow Crystal" as an example, the color of "less is more" is a major technique used in this picture book. It uses only three primary colors and primary colors to compose the self, and a closer look at some of the pictures shows that there are parts of some corners where the two colors do not completely coincide, such as the wife applying mustard paste to the police husband (a 20th-century folk remedy, do not imitate: mixing dried mustard and water into a paste, applying it to cloth, and then placing it on the patient's chest to relieve congestion) In the picture, the door of the small house in the distance is a green painted by blue and yellow, and the leftmost piece of wood reveals an unhurned blue.
High saturation and high brightness of yellow and red, coupled with large areas of high brightness of white, produce a glow phenomenon, even if the painter does not use fluorescent pigments, we will feel that the picture has a sense of dazzling. White colors, surrounded by warm colors, automatically become a negative space that sinks and is far away from the reader, and the occasional addition of dark lines creates a three-dimensional feeling, which is how illustrator Roger Divason painted the "depth of field" without choosing a rigorous perspective method.
The three primary colors of red, yellow and blue + different shades of gray constitute the complete world of the work, and the warm colors are used to paint human skin and clothing, the walls of the house - eliminating all "superfluous" colors, abandoning the ambiguity and clutter they may bring, and using the most basic human feelings about color (at the same time, simplifying the details of the body and face of the characters, not emphasizing the perspective relationship, you will even see the wife's body, quilt and bed color blocks on a certain page almost melted into a plane) to construct the most "primitive trembling", which is not only true The metaphor of "childhood", which is often undertaken in literature in the early stages of life, is also the inheritance of the experience of previous painters and designers by illustrators in the mid-20th century.
The patches of the wife's body, the quilt, and the bed were almost melted into a flat surface.
Borrowing the combination of vivid and bold colors and contrasting colors to express the love and optimism of the world and life is a kind of willingness and technique preference of American art practitioners after World War II, the humorous spirit, civilian orientation and line use in the comic book industry, the performance of color blocks in printmaking art, especially the post-impressionist and Fauvists' concept of color use, detail dilution and balance arrangement of relationships between objects, looms in the modernist style picture book of "Snow White Crystal".
As for how to draw that "fluttering" moment in the reader's mind, the post-impressionist Cézanne mentioned above finally found that if he focused all his attention on how to draw the white of the tablecloth itself, "it would be finished", what he really should do was, "Let my tableware and my bread be balanced and delicate as they are natural, and believe that those stacks, snow whites, and whole trembling will surely be there." Merleau Ponty summed up the experience of this master of color use as follows: "Composition should be produced by color, if we want the thickness of the world to be expressed", because the body of the world in this color is actually a "clump", and the original perception of man does not clearly distinguish the various sensory sensations.
This brings us back to what we call the "integrated experience" above, where Cézanne not only "sees" the depth, smoothness, and softness of objects, but also says that he can see their smells—so that not only the colors on the surface of the substance, but every color sound and fragrance touch in the "comprehensive experience" of the substance are the objects to be carried and arranged by the painter's colors.
This is why artists like Cézanne, who have special expectations and beliefs in the use of color and the arrangement of drawings, sometimes ponder for an hour before they finish their pens, because each stroke points to the whole of the "being", which is an endless task. They want to return to human experience, trying to restore the brief "tremor" generated by our comprehensive experience between electric light and flint through various chemical reactions in the human body, the white of the new snow-like tablecloth that people can't forget.
"It doesn't matter" is positive
It is the joint that makes the artistic vitality of the work
Bob Gill and John Lewis, in Illustration: aspects and directions, say that illustration can be seen as "a visual answer to a particular literary question." The picture processing of "Snow White Crystal" is highly consistent with the emphasis and pursuit of the sense of "comprehensive experience" in its text, or rather, the two artists are very compatible in the creation of this script to pursue the subtle and charming "inseparable" original experience.
The first page of the text of "White Snow Crystal".
Let's turn to the first page of the main text of "Snow White Crystal", in this big spread:
"The postman said it looked like it would be snowing;
The farmer said it smelled snowy;
The police said it felt like it was going to snow;
The policeman's wife said the big toe hurt a bit, which usually means it's getting snowing. ”
Then, through parallel montages, the painter puts the lives and feelings of people in different spaces (and possibly not exactly the same moment) into the same picture as a "tremor superposition" of the event, composing the "earthly tremor polyphony" for the reader.
Similar to the technique of painting cold and warm contrast color, when the friend replies that the reason you like winter is "you can eat hot pot" (the implication is that the summer hot pot is not considered a "real" hot pot), when we find that Zhu Ziqing wrote that when he was a child, he sat around with his family in winter and ate white water boiled tofu with a special sense of sight, and the lettuce of Ye Shengtao's hometown that Ye Shengtao missed must be fresh buds that have just been fished up in the spring and rested in the cabin, and so on. This "indifference" is precisely the joint of the artistic vitality of the achievement work that will be mentioned below.
