(upbeat - [Announcer] Welcome, everyone, to the Penny S (audience applauding) - Welcome, everyone, to the Penny Stamps My name is Chrisstina Hamilton, the series director, and today is a very special day.

This is a homecoming of sorts.

We have a local hero who's also a with an international acclaim.

So we are very honored today to present author and illustrator, Chris Van Allsburg.

(audience cheering) Yeah.

A thank you to our supporters, the Ann Arbor District Library, I know we have librarians in the house today, the University of Michigan Arts Initiative, and our series partners, Detroit Public Television, PBS Books, and Michigan Radio 91.7 FM.

(audience applauding) Just quickly, for those of you who are here in the house be cause you love Chris Van Allsbu but you have no idea what the Penny Stamp Speaker Seri a word of explanation.

The Penny Stamp Series is a program of the University of Michigan Stamp School and we bring in all kinds of creators and innova as a way for our students, that are also here in the audience tonight, to connect directly with creative leaders of the day.

We happen every week here on Thursdays.

We're free and open to the public.

We're an open classroom, So if this is your first time, please join us again.

You can pick up a calendar out in the lobby, or you can find us at pennystampsevents.org or on social media.

Plan to be here every Th through April 5:30 PM, same tim And before we get started, I also wanna introdu in the audience with us today.

We have the Stamp School's Dean's Advis This is a very important and special council comprised of our alumni from the Stamp School who have embarked into the world and found success.

And they are taking their time and trouble and to come back here to work with our Dean, Carlos Francisco Jackson, and help to guide the school.

So we thank all of you here today in that capacity for your time and energy.

It really is so importan (audience applauding) Yeah.

It's a homecoming of all kinds of sorts.

And no, we have books for sale.

Schuler's books is in the lobby, and though we wil having a book signing today, there are many, many of Van Allsburg's titles for sale.

And they're pre-signed.

So you can get a book that is signed, because we will have a Q&A, so you will have an opportunity of Chris's talk to ask him Yo u'll see they're microphones on stands at the end of the two aisles here, when we get to that moment, you can come down and line up and we'll se we have for questions.

If you're up i you'll have to com And now, oh, please do silence your cell phones.

Yes.

And now, for an introduction of our illustrious guest, Chris Van Allsburg, a Michigan native, and a University of Michigan Stamp School alum.

His life work exemplifies the potential of a University of Michigan education on a bright individual, and the impact that this individual can have on so many lives.

Children and adults around the world love his work because he inspires our imagination as a master of the unexpected.

His stories and illustration have really become part of our collective memory and cultural fabric.

Van Allsburg has written and illustrated 21 his book "Jumanji" and its sequel "Zathura" became a series of Hollywood films.

His most recognized book, "The P was also adapted to the big screen and is one of the bestselling children's books of all time He's been awarded two Caldecott medals and a Caldecott Honor, received the Reg for Lifetime Achievement in a National Book Award...

He's inducted into Hall of Fame, and the list of honor We are pleased to welcome him back to Michigan, a man who has taken us on so many journeys.

We are honored he has made the journey to be back with us here today.

Please w (audience cheering) (audience applauding) - Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you.

For about 50 years, I've been going out and talking about my work.

Initially, when yo it's not clear to you that you'll have obligations to talk about your work, but I learned that pretty quickly.

And I was going out to groups of librarians and groups of classroom students, groups of art students.

And as I say, I've been doing it for about 45 years.

What I found over that time was that there was a surprising amount of interest in that I didn't start out as an illustrator and actually made sculpture.

So I started introducing into my li that I made.

And I wa at some points, they found this more interesting than then the illustration that I was sharing with them.

So I thought I would share some of my sculpture with you.

It starts very early, my efforts as a sculptor.

I have the oldest, an image here of the ol in my collection.

Yes, there it is.

(audience laughing) Made it in second grade.

Super proud of it.

It's a duck-billed platypus.

Not sure why as a seven year old, I was interested in Australian marsupials, but you can't see it 'cause it broke off, it also had the ducktail in the back, 'cause I was, even as a young person, concerned with details.

I brought this home to my mother and it ended up in the place where so many of these gifts that children make for their parents in our class, ended up in the kitchen, that's the gallery of childhood art.

And she put it on the window sill over the sink.

And in about 1958, 59, it dropped into the sink and the tail dropped off.

But my mother just picked it back up and put it on the window sill.

And it was the And this represented my sculptural achievement at the age of seven.

I don't think it showed a great deal of promise.

My mom sure liked it.

So there's a giant leap forward here.

I had interest in art when I was in elementary school, but by the time I got to high school, not so much.

There were other things that distracted me, and I wasn't really involved in art at all.

And this reality led to a kind of an unexpecte in my academic ambitions.

When I got to be 17, I was in a high school in East Grand Rapids, Michigan, and they would send admission officers to my high school.

And it was actually a kind of a compassionate act because they would send these interviewers to the schools and you would present your SAT scores, your grade point average, and you would have an interview.

And at the end of the interview, the representative from U And it was a great relief to have it happen so simply.

And I got to that point.

I got to be 17 and had that appointment scheduled for me at the guidance office of my school.

And I hadn't given a great deal of thought to what I wanted to do.

As you all know, the Univ It's possible to major in many things and study many things.

And when I entered the guidance counselor's office with this representative of U of M, I had not yet decided really what I wanted to do.

And I handed him the application.

And it was not marked up in the way he expected, which was that I had not indicated what I wanted to major in, that I wanted to go into LSNA or some other college.

And I was just kind of dumb about it.

And he said, "Well, Chris, you haven' What are your interests?"

And I was kind of hedg I guess I had vague ideas about being a lawyer or something, but I couldn't make a commitment.

It was a fork in the road.

And I was looking at the sheet that listed the different kinds of things you could study at the University of Michigan.

And there was a line that said A&D and I didn't know what that meant.

And he sai And haven't given being an artist much thought, and I hadn't formed an ambition to study art at that point.

And most of my art, when I thought about it, was like this, this was my last sort of serious involvement with art.

But when I was in that office, there was an impulse that came over me.

I just decided, I'm gonna get into the art school.

So how am I gonna do that?

I had to persuade the admissions officer, because the way you got in then, 1967, I believe, was the last year that a portfolio was not required, but you certainly had to prove through your transcript that you'd studied art, and maybe some recommendations from your art teacher.

So my transcript had none of that.

I was looking good with my SATs and my GPA, but there was an absence of art classes.

And that struck the admissions person as peculiar that I was electing to become an art major.

I was challenged by his doubt, his resistance.

And so I explained to him that I'd been studying privately at home, (audience laughing) that I was doing a little painting, and I had set up a small studio on where I could do some stone carving.

And I spoke with it with a kind of confidence and the cheekiness, I guess, that he thought, well, no one would lie about something like that.

And so we talked a little bit about art and I knew the names of a couple of artists.

I think Van Gogh is one of them.

I can't remember the other.

But that brief conversation was enough to persuade him that I deserved to be in the University of Michigan Art School.

