Dancing Through Fields of Color: The Story of Helen Frankenthaler

by Elizabeth Brown, Aimée Sicuro (Illustrator)

Overview

Author Elizabeth Brown and illustrator Aimee Sicuro’s picture book Dancing Through Fields of Color:The Story of Helen Frankenthaler is a biography about the artist’s breakthrough into the art world.
 
They said only men could paint powerful pictures, but Helen Frankenthaler (1928-2011) splashed her way through the modern art world. Channeling deep emotion, she poured paint onto her canvas and danced with the colors to make art unlike anything anyone had ever seen. She used unique tools like mops and squeegees to push the paint around, to dazzling effects. Frankenthaler became an originator of the influential “Color Field” style of abstract expressionist painting with her “soak stain” technique, and her artwork continues to electrify new generations of artists today.
 
Dancing Through Fields of Color discusses Frankenthaler’s early life, how she used colors to express emotion, and how she overcame the male-dominated art world of the 1950s.
 
“A pitch-perfect expression of a little-known artist in text and illustration alike, this is a top-notch example of the picture book biography.” —School Library Journal
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781419734106
Publisher:	Abrams Books for Young Readers
Publication date:	03/19/2019
Pages:	40
Product dimensions:	8.80(w) x 10.60(h) x 0.50(d)
Lexile:	890L (what's this?)
Age Range:	4 - 8 Years

About the Author

Elizabeth Brown holds an MFA in creative writing from Goddard College and teaches writing and humanities at Saint Augustine College. Dancing Through Fields of Color is her debut picture book.
 
Aimee Sicuro is an illustrator, picture-book maker, and surface-pattern designer. She graduated from Columbus College of Art and Design with a BFA in illustration. She lives in Brooklyn.
 
 

Editorial Reviews

"The textual descriptions of Frankenthaler's process are gorgeous . . . [and] Sicuro's watercolor, ink, and charcoal pencil illustrations are spirited."

— Kirkus Reviews

"Sicuro’s bold illustrations are a wonderful match for a biography on an abstract artist; the saturated colors, thick lines, and rounded shapes work well with Brown’s descriptive text to immerse readers in Frankenthaler’s world . . . A pitch-perfect expression of a little-known artist in text and illustration alike, this is a top-notch example of the picture book biography."

— School Library Journal

"Brown uses lyrical text full of action words and ranges of color to describe this lesser-known yet influential abstract expressionist artist from the twentieth century . . . [Sicuro's] loosely drawn illustrations with thick strokes of watercolor, ink, and charcoal pencil evoke both Helen’s moods and her abstract style."

— Booklist

"Brown’s debut picture-book biography limns [Frankenthaler's] creative and imaginative childhood, dutiful art study in college, and early career in mid-twentieth-century NYC . . . Sicuro’s compositions—in watercolor, ink, and charcoal pencil . . . consistently reinforce the ideas of movement and color saturation."

— Horn Book Magazine

"With sweeping strokes, Sicuro conveys the young artist’s joy in the act of creation."

— Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher

2019-01-15

Abstract expressionist painter Helen Frankenthaler (1928-2011) carries a deep fascination with color and light from childhood to adulthood.

In Frankenthaler's wealthy, white Manhattan family, her parents nurture her artistic tendency toward abstraction—but her schools demand realism. A downcast Frankenthaler creeps past eight easels displaying eight identical pear paintings, while across the page, another version of her dances in midair, brushes in both hands, trailing swirls of nonrepresentational orange. In adulthood, she embraces her own path. The narration frames her artistic motivations as primarily emotional, undermining her deliberate aesthetic decisions. Moreover, though the textual descriptions of Frankenthaler's process are gorgeous ("Colors jetéd across the painting, merged and connected, like rivers into oceans"), neither the colorist's groundbreaking "soak-stain" technique—oils thinned with turpentine so they seep like watercolors—nor her level of influence as "one of the major Abstract Expressionists of the twentieth century" are mentioned until the bountiful backmatter. Sicuro's watercolor, ink, and charcoal pencil illustrations are spirited, the ones about art process especially buoyant; her use of watercolor is actually a better match for Frankenthaler's look than oils would have shown without Frankenthaler's own soak-stain technique. However, there's one enormous visual mismatch: Frankenthaler's work features paint that soaks, flows, bleeds, and wetly saturates canvas, while Sicuro uses mostly controlled and neatly identifiable brush strokes.

Greatly enthusiastic, but it waters down Frankenthaler's actual work and importance. (timeline, activities, author's notes, quotes and sources, primary and secondary bibliography) (Picture book/biography. 5-9)

Kirkus Reviews