It's a shimmer and shudder.
Good writers are just as good at capturing them as painters. The so-called "most memorable when the snow moon flowers", the text magicians are very fond of the snow season, we will find that not only Chinese poets, American picture book writers, Oriental and Western European writers are also looking for things in the snow.
Japan's Kitahara Shiraaki wrote "Ye Ye dazzling gas lamp, I watch the snowstorm on the street." "The southern poet came to the north to see the snowstorm for the first time, but his attention was half on the shining light of the gas lamp. This is also the magic of the bright yellow block in the wind and snow of "Snow Crystal", which imitates the warm and warm light of the human huts, and the reader naturally feels the warmth without explanation.
Warmth in the snow and wind.
Another example is qing shao nayan's "Pillow Grass" begins by writing that only when it snows heavily and then people begin to spread the charcoal and put it into the charcoal basin, there is a "meaning of winter", after which it is written:
"The snow fell heavily, deeply in the evening, and near the porch, two or three like-minded people spoke around the brazier. At that time, it was already dark, but there was no light indoors, only the snow light outside, [across the curtain] to see that it was all snow white, with fire chopsticks to paint ash recreation, talking to each other about those touching and funny things, I think it is very interesting. ”
Looking back at this section of "Snow White Crystal", "The policeman's feet were wet with snow and water, and he had to soak in a basin of boiling hot water." The wife put mustard paste on his chest so that he would not catch a cold", supplemented by the warm light of a lover in a red brick hut in a yellow dress in the gray and white, how similar is this slightly numbing coziness.
Oriental literature is very good at capturing this shimmer and trembling—the gas lamp under the snowstorm of white autumn, the glimmer of snow at the tip of maeda's distant mountain ("Mt. Obaigen is majestic, dazzling and snowy"), needless to say; and the fifteenth song of the collection of songs, "One Hundred People in Kokura", the waka of Emperor Mitsutaka (then Prince Shiyasu), wrote that the snow collected medicine for his lover "The original spring buds were picked only for the sake of the king." See the white sleeves, fluttering snow" (just like the song set in the picture of Yuan Yizhong Ai Ji Xue Ye Ma Yi Ben willing to fight and die with his lover) in the flip-up kimono sleeves are so conspicuous in the snow, not kimono color white victory snow, it is really the lover's lonely and determined figure jumping on the tip of the heart, which is the same as the wife's intimate poultice in the American writer Alvin Trisette's "White Snow Crystal", the meticulous care in front of the bed and the early melting of the snow in the garden to dig in the mud to find the buds of spring, All are attentions and praises to the glimmer of love in the shadows of winter and death.
"One Hundred Songs from Kokura" originally referred to a collection of Japanese Japanese Japanese singers Wakashi Fujiwara Nobuya. Fujiwara Selected one piece of each of the 100 singers up to the "New Ancient and Modern Waka Collection" and compiled them into a collection, hence the name. The picture shows emperor Mitsutaka and a ukiyo-e painting with a song.
Similarly, Tolstoy's Anna fell into a snowstorm in the north after meeting Vronsky, and the writer also set his sights on the street lamps of the train station and the lamp-adders on the car in a snowy and chaotic world, he wrote about the peasants who made the stove, and wrote about the heroine's red bag, this long passage is actually written with some horror and horror, the blurred vision brought by the blizzard, the black shadows and some hints of the fate of death, For example, the black shadow that flashes in the sound of knocking iron and hunches over, and the paper knife pulled out of the red handbag along with the British novel.
In the commentary on "Give Way to the Duckling" ("Make way for the duckling : How Fiction Reshapes the Real World"), I have said that the implicit author of Anna Karenina has "uncontrollable self-correction" towards the real author of the anti-fornication woman, Tolstoy, and this is a very nuanced example, whether the wind and snow here is a manifestation of the heroine's fierce inner struggle or a sharp turn in fate under the symbolist brushwork, or the use of naturalistic techniques to imply that the heroine will talk to Vronsky next. All kinds of behaviors are temporarily affected by the dim and unclear environment and thus make irrational choices, and what we can clearly see is a fiery red or bright yellow light that flashes from time to time in the white ice, sometimes it does carry a sense of danger, but more often it is a warm light source and an image that points the direction at a high place. Not to mention, there is this sentence:
She happily took a deep breath of cold, snowy air and stood beside the train, looking around the platform and the brightly lit station.
