Dilys Evans Shines Spotlight on Children’s Illustrators

By Charlotte Albers, Children's Bookshelf -- Publishers Weekly, 5/22/2008

Illustrators use their talents as a form of visual storytelling, and in Show & Tell: Exploring the Fine Art of Children’s Book Illustration (Chronicle, Apr.), Dilys Evans, who has worked as an artist’s representative for the last 30 years, delves into the lives and artwork of 12 big names in children’s book illustration. The book explores the personal paths of the artists as well as the processes and techniques by which they use pigments, ink, collage or other methods to “show and tell a particular story.” The 12 artists represent a broad array of artistic styles and include David Wiesner, Bryan Collier, David Shannon, Harry Bliss, Hilary Knight, and Brian Selznick.

Evans was a nurse at New York’s Mount Sinai Hospital in 1959 when she met the painter Nell Blaine, who was undergoing treatment for polio. “I was going to art school at night,” Evans recalls, “and Nell offered me the job of an assistant to help rehabilitate her and to travel and study.” For six years they visited museums and galleries, traveling from New York to London, Paris, Lisbon and Madrid, and everywhere Evans pushed the wheelchair, Nell talked about art. Evans then studied painting and drawing in New York at the Art Students League, the New School, the Riverside Museum and won a fellowship to Yaddo in Saratoga Springs.

An opportunity to work at Cricket magazine in the mid-1970’s changed her career focus. “I found myself entering a whole new world and discovered a new passion in life,” Evans says. Working with Trina Schart Hyman, who was then Cricket’s art director, Evans learned the mechanics of matching art to story and became familiar with the work of Maurice Sendak, Hilary Knight, Arnold Lobel, Richard Egielski and others. In 1978 she met a young art student from the Rhode Island School of Design named David Wiesner who had been commissioned to do a cover for Cricket. Two years later, when she launched Dilys Evans Fine Illustration, an agency representing children’s book illustrators in New York City, Wiesner was one of the first artists to join her portfolio; he designed her business logo, and Evans has worked with him on each of his projects since the agency was founded.

Evans had seen the children’s book industry grow steadily for 20 years but felt a need to support illustrators and help promote their work. In 1980 she organized The Original Art Exhibition at the Master Eagle Gallery in lower Manhattan, a juried exhibition of picture book art that now takes place at the Society of Illustrators. In 2005, to mark the show’s 25th anniversary, she established the Founders Award, a cash prize awarded to the most promising new talent.

Dilys Evans.
Photo: Michael Datoli.

The idea for Show & Tell stems from her early years in the industry. Outraged by a review of a picture book that described the full-color art as “pretty little watercolors that accompanied the text,” Evans resolved to write about the fine art form of children’s books one day. Zena Sutherland, who served on many Newbery and Caldecott award committees for the ALA, was a strong supporter. “At an exhibition of Caldecott artists at the Art Institute of Chicago that I had helped organize, Zena cornered me,” Evans recalls with a laugh. “She said, ‘So, when are you going to write the book?’ ”

Six years ago, the project started to take shape in the hands of Andrea Spooner at SeaStar, then an imprint of North-South Books, but stopped when SeaStar was put up for sale. In 2003 when Chronicle Books acquired SeaStar and its backlist, Evans picked up the project, working closely with Chronicle art director Sara Gillingham and editor Victoria Rock, whose support helped expand the book to incorporate more spreads and cover images. “I was very lucky,” Evans says. “The layout and design is fantastic and I couldn’t be more pleased.”

The 12 illustrators in Show & Tell, whom Evans says are “all very different,” were chosen for their “particular skills, technique, point of view, ability and remarkable imagination.” Each profile begins with the artist’s back-story and influences, before moving on to a critical analysis of their artwork (“In Eloise, the choice of a vertical format is all-important, since it gives the illustrations of the Plaza Hotel a grand, upright scale.... And the relatively small bustling figure of Eloise has a vast stage to roam,” Evans writes in the chapter on Hilary Knight). Evans included information about the artists’ backgrounds because she saw a pattern emerging when her interviews were completed. “Each of these illustrators were exposed to some kind of creative environment—parents who read to them or took them to museums or the theater or the circus,” she discovered.

Rock believes that the book’s art focus made it a good fit for Chronicle, and that it will appeal to a wide audience ranging from publishing professionals to students and teachers to children’s book collectors. “There’s not much out there that does what this book does,” Rock notes. “Dilys understands that a person’s life and history come to the table when they create art.”

For Evans, the completion of Show & Tell is the latest high point in a career that has had many different chapters. “After a journey of four years as an assistant art director to Trina and then 30 years in the world of children’s books,” Evans says, “having this book in my hand is an enormous relief. I just want people to know how the pictures work and why they should take them seriously and give them their respect.”

Show & Tell: Exploring the Fine Art of Children’s Book Illustration by Dilys Evans. Chronicle, $24.99, 978-0-8118-4971-5