I like the texture of the pictures in this book, and on the whole this, along with Taylor's ability to draw animals, is what makes the book work for me. And so I'll concentrate on texture here. By texture, I am thinking of both the colour and the application of paint. Taylor defines her shapes by colour and brush. Not being trained as an art critic and not being able to draw a stick person successfully, I lack the language to articulate precisely what I am driving at. But I'll work up to what I want to say by stepping back for a moment and noting that in a picture book, the pictures take pride of place. To the person who sees a picture book (as opposed to a person who only hears it read out loud), the eye dominates the ear. Not only this, but the eye will first take in that which is representational and colourful, and then second, it will take note of the printed letters and words. Strangely, we learn to read print before we learn to read pictures, and yet we are capable of identifying pictures before we can read printed words. For example, a young child who cannot read the words on the cover of this book will nevertheless be able to see and identify the head and neck of a person, and above the person the heads of several animals, whether or not he or she can identify these as an eagle (the book says "hawk"), a deer, a bear, a turtle, and a wolf (the otter on the extreme right is hardly available to the sight of anyone who has not read the story inside this book). We may have the illusion of knowing what this picture"says" because we recognize a human head and several animal heads. But what does this cover tell us?
To answer this question, I'll begin with a mechanical listing of the obvious. The cover of Little Water and the Gift of the Animals tells us:
1. the title of the book and the author (this is available only to those who can read printed words).
Note: we may be able to read the name of the author here, but unless we know other books by this same author, books with notes on the author (absent here), or unless we look carefully at the dedication and publishing information page (here at the back of the book), we will not know whether the author is a man or a woman.
2. that the book will feature a main character who has long black hair with feathers hanging from it, brown skin, a necklace with smallish black decorations, and several objects which may or may not be clear to the viewer. Because of conventional associations of Native people with long hair, feathers, necklaces of the kind depicted here, and nature we probably conclude that this person is a Native Canadian or American.
3. that animals will feature in the book
4. if we follow the picture round the spine to the back, we will see more people and some dwellings, smoke, pumpkins, and trees in autumn colours, a drummer, along with other things. This may simply confirm our first impression that the book will deal in some way with Native people.
5. that a relationship exists between the human figure on the cover and the animals that appear above him. The title, of course, also tells us this. The animals are a boon to the human being here. They offer a gift. But the picture begins to fill in what this gift might be. We begin to discern that this picture communicates something specific about the relationship between animals and human.
I break off here because I think what I have outlined so far is self-evident to most readers or viewers of whatever age. What I an going on to not will not, I think, be available to the person without a conscious habit of "reading," that is, scanning the picture for what it communicates beyond the most obvious representational level. The six animals above the human's head are actually in the picture twice: once above and behind the human, apparently in the sky and once in front of the human or actually on his body. Even without reading the book, we might notice that objects in front of the human are feathers, antlers, and pouch or bag probably made of skin since we are apparently in the context of Native culture. Once we have twigged to this, we might connect the antlers to the deer in the sky, the feathers to the eagle, and the pouch to an animal skin, say an otter. The necklace might now come into focus as a necklace of bear claws, and the paddle-like object cutting a diagonal across the picture might well relate to the turtle (it is a turtle shell rattle, we will learn when we read the story). In other words, the gifts of the animals appear here in the foreground and the animals themselves appear in the background. Only the gift of the wolf does not appear pictured here.
Okay, so what? Well a number of other things call for comment. The human depicted here is the largest figure in the visual field, placed prominently beside the title and between the animals and the gifts. Although this figure--let's call him Little Water--occupies the right side of the visual field, he appears to be the centre of a compositional field, a circle of sorts formed by his head and then by the animals above and the gifts below. This hint of the circular seems to me to be repeated in the turtle-shell rattle, in the curve of the antlers and the curve of the white feathers, and most importantly in the long curve of the rainbow in the sky behind the animals. In effect, we recede in this picture from the water in the extreme foreground and left of the picture to the gifts, to Little Water, to the animals, to the rainbow. The rainbow wraps the whole image in an embrace of colour.
Now, what does all this signify? Here's where colour becomes important. The blue and white of the water in the lower left finds balance in the blue and white of the sky with its animal clouds. In between we have black, brown, green, yellow, grey, white, and red. In other words, the relatively colourful foreground contrasts with the sky blue. The animals in the sky are not coloured realistically, and they are not real in that they are in the sky. Situated above and behind Little Water, who is presented fairly realistically, the animals are a vision or a dream; they exist in a spirit realm, a realm of blue, colour of mystery and contemplation and coolness and spirit. Shot through, as it were, by the rainbow, the animals represent something spiritual. Here the rainbow nicely revisions the biblical rainbow to represent a convenant between Little Water and the animals. The colours of the rainbow in the sky pick up and connect with the colours of earth and objects below. Blue, green, yellow, and red: things primary and fundamental. This book is about fundamental things. The hope here is the hope of connectedness, the connectedness of human and animal, human and nature. This book will be about the deep connection between all things inside the circle of this world. To put this in a different way, I will say this book looks inward to spirit, rather than outward to the world. Note Little Water's eyes. His eyes appear half closed; he does not look directly at us despite the full frontal view we have of him. He appears to look downward, or better yet, inward. His is a contemplative look. Perhaps he is thinking of the animals we see behind him.
