Let’s start this series of posts on biographical picturebooks by considering Barb Rosenstock and Mary Grandpre’s The Noisy Paint Box. It’s an exuberant celebration of art and creative freedom, and an inspiring example of the ability of the picturebook to bring the past into the present.
Vasya Kandinsky’s childhood does not look like much fun. He studies subjects he dislikes, plays the piano with the exuberance of a ticking metronome, and endures dinner parties that even the dead fish find boring.
These long early years are narrated across the first four pages of the book, and we find no indications of time passing. In the text there are no dates or singular events, and in the illustrations no changes in season or in the characters’ appearance. This reinforces the sense that Vasya is bored and that time is dragging on endlessly “… until the day his aunt gave him a small wooden paint box.” (7)
Suddenly we are plunged into ten pages where we witness Kandinsky’s very first contact with painting. As he mixes the paints, he hears a whisper, then a hiss! “Vasya listened as his brush stirred and swished. The swirling colours trilled like an orchestra tuning up for a magical symphony.”
Streaks of colour escape Vasya’s paint box and canvas, roar across the gutter, and explode like fireworks across Mary Grandpré’s double page spreads; while Barb Rosenstock pens her imagining of this moment by harnessing Kandinsky’s synaesthesia (a neuropsychological trait in which the stimulation of one sense causes the automatic experience of another sense) and producing a kaleidoscopic eruption of colour, sound and motion.
The iterative time of Vasya’s ennui has given way to an almost real-time narration, as illustrator and author sweep us up into the action. The former zooms in on Vasya’s wonderment as he peers into his noisy paintbox for the first time (9 -10), and allows us to share his point of view as he paints his first canvas (13-14). The latter lets us overhear the details of Vasya talking with his Auntie and parents, and listen in on what feels like every musical brushstroke.
This central section of the book is a synchronic rendition of a few gleeful hours. Story time and discourse time almost seem to coincide, and the gaps between double page spreads last only seconds or minutes. As the experience spans a full third of the book, we are not simply informed that Kandinsky experienced colours as sounds but WE do so, probably for the first time in our lives, as well.
Then the narrative leaps ahead in time: Vasya is now a young man studying law in Moscow. Years go by in one page, a decade in one page turn, and then we stand, poised for an eternal second as: “An ivory chorus of snowflakes scattered on the sable collar of his overcoat.”
On and on it goes, leaping through Kandinsky’s life at an astonishing speed. We hurtle down the diachronic time line eager to find out whether he will ever put aside the conventions and expectations of his time.
The book as a whole focuses primarily on the first forty years of Kandinsky’s life up to 1910 when he painted his first completely abstract painting. A quote by the painter himself is printed on the last page and sums it up best: “I let myself go. I had little thought for houses and trees, drawing coloured lines and blobs on the canvas with my palette knife, making them sing just as powerfully as I knew how.”
Barb Rosenstock describes The Noisy Paint Box in her Author’s Note as historical fiction. She says: “The dialogue is imagined, although the events are true. In his writings, Kandinsky describes hearing a hissing sound as a child when he first mixed colours in the paint box his aunt gave him.”
So this type of fictional biography has the freedom to manipulate time through pacing, view point, and discourse; to invent dialogue where none was recorded, and to activate our senses through colour, onomatopoeia and literary synaesthesia.
These are just some of the features of text and image which come together to bring the past into the present. As we read we hear and witness Kandinsky’s colours tinkling, thundering and leaping off the canvas, we experience, first hand, the awe-inspiring moments that first unleashed abstract art into the world. By the end of it do we know more about Kandinsky and abstract art? Yes, and no. We don’t know any dates, titles of manifestos, critics’ reviews of the period… However, we are alight with fresh curiosity and our souls resonate with abstract art, like it has possibly never done before.
© While all images of the books and all the written content on this blog have been created by me, original copyright of the books belong to the authors and illustrators.
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