A triumph for me, I guess, except that I didn't I spent the summer goofing off, knowing that I was gonna be a U of M freshman in a couple of months, not giving a lot of thought to what it meant to become an art major.

In some ways I thought I would be like a regular academic student.

I would be an LSNA student, except that on Fridays I would be to do things like this as a way of relieving the pressure that grows out of academic demand.

But when I got there, when I got to the University o I found myself way over my head.

And I found myself in classrooms with kids who actually had studied privately, and kids from, you know, arts and craft school in Detroit, kids who went to Sunday art classes in Cranb And when I got into the classroom with these students, I was, I don't know, just sort of shocked at what I was expected to do based on what they were able to do.

And that showed up most clearly in figure I think all the art students here will appreciate the fact that figure drawing right away shows a kind of an understanding for draftsmanship, for the ability to look at something and reproduce it convincingly on a piece of pape And I was really hopeless.

I mean, you know, I would do a figure drawing and then tear it off the sheet before the instructor came by, 'cause it was just a humiliation.

This led me to believe that my skills were the way they were because I was not born with a gift.

And it was a gift that I saw around me in all the other students.

And I didn't wanna feel left out.

I didn't wanna feel, I don't know, like a loser.

And so I said, hmm, maybe drawing's not for me.

Is there something else I might be able to excel at?

And so I started thinking about sculpture.

And when you become a sophomore, you can start to sort of specialize.

You can find courses that will teach you about the principles of three dimensional art.

And so I think the next, yes, this next image is the first thing I did at the University of Michigan.

(audience laughing) And not sure what the assignment was, but I saw beauty in a normal object, and I would like to lay claim that this was an extraordinary in But it was 1967, 1968, and pop art was a real thing.

And there was actually a, you know, a legitimate aesthetic investigation of the beauty that surrounded us in low culture design, you know, but I thought there was a way to emphasize it by, you kn And it is an elegant shape.

It would clearly be for very tall people.

And also closing the lid would So anyway, in making this, I discovered a handiness I had modeling, or not modeling, but carving wood.

I believe this was pine, it's probably about, it's not life size.

Can't sit on it.

It's But I was so kind of enthusiastic and motivated by my achievement with the wood, I decided wood was my thing and that I could do better, I could be better if I applied myself.

So I really did focus on woodworking.

And I stopped drawing entirely because I felt, as I say, overwhelmed by the demands of it, and a true believer that I lacked the drawing gene.

But I did believe I had the sculpture gene.

So I stuck with it.

And probably about four mont I set out on a much more ambitious woodworking project.

And this is it right here.

Now this is, I wish this were life size 'cause that would be quite impressive, but it's not quite It's three feet.

It's about three feet long.

And hard to... Hard to articulate, I think, exactly what was because even though I was na in the craft that was demanded to make something like this, which struck me as so sleek and so I was still involved in an aesthetic investigation about the unrevealed beauty of pop culture images.

So, I don't know, this is the car that I to visit Pluto in.

And it's simply a cartoon image.

But I thought taking this pop culture image and treating it with a kind of respect as if it were a noble subject matter for sculpture, I thought I was revealing qualities about it that went unobserved, unappreciated.

And I don't know if I convinced my professors, all my fellow students, that I was really onto something.

But later on, you know, when I look at work, these early efforts of mine, and I, you know, I look at the work, you know, 30, 40 years later of Jeff who basically does, you know, balloon toys, but balloon toys in highly polished stainless steel.

It's sort of the same approach, which you take a normal one that we're kind of familiar wh ich even has some comical qu But if you just labor on it and pour all this effort into trying to articulate exactly how these forms intersect, that it becomes something slightly different.

Got some other pictures of it.

Yeah, rear view's nice too.

(laughs) Yeah...

There's the cockpit.

So this actually comes quite a bit later because it wasn't really exactly in the same spirit of trying to discover or trying to reveal the formal aesthetic qualities of pop art, pop culture images.

This had more to do with the ridiculousness of hyperbole and how you can use hyperbole to also sort of accentuate the sometimes overlooked beauty of things.

Now, boat hulls have been, I think, appreciated for, well, for a long time for their sensuous quality and their beauty, but I didn't feel they went far enough.

And so this is a seven foot long speedboat.

And the idea here was that how far can you go with this kind of exaggeration, that not only creates a particular response to this object, assuming it was a model of a real thing, but also just as a piece of sculpture, how the white inlaid lines reinforce the shapes that you're looking at.

So I guess in some ways this was a little bit like the car, which is trying to find or trying to reveal things that might go overlooked in these common objects.

So this would be another sort of example of that.

This, in this case, a cartoon animal, but once again, lavished with a kind of precisionist attitude about the contours of the animal, the perfection.

It's the kind of thing, I don't know, way ahea It might've been an example of having commissioned AI to make a perfect bull terrier.

And it might've been able to turn out something like this.

This is life size.

It's a pretty good piece.

These were all made in resin, cast resin, and then highly refined.

I'm not sure exactly why, but in almost all the work I did, when you make things like this, you take them out of a mold, and when you take them o they look kind of crummy.

The surfaces are ver an enormous amount of work for us to put them together, cl But having completed the reconstruction of them, there are, well, it's maybe, in a piece like this, which is maybe one and a a week and a half of just rubbing this resin with a wet and dry sandpaper and trying to pull out this mere finish from it.

And I don't know, it's fetishistic in a way.

I me But it's irresistible when you have something in a state that is crude and may have all the shapes that you want, there's something irresistible about making the finish so refined that it starts to reflect light in a different way, and it emphasizes the kind of shape and forms... Yeah, it's a crazy thing.

I actually I gave these names.

I had in mind the idea of doing a series of, the dogs of famous artists, and I was a big Br#ncu#i fan at the time.

So I tol and this is "Br#ncu#i's Rabbit".

(audience laughing) So, these are good sized pieces.

This is probably about Because I made them look so precious with these extraordinarily mirror-like fini and I want 'em to keep 'em that way, I ordinarily built these plexiglass So I was still into these, this idea that if you take these cartoon-li that we see, and we only see them in two dimensions in a cartoon, but I thought looking at them and treating them with different materials and making them three-dimensio So this is a cane head, the handle of a cane.

And this is an armadillo cane head, a cute little bugger, isn't it?

(audience laughing) So my interest shifted a little bit from these ideas of curvilinear shapes that had a kind of a sensuous quality to them.

And I got into...

I got into tragedy.

So this doesn't have anything to do with the same formal investigatio or anything like that.

This is more l And the narration here is a sinking ocean liner.

It's actually the Titanic, I'd like to point out that it was cast probably 3 years before James Cameron's production.

So...

Pretty good size also.

It's probably about 34 inches long, 36 inches long.

Made originally out of wax.

And the waves carefully modeled in wax.

And then through the lost wax process, cast into bronz It has a companion piece.

(audience laughing) I try not to put them too close together, it just seems...

So I continued my interest in tragedy.

And I think there was something, obviously the work is It's not this formal investigation of shapes.

It's really telling a story.

