Last week at work I helped our Family Coordinator deliver story time with the Very Hungry Caterpillar. I think I was more excited than the children. It’s such a classic, it really brings back the happiest memories. I can completely felt the collective grief of art community felt with Eric Carle’s passing.
There is something i love about collage animals. I don’t know why I love that medium for portraying animals but I feel it gives them so much character. Emily Schofield (IG @Art_with_Em) makes some beautiful collage animals too. Most recently in a live stream she made a gorgeous owl. Today I saw think link between their two styles of collage.
There is at least one owl that lives in one of the trees surrounding our house. We hear it sometimes in the evening, but of course, we never see it. It made me wonder what our local owl looks like, but it also resonates with this line from the New York Times article on Carle.
“When I was a small boy, my father would take me on walks across meadows and through woods,” Mr. Carle wrote on his website. “He would lift a stone or peel back the bark of a tree and show me the living things that scurried about. He’d tell me about the life cycles of this or that small creature, and then he would carefully put the little creature back into its home.”
I thought about the balance between wanting to look and learn and know, but respecting nature, and leaving it as it is.
After making these artic terns, I had the idea for an intergenerational story about migration called We Love like Terns. I don’t have the full story yet, but I feel like the ending line will be “we came all this way to love you”.
The theme of longevity, and sustainability has come up a lot in my work this week, and still Palestine is heavy on my heart and mind. The migrant centre my colleague works with has had a huge influx of middle eastern migrants, in response to the current crisis. It is not lost on me then, that in a time where a Palestinian author is disqualified from the Frankfurt Book Fair, we have Israeli photographers prize winning works on our walls.
It is also not lost on me that a large number of those lost, and affected by this current violence are children. The idea of separating art, and children from politics makes no sense. If anything, as I watch the current sequence of events unfold I am thinking about the power of art and story telling. Who is telling what story and why? It has really reminded of the intentions of my work.
As I write this, Radhia Rahman is closing her blog in the background with this poem and I can feel this story morphing into something necessary.
In order for me to write poetry that isn’t political
I must listen to the birds
and in order to hear the birds
the warplanes must be silent.
– Marwan Makhoul,
Amara Antoinette 