It is a phrase of "pure happiness", without any danger or reluctance. After escaping from the suffocating train, Anna gains her freedom through the chaos and danger of the snow that had previously brought about it. By this time, the snow had melted into the air she needed to breathe. Next, when she "took a deep breath of fresh air" for the second time and was ready to turn back into the carriage, she saw the man she was expecting to come looking for her. In these two breaths, the author wants the reader to feel the same as the direct statement in Trisette's picture book that the snow is the sound, smell and the unique "color" of the whole world before it comes- the intention is to reach the other shore - the cold, snowy air at this moment does not bring the reader a negative association of severe cold and intolerable, but another kind of life experience mobilization, long-awaited rescue and happiness, we seem to have swallowed the cold and freshness of the snowy air, all the smells, temperatures, touches, and even the clump that enters the mouth The cold wind blowing around the cheeks, the blurred figures traveling around, the cold wetness of the snowflakes in the entrance, all the factors are in it.
Poster of Anna Karenina (2013).
The same "other shore" quest is in the last and best chapter of Joyce's Dubliners, The Dead:
"A thin wisp of snow covers the shoulders of his coat like a shawl, and the snow on the toe of his overwear is like the head of a slip of his coat; when he unbuttons his coat, the stiff tweed of the snow creaks, and a cold aroma from the outside spills out of the seams and folds of his coat."
It echoes in a more direct way the people's synaesthesia about snow written by Trisset. We even kind of wanted to reach out and gently dust off the thin layer of snow on that shoulder. The cold scent of snowy air must have mixed with the smell of soapy water, the smell of the tweed cloth itself, the body temperature of the owner of the tweed coat, and the white gas he exhaled.
There are only artists who can never die
In order to hold the beauty tightly
This is how we feel the world and love it. So, Cézanne burst into tears after reading Balzac's The Unsung Masterpiece, claiming that he was Franchofe, the one who said, "A hand is not just a part of the body, the hand is the embodiment and extension of the ideas that we are to grasp and express... The real work is here! "The painter.
The more extraordinary it is, the closer it is to a complete, independently functioning organism. Creating a masterpiece is like creating a life that moves freely and flows with blood, like the creator (if there is one) constructing a world that can run independently and grow on its own, if it is written badly, it is like a human body that has been infarctioned somewhere inside, according to Franchofe, "She is a woman here, but a sculpture, and there is a dead body", or the little man in this false world suddenly glimpses the place where it collapses, walks to the edge of this false world, and the exquisite wallpaper peels off there. Exposing the unbearable failure of the connection, the smell of plastic is emitted inside.
I happened to see the work of the infamous Nazi leader who thought he was great, was Adolf Hitler's paintings good? It looks good, almost as good as the scenic postcards sold in the scenic area of the ancient town. But when we look at the works of the kings of art, no matter what school or era they are, classicism, realism, impressionism or fauvism, there is a dynamic, heartwarming vitality in their works, they convey the spirit of nature rather than inferior copyers or stylists. "Painters, writers, sculptors, they're all the same."
I'm certainly not saying that Devasson and Trisette are already good enough to be the "king of art", such as the above mention of Trisette's "blunt telling" about the snow experience, the text of this paragraph always makes people feel lazy, and it is no longer fresh today, with a hint of literary chicken soup, especially when they are compared with Anna's "snowy air" and the cold fragrance on the tweed clothes of the protagonist of "The Dead", we can clearly see the superiority.
Stills from The Dead (1987).
The series of "Award-winning Picture Book Reviews" has not been dedicated to doing the common "GuideBook" column, what I hope is to use each picture book here to talk about things other than the "education guide", but also to treat a literary genre in a truly equal way, to talk about it like all other literature, to put it in the mountains and rivers of literature to compare it - this is the respect that serious creators deserve.
According to Franchoeffer, beauty is inherently a grim and difficult thing to capture easily, and "only an invincibility artist can hold it tight and force it to submit, so that nature has to reveal its true spirit naked." And the full vitality often lies in the end of that little "indifferent thing", with this, the air on the canvas circulates, the plasma of life fills the blood vessels and small fibers under the skin, and the characters are not just half-faces on paper but become convincing "living people".
So, going back to the original question of this article, what does snow usually represent for people, or what is the experience of snow often related to? What are those unique shimmers and tremors that we can see and hear from the snow? Freedom, mystery, tolerance, the eternal silence of death and the ode of the new birth, the warmth of the cold, the purity and clarity, is this it?
Or go back to the literature itself, in the unforgettable ending of The Dubliners (or you can return to the beautiful opening poem of Snow White):
"It was snowing all over Ireland. Snow fell on every piece of the gloomy central plain, on treeless hills, gently on the Allen Moor, and further west, gently into the raging black waves of the Shannong River. It also falls on every corner of the lonely church cemetery on the hill, where Michael Fury is buried... Snowflakes fell gently through the universe, just like their end, on all living and dead. ”