I still believe there's a kind of a formal evalu of the intersecting circles, the lines, the way collision can create these unexpected angles and shapes.

But still, nobody's gonna look at that and start to think about how the cylinders are displaced.

They're gonna think about, you know, what the hell And this is a train wreck, goes without saying.

Yeah.

So after I went back and did but I did take a b in architecture as subject matter.

And the piece on the left is a hypothetical design for a chair factory.

(audience laughing) And it's big, it's bigger than a it's a big chair, and it's an ex (audience laughing) But having completed the chair factory, I happened to have a roommate who was doing tooled leather belts as a way to earn some money to get through U of M. And I saw that with tooled leather, you could make these repeated imp had the correct dye.

So I don't know if this lights up it's not too bad.

So I went directly from observing h these little impressions on belts...

I said, gosh, you could make a leather Chrysler Building with that.

And so this is the Chrysler Build in tooled leather.

It's about five and a half feet high.

An I think I was a little ahead of my time with this too, because I don't know, sort of playful manipulation by sculptors or even by architects.

Hadn't really come around yet, but I stuck with it.

So this is a model that I made in...

I'm sure that you've all seen pictures of the Flatiron Building looking sout and they show the leading edge.

And you look at the Flatiron Buil that's really strange, it's a flat building, but you just walk around it and you see it a triangular building.

And for some reason that disapp the desire to make a truly Flatiron Building.

(audience laughing) So this is about four and a half feet ta it's cast and has its own little kind of case to protect it.

And you can see here in the image on the far right that a floor plan of this building, this is what was so interesting to me is that, you know, in just executing what I wanted the facade to look like, I had created a floor plan, which would be just a hallway with circular stairs at the end.

And it would be a useless building.

And I thought very Magritte-like, in its, you know, kind of insane surrealistic reality to that, who would want it?

But it mystified people when they looked at it because it's done with a kind of accuracy that you associate with, you know, architectural firm commissioned architecture.

So when people walk up to it and they look at it, they think it's just insane, and they wanna know where is it, who built i Onto some more odd kind of architectural fantasies.

This is the cottage of the horticulturalist.

And I built this little cottage out of wood, and I went to a florist, an artificial florist, and I got these giant bags of artificial leaves.

And I spent a long time tacking them on individually onto the cottage armature.

And then I did a leaded glass cover for it.

It had a great deal of mood and mystery to me, because you just walk up and it's the idea of the kind of architectural identity sort of subsumed by the nature that finally cloaked it.

So then I got onto some other ideas, and these were ideas about freezing motion.

This is probably about tw And I was interested in stopping motion.

And so this is a cup of coffee spilling on a little cabinet, which I thought it w had some utilitarian benefits.

So there's a little door there with some drawers.

Keep your coffee grounds in, I guess.

And then something a little bit more ambitious.

These are cones suffering impact.

So I was imagining a kind of a conflict between cones, which were malleable, and spheres, which were rigid.

And so I poked them through at various points in the cones.

And they sort of are, in my mind, partly because of the materials I used and the kind of meticulous presentation, they're the kind of things that I would expect to see in a museum of physics where they're trying to prove something.

I don't know what.

But there are a number of and try to figure out why I made them, I realize that I was making things that I wish I could have discovered in some obscure museum of physics, or even better than that, some obscure a And I could have made these mine, but that opportunity didn't exist, so I ma So these are cones suffering impact.

So this is, I mean, this is almost like a drawer.

This is not the best shot, but this is a pretty good sized cabinet, in it, but it was called "Ball Coming to a Skidding Stop on a Checkered Carpet."

And it's just inlaid maple and walnut and n a good angle, because from up above you can actually see the compression of the squares and how the compression of the squares conforms to the change in its contour.

Yeah.

So this is a big piece, actually.

This is about five feet tall.

It's called "Obelisk in a Strong Wind."

And the idea here was just to stop a tragedy before it gets to its worst point.

And so this is rosewood.

I actually cut all these little bricks out of rosewood.

And then had a very complicated armature in the center here, so that assuming you didn't it 's a pretty convincing sort of impression that this thing is being blown over, "Obelisk in a Strong Wind."

These are the invisible men bookends.

(audience laughing) These are bronze, actually, no, they aren't bronze.

I cast these in bronze, but they didn't have that I wanted them to have.

So then I plated them in copper, so they had more of the souvenir look.

And then I put the hats there in sterling silver So this would neatly fit into the category that I was describing of things I wished I could have found in an antique shop that didn't exist, but I would've felt so lucky to find it.

Let me see if I can... Yeah, this is called the hypnotizing machine.

(all laughing) Yeah, don't look at it too long.

(audience laughing) Yeah, this is... You can't really tell, but this, I'm stil with the level of craft that I embraced from a very young age.

And so this is actually end papers from some old books mounted onto wood, and there's about 20 coats of lacquer on top of it to give it that decoupage feel.

Yeah, yeah, I'm sorry, this is a little dark in the center, but this is, I guess this would go along with the Titanic and train wreck.

This is And I had this idea, and this becomes slightly narrative in the way that some of the others, and by narrative I mean it's a sculpture, which you aren't meant to simply behold and appreciate its shape, its contours.

There's at least a moment here where you're left to wonder, what was the astronomer looking at?

He must have seen something in the sky that was bright and it was getting closer, and it was getting closer, and it was getting closer, and finally it landed.

Yeah.

So there I am, there I am holding the "Event at the Observatory."

So this is in a studio that...

I finished my bachelor's degree at Michigan, and I went on and got a graduate degree at Rhode Island School of I set up a studio and the studio was owned by, it's not so common here, more common in the East Coast, these big old mi of vacated, artists go in there for really cheap studio space.

It's really, in some ways, a fabulous The studio that I got into, the landlord turned the heat off at around five o'clock in the afternoon, which meant, you know, you got about a half hour, an hour to keep on working, but it just got too cold at night.

And so this big space you can't see is quite large, I shared it with another artist, pushed me into a position where I needed to do something at night, because at that young age, when you're filled with energy, you can work after supper, you know... And I was ready to go and that was my habit, but I couldn't work after supper, I couldn't work after supper in the studio because my hands were too cold.

So I had to make a decision.

I needed a hobby.

So my hobby was drawing pictures.

And I started to draw pictures.

And about the same time I started with drawing these pictures, yo ur pictures look like illustrations," which is not a compliment for an artist, ordinarily.

And she said to me, I think there's a chance here.

My wife is an elementary school and she used picture books in and she brought home a whole big box of them.

And she said, just look at these.

I think you could do And I looked into the box of books and it was a disappointment because back then the books that were written for children appeared to me as if they were written and illustrated by adults who had already formed in their minds that they were doing this for children.

And the work just seemed to be, I don't know, I mean, I don't want to be critical, but I sort of ca of like, I don't know, greeting cards.

It didn't look like serious art to me.

The images that were in these picture books were so much like the images children's themselves drew.

And I guess you could make the argument, well, the kids would like to see that.

It looks like something But I kind of rejected that.

