Chris Van Allsburg

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Chris Van Allsburg (2011)

Chris Van Allsburg (born June 18, 1949 in Grand Rapids , Michigan ) is an American illustrator and writer of children's books. He won the Caldecott Medal for his books Jumanji (1982) and The Polar Express (1985); In addition to the text, he also created the illustrations. Both were later successfully implemented in feature films.

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Life

He attended the University of Michigan Art School and received his Masters of Fine Arts from the Rhode Island School of Design.

Van Allsburg was actually a sculptor and only began to make drawings later, which are also very vivid for that reason. At first he saw them as a minor matter. For his graphic work he sometimes uses strong contrasts similar to Ludwig Hohlwein . His wife, who is a teacher, encouraged him to use his drawings and pictures for children's books, as they seemed very suitable for this. A friend, the writer and illustrator David Macaulay , agreed with her on this. Macaulay encouraged Van Allsburg's wife to show the pictures to a publisher. The publisher replied positively but seemed to assume Van Allsburg should take pictures for other authors' stories, however Van Allsburg's wife encouraged her husband to come up with stories of their own.

Chris Van Allsburg takes several months for his extremely detailed and meticulously drawn books. Despite the finely drawn details, all of Van Allsburg's pictures live from uniform and very haunting moods. Depending on the character of the story, his books are black and white (e.g. Jumanji ) or colored (e.g. The Polar Express .)

Chris Van Allsburg lives with his family in Providence , Rhode Island .

Works

His books describe fantastic and uncontrollable happenings and sometimes use violent irony. Van Allsburg breaks out of the comfortable world of children's literature to discover the darker side of people. For example, the book The Sweetest Fig is about a selfish man who is suddenly able to live out his wildest dreams. His greed is ultimately his downfall. This is not an uncommon moral for the content of a children's book, but Van Allsburg's cool drawing of the man brings a terrifying undertone to the narrative. The story of The Wretched Stone , in which a ship's crew is hypnotized and corrupted by the stone, is an allegorical tale about the bad influence of television.

Other literary themes include dreams, the environment, and objects with a life of their own (such as the board in Jumanji and Zathura .)

Every book features the dog Fritz, a bull terrier modeled after a real dog that belonged to Chris Van Allsburg's brother-in-law. He appears in every book as well as on his website, sometimes as a real dog, sometimes as a toy or as another object as a reminder of the real Fritz.

In an interview, Van Allsburg mentions his interest in the “personal thoughts” of the book characters in relation to his choice of topics, for example how a brightly colored coloring book character by his daughter feels. His childhood favorite book ( Harold and the Purple Crayon ) had a similar theme: a little boy who draws a world for himself with a purple pencil, only to end up painting a room and a bed, lying down and sleeping. He also chooses unexpected contexts and ambiguous outcomes of situations (e.g. Abdul Gasazi's garden ) as topics .

The Secrets of Harry Burdick, a collection of pictures on one side and sayings on the other (they represent "rediscovered pages" of longer books) continues the topics with darker undertones and gave rise to the idea for a short story by the writer Stephen King in the Nightmares and Dreamscapes collection.

Van Allsburg's art can also be found in one of the many editions of CS Lewis ' Chronicles of Narnia series and he illustrated a number of children's books by Mark Helprin .

Awards

Books

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Van Allsburg, Chris
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American illustrator and writer of children's books
DATE OF BIRTH June 18, 1949
PLACE OF BIRTH Grand Rapids , Michigan, USA