Claire Ewart
From Words a Story Grows...

I'll never forget when my kindergarten teacher thumb-tacked my crayon drawing of a robin up on the classroom bulletin board.  I'm sure I scuffed my penny loafers on the linoleum floor.  I know that my cheeks burned with pride as she held my drawing in front of the class!  No wonder that all these years later I am still drawing!

Since first holding a crayon, my natural instinct has been to tell a story.

Maybe this has something to do with being born in the almost fairytale-like town of Holland, Michigan where at a very young age I squeezed my toes into wooden shoes to clomp along 8th street with my mother during the Tulip Time Parade.  Or perhaps, my interest in story springs from having grown up tickling tadpoles, spying turtles in the sun, and mucking around muskrat dens with my scientifically inclined, ever-adventurous father.

Whatever the reason for my inclination, throughout elementary school, I made drawings, dioramas, and 2-dimensional puppet theaters which fed on narrative.  I wrote, sang, drew, and as I went on to jr. high, and high school, I painted and kept writing.

My father's job required that we move a number of times, but my mother always made sure that where ever that took us, we lived on a lake.  In each new place, my father lost no time in marching my two younger sisters and me out to explore.  We swam in clear water, hiked along up-turned creek beds, squished and sprang through peat bogs.  As we did, we learned that each feather, fossil and footprint we found was part of a story.

In the winter when the lake was frozen, when leaves and tiny fish were suspended in the ice, we skated.  One windy winter morning my mother surprised us with a sail that she'd made from an old curtain.  We clambered aboard our sled, caught the wind and skittered and skimmed across the frozen lake.

What a way to appreciate the gifts of nature, to learn ingenuity and resourcefulness!  Because my parents led by example, those early explorations began my creative journey.

When I wasn't exploring, I drew and painted and wrote, and kept doing so as we moved and I was transferred from one school to the next.  As I grew, I found that my instinct to tell a story was becoming stronger.  By the time I became a college student at the Rhode Island School of Design I was no longer satisfied with the static nature of the 2-dimensional medium of painting.  When I applied oil to canvas, along came the nagging feeling, that there must be "more to the story."

Almost by accident, I rediscovered that if I went beyond the cold, analytical environment of the painting studio, out into the world, my work came alive.  Out there in the streets, beneath the sky, along the water, I used pencil, brush and ink, or watercolor to capture the gestures and emotions of people and animals.  I drew with brush and ink at the Providence bus station.  I took pencils to the Ringling Bros. & Barnum and Bailey Circus, and sat in the elephant tent sketching the huge elephants as they swayed back in forth in their chains.  I knew I was on to something when my instructor compared my sketches from life to the work of the Spanish painter Goya!

Not long afterward, I traveled to Egypt and did plein-air watercolors of canted sail feluccas drifting across the Nile, and brush and ink paintings of robed Egyptian men sharing puffs on the hookah and sugary glasses of tea.  In a sense each drawing or painting captured part of the experience, like a thumbnail sketch or frame from a storyboard.  The rest of the story, I recorded in a journal.

There was something about capturing the essence of an event, a gesture, the quality of light in a scene that stayed with me.  At around that same time, I stumbled upon, the fell, whole-heartedly under the spell of the art of traditional animation.  My thumbnail sketches that grew into full-fledged storyboards, became effective ways to plot out action.  With animation, I could make stories come "alive."  So, much so that a film I finished during my senior year at RISD was nominated for a Student Academy Award.

Yet after college, when I looked for work in traditional hand-drawn animation, the job I found was as an art director of computer animation.  The medium of computer animation was in its infancy.  Using computers to produce animation seemed exciting, and I could imagine the potential for incredible storytelling.  Yet, the reality of the process, at least in those early days, was all too often a drudgery of numbers and equations that had little to do with the spontaneity of creation.  That regimentation prove far too mechanical for imaginative storytelling.

Soon I understood that I would have to tell my stories on my own.  And if I hoped that one day other people would see or appreciate them, I would have to write them down.  As I wrote, I began to see that in words there existed a kind of perfect freedom.  We all know from hearing a good book read, or reading that book ourselves, that words can suggest imagery limited only by the imagination.  For me well-chosen words worked like music.  When someone else could hear the music too, then, my story might have a life of its own.

I am an author and illustrator today because whether I am sketching water buffalo in Egypt, photographing camels in India (both of which prepared me for illustrating THE LEGEND OF THE PERSIAN CARPET), writing about fruit bats in Indonesia ( for THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE, and THE BOSTON GLOBE), photographing work horses on Amish farms for my book THE GIANT, or finding fossils in my own back yard which led to FOSSIL, I continue to weave words and pictures together to tell a story.

My work has been featured on PBS's READING RAINBOW, and STORYTIME.  My illustrations have been featured in museums and galleries, and included in the Society of Illustrators Show ORIGINAL ART.  My portfolio has been featured in the 1992 edition of CHILDREN'S WRITER'S & ILLUSTRATOR'S MARKET.

I'm excited to know that my books, selected for state reading lists, and nominated for state book awards, have enchanted young readers around the world.

I am a recipient of the Celebrate Literacy Award from the International Reading Association.

The internationally known author/illustrator Tomie dePaola has said of my work:

"No author could ask for a more talented interpreter."

And yet, what I value most about my life with words and pictures are the moments of discovery.  Now, I am thrilled that through my books and school visits, I am able to share those discoveries with young readers.