My wife had a box of the and encouraging me to think about it, she brought the box home, I looked at 'em I told my wife that she was barking up the wrong tree.

I couldn't be a children's book illustrator, but there was one book in the box, "Higglety Pigglety Pop!

", Maurice Sendak.

And amongst all the books, this was the single book that seemed to me that the artist could rightfully claim that they' a work of art.

It was not a an editor, an artist who maybe never even met the author.

And when I saw "Higglety Pigglety Pop!"

and this is a measure of how naive I was about the field, 'cause Maurice h but this is the one I saw.

And it's such a peculiar and personal book, it occurred to me, well, wait a minute, you actually could be a children's book artist and n have to make these kind of childish things about, you know, bunny rabbits and stuff like that.

And, you know, talking bunny rabbits who were learn how to share their rabbits, carrots, excuse me.

Not a bad idea, really, but I didn't wanna do it.

So anyway, I saw this and I was encouraged to think, well, maybe I could.

And these are the kinds of drawi at that time.

And you can see my but this is called "The Bird Watcher," and they're very kind of static compositions and they do actually create kind of a narrative puzzle.

And this is the one, I think this one may have preceded it.

And this is the one, this is called "The Impatient Dinner Gue Once again, somewhat, you know, kind of stilted figure drawing and very simple interior spaces.

But I was interested in this kind of bizarre content that triggered people's imaginations, wondered what the story was behind it.

And it was a drawing like this, there's probably a handful of these, that encouraged my wife to go visit a publisher in Boston.

And the publisher, to my amazement, to his credit, looked at images like these.

And he said, "Oh, yeah, (audience laughing) He was considered an eccentric in the field.

And I was lucky to have connected with him.

And anyway, having met with the editor who was excited about my work, he sent back some manuscripts with my wife, Lisa.

And I looked at them and they were, unfor a lot of these stories about, you know, little bunny rabbit's first day at school and learning how to share his carrots and things like that.

And then they wore backpacks and they rode on the school bus.

And so I called them up and I said, I'm sorry, you know, I'm not the right guy for this, but thank you for your consideration.

And he said to me, you know, if you wanna do the drawings you wanna do you have to be the author of the text, because that's what will give you the opportunity to make...

If you wanna make a drawing like this and it shows up in a kid's book, that's okay, but you gotta have a story that makes sen And so I said, now, that's not happening, because, I mean, at that point, the longest thing to my mom, asking her how the platypus was.

But anyway, I said, okay, I'll give it a shot.

I'll give it a shot.

And so I ended up doing the first book.

And one of the things that people always ask is where do you get your ideas?

And for me, in And in the case of the "Garden of Abdul Gasazi", this was the image that came to mind.

And as a boy chasing a dog through a topi and left with a lot of questions.

This was a little bit like the other work, a man chewing on a plate, a man staring at a bird.

So you have a question posed here, who's the dog?

Where's he going?

What is this And my storytelling method, at least very early on, was simply to answer the questions.

The dog is running away from the boy, the boy must keep control of the dog, must keep the dog on the leash, he's lost that, he's in a garden, which is very strange.

Who owns the garden?

It's obviously owned by a and perhaps powerful fellow.

And so as I kept on answering my questions, got to the idea that this was the garden of Abdul Gasazi, a retired magici And at the end of the story, he has to first get through the garden... Oh, this is his entrance into the garden and he has to search out the dog.

But the end of the story has an ambiguity to it unusual in children's books.

Because what happens i is that the boy, does finally get to the magician's house and he finds that the dog has been turned into a duck.

This is very alarming to him, 'cause the dog was not his, he was actually taking care of it for a woman.

And he was looking forward to having to to the owner, and now it was a duck.

So he goes home.

On his way home, he loses control of the d and the duck flies away.

And now he's got not who owned the dog, the dog named Fritz.

But when he finally gets home to confess his failure, Fritz's is there, and so is the dog, Fritz.

And what she explains to the boy was that magicians fool people, they can't really turn dogs into ducks.

He just made you believe the duck of him was your dog, and he took off and he grabbed your hat and he flew here... And then he took off again.

And then the dog showed up.

Won't get into it too long, 'cause I'm get But I guess the final point is that on the l of the story, there is a clue that is provided, which encourages the child to wonder, well, what did happen?

Was Gasazi a real magician that could turn the dog into a duck?

Or was he just a stage And to me, there's a big separation point there.

And also, in some ways, kind of a heavy psychological premise for six year olds.

(laughs) And much to my surprise, the same editor who is okay with my black and white pictures, I said, you know, it's not really finished.

There's not an e We don't know really what happen And so they published it and the reality was, you know, when you publish books like this, you figure, you know, they're gonna publish 10,000, they'll sell two, the other 8,000 will be available to me at a remainder price, and I'll have gifts for a l But anyway, turned out great, people loved it, sold a lot of copies.

Called an honor, which led me on to "Ju And I'll try to speed this up because, let me see what we have here.

Okay, yeah, we're gonna go a little Okay, "Jumanji".

So, the second book, and one thing that had happened and "Jumanji" is that I'd learne a lot better, because when I did "Gasazi," the only way I knew how to draw was to put a very sharp point on a pencil and just very slowly nudge it across the paper ti I had the tone I wanted.

Then I discovered I could put tone on paper with charcoal and I could move it around with my thumb and I could move it around with ch And so I was able to lay out these very large gray tones and I in and cut them out with eraser.

And so these drawings, which are much bigger than "Gasazi," and in some ways more refined, took about half the time.

And it was just such a breakthrou of picture making.

The whole idea of the, a little aside here, you know, I was surprised to get so many more reviews.

I'd had a couple of shows in New York City, of sculpture, and God, you're lucky if you get three lines in the New York Times.

But there was a whole ap to review children's books, which And, you know, there's a picture of this in The New York And the reviewer made a comparison of it to Balthus.

And I thought, me?

Balthus?

So it was a real encouragement that I was making something an d kind of mysterious and also played on a fairly simple idea.

And in this case the idea was cognitive dissonance.

The idea of placing things in spaces where they don't belong is immediately gives you the big creeps.

And so the snake on the So a restless person in terms of materials.

As soon as I kind of mastered the technique with "Jumanji", I figured it's time for pen and ink.

So the next book I did was "Ben's Dream" in pen and ink.

And this is about a boy who sails around the world in a world that's partly submerged, going past the great landmarks.

Here he is fishing in front of the Taj Mahal.

It also has a premise in it, a psychological premise.

He sees someone else in the dream and at the end of the dream, he meets that person.

The person said, "I had a strange dream.

Do you know what I saw?"

And the protagonist, And raising the question once again for, you know, seven or eight year olds, that if you had the same dream, would you see each oth Time for color, I thought, and I should point out, with a littl and maybe a little bit of, I don't know, regret, completely self-taught with all these materials.

'Cause once I got into sculpture in school, I avoided two dimensional art.

'Cause I didn't feel it was my ca But I started going out and experimenting with different colored materials.

In this case, pastel.

