A few years later, when Raschka was accepted to the University of Michigan for medical school, he asked for and received a two-year deferment to go into the Peace Corps with his wife. Assigned to the Caribbean, both he and his wife spent what free time they had exploring their inner artists. "We both started painting a lot," Raschka said in a telephone interview from his New York studio. "When we got home, I couldn't stop.
Eastern Caribbean RPCV Chris Raschka exhibit opens at the National Center for Children's Illustrated Literature
Medical school detour led to book awards
Janet Van Vleet Special to the Reporter-News
Posted September 30, 2009 at 3 p.m.
Chris Raschka does not fear change.
If anything, the children's book author and illustrator, whose exhibit opens today at the National Center for Children's Illustrated Literature, welcomes and embraces change.
When he was a high school student in Chicago, Raschka traveled to Minnesota to check out Carleton College in Northfield, Minn., where he planned to attend university. But a visit to St. Olaf College in nearby Minneapolis made a stronger impression and he applied and went there instead.
A few years later, when Raschka was accepted to the University of Michigan for medical school, he asked for and received a two-year deferment to go into the Peace Corps with his wife. Assigned to the Caribbean, both he and his wife spent what free time they had exploring their inner artists.
"We both started painting a lot," Raschka said in a telephone interview from his New York studio. "When we got home, I couldn't stop."
But his path to full-time author/illustrator meandered a bit. Raschka's first job as an illustrator was for the Michigan bar association journal. He spent more than a year in a design studio with a "crusty old editor," before trying his hand at political and editorial cartoons.
After moving to New York and taking odd jobs, he sent out a book he had written and illustrated, "R and R: The Story of Two Alphabets," to a number of publishers. Taken on by a small label in the Midwest, that book was the stepping stone to what has been a fruitful and varied career.
Line up Raschka's books on a shelf and one might not even realize the same artist created them all. His style varies as much as the subject matters of his works, from books on jazz greats Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane to tomes about a blushing hippopotamus, a single sardine or whole zoo of Thingy Things.
"I like painting and I like brushes," Raschka said. "I'm trying to get myself away from colored drawings and more into direct painting - painting with what we would call a ‘loaded brush.' That's my ideal."
Direct painting means no preliminary drawing, no sketching it with pencil, just taking the brush to canvas and creating. Raschka's preference for that mode comes through clearly when viewing his books. He won the 2006 Caldecott award for "The Hello, Goodbye Window," a bright splash of a book. His 1994 "Yo! Yes?" received a Caldecott Honor award among others, while "Charlie Parker Played Be Bop" earned wide acclaim in the book world.
The wide range of Raschka's work makes for a wonderful exhibition, according to Debbie Lillick, executive director for the NCCIL.
"Oh, it's beautiful," she said of the show, opening tonight with a gallery talk by Raschka. "He has the most varied style of any illustrator we've had in a long time."
Lillick said the illustrations in "The Hello, Goodbye" window look Impressionistic, while "The Grasshopper's Song: An Aesop's Fable Revisited" reminds her of artist Georgia O'Keefe's style. Raschka's visual interpretation of Sergei Prokofiev's famous musical composition includes 3-D shadowboxes that look like tiny stages, she added.
"He's got a very prolific body of work," Lillick said. "It certainly makes a fun exhibit to visit."
