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I am an artist—a painter—first and foremost who happens to write.
There is in my temperament an irrepressible love of form, shape, line, and their arrangements as seen rhythmically, with or without color, under an arbitrary light. Everything I look at or imagine is translated in these terms and stored in my memory bank. These are the elements to which I as an artist respond. These are the cells that structure an artistic soul. These elements are the ultimate humanizing message and the unmeasurable passage to one's artistic nirvana. While form rhythm, color, and light—words too—serve my artistic passion, the immediate focus of my work in books for young readers is on who we are, where we originated, and what we have done for and to each other.
From the onset of my work in children's literature, I never expected to communicate anything in book form but people and events as they walked,
ran, skipped, stumbled, or jumped across history's time line. I was not interested in swamping youngsters with my personal agenda, or having children read and see mirror images of themselves in my books.
Neither did I ever try to lessen their pain by assuring them that life has its rewards. Sometimes it doesn't. I have never tried to impress young readers with the notion that life was better in the good old days. It wasn't. From the beginning I have tried to be as upfront with your children as I have been with mine. No guile. No mind games. No preaching. I am not all that cunning. I am just an adult human possessed by pictures and words who has an interest in the present and future born of a connection to the past.
I want my books to be avenues of knowledge, grace, and civility literarily conceived and artistically expressed. I try to convey to young
readers both the worthiness of their survival in a hostile world and the humanizing aspects of art beyond the illustrative match of picture and word.
I am trying to make an artistic statement logically, and a logical statement to children artistically. It matters little whether that is expressed in nonfiction or fiction. I hope to widen a youngster's knowledge base and to communicate purpose, as I have thus far stated it, pictorially and verbally, as dramatically as I can to make it stick in one's memory.
Also, what I illustrate and write for young readers has much to do with the pleasures of discovering and retaining information.
My artistic compulsion, welded as it is to varied interests, and having been transposed in large part to the book, has resulted in the communication of my internal visions of the world, past or present, the dynamics of which I try to graphically and verbally express. I work mightily in language and pictures to deliver a sense of the human experience as a work of art, and art as human experience.
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About the Author:
Abstracted from Mr. Fisher's Arbuthnot Honor Lecture given at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, May 5, 1995
Leonard Everett Fisher, born in New York in 1924, is a World War II veteran, a graduate of Yale University (1949, MFA
1950), and Dean Emeritus of Paier College of Art in Connecticut. His art can be found in many public and private collections. The Universities of Connecticut, Oregon, and Minnesota
maintain major archives of his papers, art, and manuscripts. He is the recipient of numerous awards and honors for his artistic and civic contributions. He was a delegate to the White House Conference
on Library and Information Services during the Carter administration, and he is a member of the Sanford Lowe Committee of the New Britain Museum of American Art. He lives in Connecticut with his wife,
Margery, a retired school librarian and currently a member of the Bank Street College Book Committee in New York City. They have three married children and are the grandparents of six.
Recent Books
Some of Leonard Fisher's most recent books include The Jetty Chronicles (Cavendish), The Gods and Goddesses
of The Ancient Maya (Holiday House), William Tell (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), Anasazi (Atheneum), and Leonard Everett Fisher: A Life of Art (University of Connecticut)
Gods and Goddesses of the Ancient Maya
by Leonard Everett Fisher
Published by Holiday House
ISBN: 0-8234-1427-2
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