This is a story about a boat that, or about a place that a boy ends up where it's possible to actually sail above the water.

And this is a strange enough book to spend a little bit of time on.

(laughs) This is the house lifting off.

This is "Harris Burdick".

And the premise of this book is that there are a number of stories written by a fellow who had written pictures for many of them, but visited an editor way back in the '50s.

And he'd left many of his pi And all those pictures had on them were the captions and the titles of the stories that they came from.

And this is all that was left.

And this was what was pu And it became a very effective story starter for young kids who started writing stories in So we're gonna blast through here because we wanna have time for some Q&A.

So I'll just at least pass through these.

Always experimenting, watercolor I found incredibly intimidating, but I started introducing watercolor with other materials.

So these pictures are watercolor with color pencil.

This is "The Z was Zapped", the nasty alphabet book, the D's getting drowned, the F is getting flattened.

And I have heard from teachers saying that these are so much more effective than A is for apple.

And B is for banana, because the kids really understand and remembe This is about two ants who get into some big trouble.

My effort to create a dystopian future that exists in a boy's dreams.

An allegory about the mesmerizing quality of screens.

"The Widow's Broom" about a broom that comes to life.

I experimented here (audience laughing) with animation just in two panels.

This, the broom is attacked by a dog, set on him by these two nasty little boys.

And the broom has the power, you can see, to pitch the boy far away.

"The Sweetest Fig".

Yeah.

So I should, if I can quickly, where do your ideas come from?

So this one, I was actually in Paris a very nicely dressed, tiny little dog on a leash, pulling the dog along in a way, which I found, well, not inhumane, but not very compassionate.

And so this is a dentist who ends up having a dream.

Here you can see him treating his dog badly.

This is the dream he has.

He has a dream of But what he comes into possession of are some things that can empower his dreams, that he can make his dreams come true.

So he has dreams about living on the Rivier That's his speedboat in the background.

It doesn't have a happy ending.

This one I'll try to do fast 'cause this is probably the best example of where do your ideas So my daughter, Sophia, probably four or five years old, had a coloring book, a Disney coloring book on I went in one day, picture of Tiger Lily from Ti ger Lily has a face, an expression like that beca in the water.

She's wa And she's terrified.

And my daughter has covered her wi th these crayon marks and purple, yellow, green, ev And it looked like she had the expression that she was wearing because of what my (a udience laughing) So I had this idea about cartoon char coloring book characters who lived in a wor that they did not know was a coloring book.

And then one day the bad stuff happens because a little boy gets the book and he And the horses, the horses come into this town and the sheriff is trying to pull the stuff off, but it won't come off.

And he goes out and he finds th and they're all terrified 'cause they don't know what's going on.

And it actually has, it has an unhappy ending.

Yeah.

(audience laughing) This is "Zathura", which is actually a sequel to "Jumanji", driven by some external forces.

The studio that made "Jumanji" was gonna make a really bad version of "Jumanji 2".

And the producer said, I asked the producers what would derail this terrible ide And they said, only a better idea.

And so I wrote "Zathura", which a story about space adventure.

And these are the boys out there.

Okay.

So we're just gonna blitz on through here.

Sorry.

'Cause I wanna leave some time for... Yeah, I started getting into watercolor with a little more bravery.

Oh, there are some here worth looking at.

Where is Chrisstina down here?

How tight am I getting on time here?

- Take three or four minutes.

Ye ah.

Okay.

These are big drawings.

All the time, all the I was also making what you call kind of like easel d They weren't for reproduction.

So I sold these down in New Yo This is maybe 40 inches.

And it's, I think it's called, I forget what it's called, but it doesn't really need a title, but it's an example of, once again, cognitive dissonance.

How you can trigger a lot of emotional response to just combining things that you don't see together, you know, and you wonder what that chair is doing there, who is sitting in it?

And then I got into some still lives, and this is called "Catfish Bouillabaisse."

It took a long time to get the catfish to jump out of that thing, but got it happe And then I like the idea of draftsman as magicians.

So this is the "Disappearing Egg Cup."

'Cause you can see that the egg cup on the end is suspended by the disappearing v The "Disappearing Bud Vase."

This is "The Disappearing Teacup," except that the rings remains so that the, they're a little like Saturn around the remaining spoons.

This is the disappearing dalmatian, but the spots remain.

And this is the dalmatian, the spots levitate.

So these are magic acts that are done with a pencil.

And this is the disappearing bud vase.

Not sure exactly how this got in here, but I did, I did a fair amount of commercial work while I was doing books, making sculpture.

This happened to be a terrific piece about surviving tornadoes in Texas.

And this was a man who got sucked up into a tornado.

And he remembers thinking, if only I can get to the I can go to sleep and this nightmar Anyway, quickly, I got into posters.

Really liked doing things in flat color, and playing around with type.

So these are for different affairs.

This is what I did for the Portland Symphony a long time ago.

Something very gratifying after spending a life just fussing around, nursing tone onto a piece of pap just being able to do th They weren't about, you know, careful control of tone.

And after I did this, I thought maybe I'll So this is a design for the Arizona Lighthouse Trust.

(audience laughing) Right, so I'm gonna quickly go through these.

I have only collaborated once with anot His name was Mark Helprin.

Did a terrific trilogy with me called "A City in Winter", and basically got the manuscript, the hard part.

Anybody familiar with Mark Helprin's prose?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Terrific writer.

Super descriptive.

So descriptive and so powerfully descriptiv what's left for me to do as the illustrator?

Making a picture's only gonna make it less.

So I picked out things that I thought wer So I started out in a kind of a German or a Russian style.

Ivan Bilibin black lines around the marks.

And you can see, it was costume work.

I actually had to go out and get a costume shop and rent costumes and wigs, which I'd never done before, and you think of that now, whoa, that's crazy.

But, you know, back in the golden age of illustration and, you know, back in they all had these giant closets, you know, I mean... And so this piece on the right, I just got tired of doing the kind of hard edge stuff.

So I did some front pieces in soft focus.

That's not the result of a bad picture.

I was actually drawing in soft focus.

And see, these are other images that were from that book.

Now, we're down to the last three.

Good.

How I spend my time, my free time?

These are giant German Erector Sets.

This has probably got a three and a half foot wingspan.

Many parts, take forever.

And I know that people look at stuff like this and they say, well, you know, if you've got this creativ why are you building the But it has a tremendous bo lt by bolt, piece by piece.

There's something about, it's like building a puz but it's three dimensional.

Oh, and I wanted to include these, these are mezuzah, these are the sort which you put on your doorway, Jewish families put on their doorway where of bless yourself and your house when you enter and lea And these are some mezuzahs I've made for my wife's company called Forgotten Judaica.

Don't forget that, dot com.

(laughs) And the last piece.

So this is what I did during the pandemic.

I had a bunch of clay.

I hadn't done a figurative piece in and it just seemed like something that I felt like doing.

So it's about three quarters life size, bronze casting.

And we don't know if he drowned or not, but there he is, suspended animation.

So that's it, right there.

(audience applauding) - Chris, thank you so much.

That was amazing.

Bringing out a chai Oh my gosh, look at all these folks already lined up for Q You guys are Johnny-on-the- I know we have some people that have to le so leave quietly please so we can hear up here.

And I guess we'll just go left, right, and I'll let you know when we're running outta time.

Go for it.

- Hi the I'd first like to say th to speak with us.

I'd second like to s in the '90s loved reading "The Polar E showing the film strip to her students and serving them hot chocolate.

The third thing is, your space, your sense of space in all of your work is in How do you develop your settings?

- How do I develop that sense of space?

- Your setting, the settings in your work?

- Oh, okay.

So the question is how do Th e, basically you could say the where the action takes place.

They're all for the most part in my imagination.

And I can't emphasize the importance of having an understanding of perspective because it's perspective that allows you to creat a convincing space and to be able to move things around inside that space.

And of course, they're always informed by things I've seen before, things I saw, liked and haven't forgotten.

When I was doing stuff like that, we use things like clipping files.

I don't know if they still have a c because have bee But you know, if you're wondering about what a particular yo u can always jump onto Google, get an inspiration for it.

And if you have good perspective skills, you can change your point of view inside that room.

You can make it a different proportion.

So, you know, it's a combination - Thank you.

- Yep.

- No?

Cool.

Hi.

I was curious, oh wait, he I forgot it.

So you were like an undergrad here in the and I was just curious like what, like, artistic social nature spaces you were involv with here, and like if they did like inform your work, then I was curious about that, but mostly I was just curious wh at was Ann Arbor l in the '60s?

- Yeah.

Yeah.

So the question is what were some of the, you know, the spaces, places, ha d that formed your artistic sensibilities or, yeah, and, you know, for me it was sort of a combination of the library and the wood shop.

(laughs) I mean, I know that sounds really kind of monastic.

I mean, I was not on the streets, I was not protesting the Vietnam war.

It wasn't that I was apolitical, but I was so absorbed by the you know, I'd say, oh yeah, the protes was six, you know.

But it was mostly, really... And here's another thing that I'm sure a of you appreciate as students, some of the things that were most kind of and sort of really sort of put a light under you was your fellow students' work.

'Cause sometimes I'd see things that made me just feel like.

And I'm not talking about the infe about figure drawing, but even when I was developed my sculptural s I'd see people sculpting things and I'd think, they've taken a step ahead and I can too.

- Thank you so much.

- Hello.

Hi.

It's g - After years of creating children's book, did you have any difficulty finding creative inspirations to use in children's books and/or did you find difficulty in distilling your creative ideas to make them accessible for children?

- Yeah.

Everybody get the question?

Okay.

So...

I know that there's an approach and I mentioned it in passing, that you sometimes see children's books that you know that were produced by adults, and maybe not one adult, but an editor, an I'm not sure it's simply the fact that they were collabo have this feeling of being co of for a particular audience of children.

Sometimes you see books that, and I'm not mocking these or belittling these book at all, but you'll see books that address a particular problem a child might have, the loss of a grandparent.

And so there'll be a book about And these things have a really legitimate and often beneficial use.

But they're not the kind of thing that ever appealed to me.

And I did do one book that was kind of polemical about an issue that I thought was relevant to children.

That's how much time they spend in front of screens.

But for the most part, the ideas that I have, not so much driven by children, they're more driven by sort of memories I had of my own childhood, I guess.

I guess that's being driven by children, but not by the ones that are around m And mostly I'm trying to entertain myself.

I'm not writing for an imaginary seven year old, I'm writing for a 74 year old, but doing things that I think will be of interest to a seven year old.

So sort of how I go - Thank you so much.

- Yeah.

- Hello.

I'm like shaking up here.

I was wondering if you could sign this, please and- - Well, I can' Can't do that now.

'Cause we have to keep - Okay.

And then I understand that but I was wondering if you could explain how did you navigate the curriculum to benefit your creative practice?

- When I was here at U of M?

- Yes.

- Well, as I say, after my sophomore year, avoiding drawing classes and getting into sculpture classes, ceramics classes.

The other, I mean, this is probably not exactly the answer to the question you want, but when I got to be a f I intentionally bumped my art history courses.

So at the end of my year, at the end of the four years, I was light in art history and they wouldn't graduate me, and they said I had to wh ich was actually what I wanted to do.

And the reason for that is I could come back and really, really concentrate on like the three art courses I took over a whole year.

Now, I don't think the State of Michigan likes people to do that, but I mean that's probably the furthest I went in what I saw as a curriculum to my benefit.

But mostly I sort of took what was there.

I don't know exactly how it's set up now, but, you know, I believe a person your age and the age I was then, I actually believe in fixating on something, you know, because you're right at the ag where the fire just burn and the eye of doing one thing and then getting at the end of the day and then realizing, oh, I've got, you know, this the next day.

It's just, it breaks the rhythm.

So, you know, to the extent that you can arrange a curriculum that allows you to just stick with something a long time, I'm behind that.

- Okay, thank you.

- Yeah.

- Hi.

So my qu growing up you said that you didn't r of a history in doing art and still got into Michigan, but like within those four years, you must have like done a lot to be able to end up going to one of the best art schools in the country for grad school.

So I'm just - No, no, it was great because first I took the fifth year and in that fifth year I made a lot of art.

It all got into my portfolio to apply to RISD.

And because then the curriculum allowed for that kind of concentration, I had a really good looking portfo and I also had good recommendations.

So, you know, when you apply to graduate school, at least back then, they weren't looking because as a grad student, you're already ident who's ready to go to the next step and get as deep in as you can to that particular discipline.

And your hope is that you're gonna be do with a couple of really gr So... (laughs) - Thank you.

- Yeah.

- Hi.

So the scenes th in your illustrations feel very an d yet also very aesthetically specific.

So I'm curious about where you look to for inspiration in terms of the time and place setting.

And my dad actually is really curious about this in regards to the "Gar which was always my parents' favorite book to read to me.

- I've always had a goal of sort of working in a style that the completed book, if you left the copyright date out of it, and somebody opened the book and they said, well, when was it published?

They wouldn't be able to be cause I don't ordinarily depict things, you know, I haven't, to this point, shown anybody on the cell phone, though I have somebody watching a TV.

But for the most part, yes, I mean, that's an astute observation I have with intention, tried to create thin that don't look like they were drawn yesterday.

And in "Gasazi," when I was drawing "Gasazi," I had done a series of drawings that were inspired by these old landscape books from England.

And I was just fascinated by the hedgerows and things like that.

And that was to draw, except I learned that you can't just draw a bunch of hedgerows, you have to have a story.

So that's how that worked out.

- Thank you so much.

- You discussed the sort of like hyper-focused craftsmanship, like sanding the terrier head down a lot and like taking days to do that.

And so have you experienced issues with that in a world of kind of like good enough or like, and I guess how were you able to maintain that quality, you know, like taking a long time to work on something?

- Right.

So...

It's sort of, I think it's kind of built into the personality.

I'm not sure you could take a student of by nature wanted, in a figure draw If they were in a modern class with clay, they'd be throwing on pretty big clumps of clay and just sort of catching the thing.

And then you've got people more lik to do it slow, kind of a classic sort of thing.

And I never felt pressured when I was in school.

I suppose there's a kind of pressure that could develop if you were trying to commercialize your art becau you know, the longer it takes to make, you know, in an economic sense, the more you have to get for it.

But I believe that in an age of, machine age things, things that are handcrafted, that are clearly handcrafted, and have a kind of a level of perfection in them are seen by, a group of educated people who like art, collect art, they are seen as treasures.

I think they identify the ma you know, all those hours.

So I believe there's a little bit of a because obviously if the only thing you've brought to the project is this fabulous technique and craft and the object itself is not very compelling, maybe bu t I still think a beautiful thing we I mean, I mentioned Jeff Koons, I mean those people, the reality is at a certain level, if you're a sculptor, you are no longer responsible for that level of craftsmans There are studios in Italy, there's some in New York State, and you can direct the level of finish th on these things, and it's an aesthetic determination on your part, not an example of how you're driven in terms of your personality.

- Thank you.

- Welcome.

- Hi.

- Hello.

- Oh.

- Hi.

I was- - [Chrisstina] Before you ask your question, I'm just gonna give like a time reminder to everyone, because we do have, I know some people that have to get to class and the theater does give us a Ho w many people do we have in line?

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, Okay.

I know i and leave, you should, we're supp I think we can hold till 7:05.

That gives you nine minutes to do eight questions.

- Okay.

I can answer quick.

- Hi.

I was wondering if you had any advice for aspiring storytellers.

- Do I have any advice for inspiring storytelling?

Right.

Well, for me it's al was a, I just briefly showed a story of two ants who actually get caught in a kitchen, and they're unaware of the fact that a human being is there and the result of the human being and the ants interacting is deadly for the ants, perilous, they don't die.

And so you say, well, where's an idea like that come from?

That the idea came from, I saw two ants on my countertop and what the day would be like for them if I was unaware of them and they got mixed into my coffee, they got put into my toaster, they went through the garbage So it can sometimes be somethin as what you saw and you say, well, what if, y And the what if thing is a really big sort of trigger for storytelling if you see something that just, you know, puzzles you a little bit and you try to figure it out, sometimes fi But just keep your eyes open.

- Thank you.

- Hello.

So I remember bein and my teacher would open up the book that we had to read for that day and it was " And I was so excited to hear it and listen to her talk.

And, you know, as we reached the end, it was ambiguous.

And I remember this little kid thinking, man, that sucks.

And I kind of had this like grudge, this kind of anger.

I mean, I've let go of that now.

I'm not mad at you any more, that's besides the point, I was wond where either your own kid or a child you've interacted with has changed the way you thought about things or just made you laugh?

- Yeah, yeah.

No.

(audience laughing) But your comment about "The Stranger", "The Stranger" is a story about Jack Frost gets in an accident, he gets amnesia and he can't c on his rounds, which are critical for the seasons to change.

It almost seems timely now because fall arrives in December.

But anyway, I believe, in my own mind, that myth was universal and I thought that people would understand that this was Jack Frost that I was talking about.

He is never identified.

But the interesting thing abou and this is a testament to the power of children's imagination, is that I get letters from kids down south where, Jack Frost is not a mythic figure to them at all.

And they have lots of ideas about who Jack Frost is.

So yeah, I mean, you have to be careful a or too much ambiguity, but a lot of times the or excuse me, their imagination demands a solution and they'll find one.

- Thank you so much.

- You're welcome.

- Hello.

Can you hear me?

Oh God, there we go.

So what advice would you like give in terms of people who wanna like start off illustrating, in a way whether that be like style wi or like something they want to express?

- Yeah, yeah.

So the idea is how d Maybe what kind of style or what genre that you wanna work in?

And there's no right answer to that.

I mean, the path is to identify work that you like and not copy it, but at least be inspired by it.

And also make sure that it's a kind of a genre that has an audience, but it's a long journey because yo a long time to get work that satisfies you, that satisfies the friends you show it to and they all agree you're onto something.

And then when you get to that point, you need to find an agent, and the agent agrees you're o and the agent will represent you to a publi and then you have to find an editor at the publi that agrees, yeah, I think this might work.

So that's how you get things published in the old fashioned way.

I mean, obviously, th to self-publish online now, and sometimes those can be shortc to actually getting things in print.

But, that's about all I got.

- Thank you.

- Hi.

I actual so I grew up going to Jersey Junc And I also watched my sister dance in the Grand Rapids Ballet every year, "The Nutcracke And I know you designed a lot for them for that production, so I was just wonderi was it intimidating having this such l a well-known story that's so important to people?

Was it intimidating kind of creating something new for it?

- Yeah, so the question was, I did so which is quite an accomplished company for their, you know, the big money maker in every ballet company is a "Nutcracker."

So they wanted And I was kind of excited about it, with some caveats, which was that Maurice Sendak had done it maybe six years earlier and you don't wanna tread the same path that other illustrators had done.

But I was still persuaded to do it.

Then a little disappointed too because it's a, ballet, sets have specific requirements which is that you can't put a lot out on the floor because dancers have to have a So it was mostly just a designing backdrops and I didn't know that it was gonna be quite so kind of simple, but I designed these backdrops, fairly conventional ones, but they look pretty good.

I'd probably be interested in doing theatrical desi but I'd wanna be able, because I actually build things and put it somew But, you know, you can't do that with a ballet dancer so they run into it and hurt themselves.

Right?

- Thank you.

- [Audience Member] Hi.

I was wonderin in 3D work translated to your success in illustrations just 'cause like the form and the light and shadow work that you use so well, it's just, it's beautiful and it's so successful.

But you talked about how you for so long.

I wonder of helped you be able to think in that way for your illustrations?

- Yeah, so t that I was not a skillful drafts person, like my fellow students, the kind of drawing I did, I would draw the pictures of the things I was going to make.

So I'm sure that that benefited me when I became an illustrator because I was drawing things that didn't exist.

And that can be an importa You know, you have to use perspective and things like that.

And also because I was used to, when I drew the things I was going to build, I would do those things volumetrically.

So I learned some of those drawing skills in sculpture and I'm sure that they're reflected in the pictures I made, eventually.

- Thank you.

- Hi.

So as so a book illustrator, I'm just so overwhelmed with like the idea of how to like begin.

Do you have any advice for how to do that?

- How do you just begin?

- Yeah.

- (laugh So I taught illustration at the Rhode Island School of Design for some years.

And, you know, this is the question that troubles, worries students when they're seniors.

And there's not a hard, fast way to do it.

And because I am 74 and don't know of the digital opportunities that exist to circumvent the old way, but the old way was the one I described over here, which is that you build, you do a dummy of a book, you get that dummy into the best shape you can, you get all sorts of feedback, and when you have a group of people whose opinion we like this, and they aren't saying that 'cause they like you, (laughs) we like what you've done, then you can start looking for an agent.

Now it didn't use to be the case that every aspiring author, graphic novelist needed an agent.

But it is that way more now because, for one thing, there's consolidation and publishing, so there's less publishers, and there who like to do it.

So usually an agent is to get your work in front of an editor who might choose to publish it.

But as I say, all the electronic opportu And I know there are ways for people who get things published electron that sometimes, because they're so lead to opportunities in the print world.

- Wait.

Wait, wait, wait, wait.

Do we really only have four more questions?

I think more students got we only had eight minutes left.

I have an idea so that we can Would you be open to, if we do a quick round their question and then you can give a big grand at the end and pick up on the threads that you would need to.

- Is that all - Ooh, I don't have anything to take notes with.

I think it's what sticks in - Okay-- - Can we do that - I'll listen to all six questions.

- So all six questions you g through and then Chris gets to - [Chris] I'm gonna, yeah, I'm gonn - So we're just gonna go bing, bing... We're just gonna do all three of the three of you... And then are you in li Oh, you're so good.

Thank you.

Okay, so It's gotta be brief.

We're going 1, 2, 3, 1, and then Chris answers how he answers.

- Okay.

Hi.

So I'm from Grand it inspired a bit of my portfolio coming here and some of my other, I was just wondering if, where you're from, Michigan, East Grand Rapids, whatever, how that has influenced and inspired any of your work?

- Okay.

- Th - Okay.

ki nd of on behalf of my daughter who adores you, she's in I know a lot of your pictures I know you mentioned you have a daughter and I know there's like one girl in Jumanji, but are from the male perspective?

Because yo writing from the seven - Okay.

(audience laughing) - Hi, big fan.

I've grown up watching "The P reading "The Polar Express".

My family loves it.

I guess my question was ju or any of the movies made off your books or do you read the books with your children, stuff like that.

- Okay.

I'm gonn One, yes.

A young woman here, grew up wh I grew up in East Grand Rapids and there's a ice cream store th at my mother owned named Jersey You said you... - I worked there... - You worked at Jersey Juncti So she knows where I grew up and she's wondering, wel what influence did that have on me?

And, you know, it's really di to trace those things because you couldn't make an argument that it had no You know, I grew up in the Midwest, I loved cars when I was a kid and had a genuinely happy childhood.

So not traumatized, not working on any of those things, to my knowledge.

So yeah, I'm a Grand Rapidian and I'm sure there's some Grand Rapids in my work.

Now... - The boy.

- Yes, yes, yes, so, yes, the question here was a lot of boy-centric protagonists in my work, there is "The Widow's Broom", which is very female centric, and there's also "Probuditi!

", which is where a little girl gets the best of her brother 'cause she's smarter than he is.

What else?

We don't but you're right, I mean, I'm working from my own seven year old's imagination and I'm thinking, well, I'm the person in these stories, but I think there may be some others with women on, but... - [Audience Member] I have all daughters.

They als So it's just somethi - I'll tell you an interesting thing about "Zathura", but the models for those were my two daughters.

(laughs) So there's two daughters, two girls in "Zathura" too.

Okay.

Have we covered this?

Oh... - Movies.

The movies.

- Okay, so the movies, so the movie thing is a is kind because the movies that get made from children's books can be really awful and they can be made principally as exploitations, children's books that have been in print for decades, have wide name recognition and some studio says the name recognition alone will get lots of people in, it doesn't really matter how good it is.

And those kinds of films have happened an the authors, assuming they're still living, are really, you know, heartbroken by them.

But I haven't had that, I haven't suffered that, all the films have been made from my books, there's been three, all could ha but I never felt that any of them was exploitive.

And I felt that all of them were made, you know, with a sincere determination to entertain, and not entertain in ways that were, you know, kind of cheesy and predictable.

So I haven't had a bad experience with it.

- Hi.

I'm just did you let your child self lead your adult self or your adult self lead your inner child?

- Yeah, you know, those, the idea here is that the child that I remember in myself giving cues to the adult, giving dictation to the adult and telling them to write it down or that the adult sort of in their imagination driving the kid around.

I think just because there are kind of requirements narratively, structurally, and even thematically, I think it's a little bit more the adult me is making suggestions to the seven year old me and seeing how it plays out.

Seeing if a seven year old would do that, could do that, would wanna do it.

- So I'm sure you get this question all the time, but would you be interested in perhaps exchanging information with a startup publisher that actually does have expertise in the digital field and has worked with other successful artists and like non-traditional childhood like propertie that has had success in like Nickelodeon, Disney and the creator of Hannah Montana?

- [Chris] Well, I don't know.

I mean I'm always interested in different - For sure.

- I'm not sure exactly what you've described or- in like perhaps working to to maybe create so or even digitally publish yo or figure out something, a fu - Well I'm involved in a lot in other things now.

I mean writing and a couple of screenplays.

- Yeah.

- So I'm a busy guy.

- [Audience Member] I can imagine.

Of cours - Oh, if you've got a card.

Wo uld it be possible to like exch - Yeah, sure.

- Okay, thank you.

- Hi.

So I did illustratio so I'm just really curious like how much time do you generally sp on each illustration and do you get any chance to spend like as much time as you want to the time that you get like satisfied with your work?

- Yeah, so the question here is how long does it take Ho w much time are you given?

One thing that's happened over the years is because I did not train as a people I interacted with were painters, print-makers, and my original illustrations are about this big and that's big 'cause that means they get reduced about 50%.

And as time went on, I started to miss the texture that was part of the drawing.

So I started drawing closer and closer to scale.

And the simple reality is, the closer you draw to scale, the quicker the drawing takes.

If you draw one to one, I know some artists who draw illustrations smaller than the reproduction size, and like, who's that?

Well anyway, so there's lots of ways to make the drawing process go faster, but you don't wanna make it go faster and make sacrifices in the kind of images you're trying to produce.

For me, back when I was doing a "Jumanji" picture, which is yay big, probably seven, eight days on a picture.

Working pretty steadily.

- Nice.

- What you say?

Well tha book's only got 15, traditional picture book got 15 pictures in it.

Seven, eight days... You do the m it's not a giant sacrifice, so... - All right, thank you.

- Yeah.

- So this question is very silly and you can answer it with as much or as little detail as you want, but I was telling a lot of people that I was gon that I told is a huge fan of "Zathura" and a goofy question 'cause they didn't think I was actually gonna ask y I thought it Would you rather be a spider with an egg, like a chicken egg, or a bee?

That was the question.

- Would I rather be - Yeah.

Or a bee?

- Or a bee.

- Yeah.

- I gotta be the bee, I think.

- A bee?

- Yeah.

- Even t just a bee with no egg?

- Well, the spider with an egg suggests that it's gonna have some maternal responsibilities.

Right?

- Yeah.

Or perhaps that - Oh, stole the egg?

It's not a spider - Origin of th It's just you come with an egg.

- I'm still sticking with the bee.

- Okay, good answer.

That was also Thank you.

(audience applauding) I'll... - Okay.

Thank you.

(people chattering)