But let's look for a moment at brown. Although blue dominates the overall effect, brown is important and once we move inside the book I think brown becomes the dominant colour. Here we have the brown face, brown neck, brown feathers, and brown shirt. This last is perhaps the key. The brown of Little Water's face reflects the brown of the earth just below the antler. But more significant is the lighter brown of what might be his shirt. I say "what might be his shirt" because this light brown is obvioulsy not just Little Water's shirt; it is also the ground to his right (our left). I might note before I make the point that the edge of the picture assists in this assimilation of Little Water into nature. The white feathers on the lower right curve round and off the page, but if we could follow the line they make, then we would run smack into the water. Another connective between Little Water and the water are the red ribbons that tie the otter-skin pouch. The one strand dangles over the space where the water is. The point I am making is that Little Water is assimilated into nature here; he is a part of nature; he grows, as it were, right out of the earth. He is, in short, of the earth. From a purely conventional point of view, we might say that in this picture Little Water takes his place squarely amid the four elements: earth, air, water, and fire. The last of these--fire--is the only element not literally here in the picture, but the red ribbons and the red of the leaves in the upper left at least hint at fire. And then, if we look around the spine we will see the smoke of the camp fire. Only Little Water's hair sets him apart from that which surrounds him, and this too shows the effect of the breeze. His hair wisps to connects with that which is around him.
So before I go on, I will summarize. The force of the story we will read is here on the cover. If we looked no farther, we would nevertheless have a good idea of what this book is about. Once inside the covers, we will see repetitions of what we see here. A few examples will suffice. Most pages have an insistent compositional feature: a circle, sometimes a circle which recedes or funnels inwards as if taking the eye inside, sucking the viewer deeper into the mystery that is nature. The book's title page is dramatic, presenting a circular picture of Little Water and the wolf. Here we are in, as it were, the eye of nature. The first pages do not illustrate this circularity dramatically, but a hint of what I'm observing is here in the open space of brown ground surrounded by trees, wolf and Little Water. Nature is a series of holy spots. The second illustration presents this perhaps as clearly as any page in the book. Here the centre of the composition takes the eye inward through a tunnel of trees to the old man, the lake, and the camp on the opposite shore. Next we have larger images of Little Water and the Old Man with the lake as holy space between and behind them. The fourth illustration, of course, takes us out of sight of holy space--at least it apparently does so. Here is turmoil, storm, conflict. Things are so bad here that Little Water's quiver has fallen off despite the fact that it was on his back and he is falling forwards. Anyhow, he tumbles toward a darkness with rocks. We might see this as a moment in which Little Water falls into nature--he needs to experience nature in an extreme way if he is to be successful in his quest to feed his people. Next we see what I am calling "holy space" in the foreground with water and shore a little omphalos where Little Water has come to rest.
At this point we reach the centre of the book. The center double-page spread has five pages on either side of it. Here we are literaly in the centre, and so although the space of holy ground, the omphalos, not as obvious a feature of landscape here, the large round moon reminds us of the circle of life I am positing as the deep significance of this book. The next page, like the first page in the book has only hints of the space I'm focusing on, but the one following is all circle, a vortex of animal life into which the dreaming Little Water moves. From here to the end of the book, the circle of life has moved inwards, as the final illustration, the one we also see on the cover of the book, makes clear. Strangely, this book is about individual relationship with nature, and about community. Like a folk tale, this Seneca legend, explains the need for the rituals of song and dance to maintain connection to animal life. The music and dance are reflections of the animals' gifts: the shell-rattle, the wolf-song, the peace of the hawk, and so on.
But what of texture? I have to return to my beginning. As a non-native reader of this book, I must confess to some distance to it. Some of the drawing leaves me unmoved; for example, the face of Little Water on the cover or the pudgy drawing of the otter in the double-page spread in the center or the bowl-like shell on the turtle in the cover illustration. Much of the drawing strikes me as rough and although I suspect this is a deliberate attempt to capture what I can only call a "primitive" quality in the art, I don't find it compelling. But the medium itself I do find attractive for this book (and for all Taylor's work that I have seen). I mean the paint (oil, I suspect). The paint is a very apt medium for Taylor to use since she is interested in nature and a "natural" affect. By "natural" here I don't necessarily mean "realistic." Some pictures seem to me quite unrealistic, but natural nevertheless. The colours are natural and what I refer to as the texture is almost palpable. If we look closely at the painting--on the cover, for example--we can see the weave of the paper or canvas or whatever material Taylor applied the paint to. Look at the face of Little Water here; the texture is visible. This texture, along with the predominant earth tones throughout, give the book the feel of the natural world. Surface is everything here and the surface is textured. The experience of reading this book through its pictures is an experience of a visceral art, an art that communicates mostly through its texture, rather than through its designs or its compositional patterning or its graphic detail. Taylor wants to take her reader into a particular mind-set, one that is not predominant in European art. This is why the rainbow on the cover is so startling. The rainbow is a familiar symbol in much European painting and of course it has Christian significance. Here is takes on a thoroughly new (yet still familiar) role. It is part of the texture of colour, the weave of colour throughout the book that constructs a world connected through that which lies on the surface, the elemental stuff of life.
If I seem to struggle here, this is because I do. I keep trying to get at this book and find it resists my attempts to read it through my limited training. Note the flatness of the cover illustration. Not much in the way of dimension is here, not a lot of depth. Everything is on a surface plane even though reason tells us that the placement of things in the visual field demands that some things are in front and others behind. But the flatness, the surface texture makes everything somehow equal, connected. I keep coming back to the same things: surface, connectedness, elementary things, circle of life.
I note that I have concentrated entirely on the pictures in this book. But this is a picture-story-book, that is, it consists of words and pictures in relation to each other. If I were to argue the priority of one over the other (and I have already done this at the outset by noting that we look at pictures before we read words), I would note that pictures "wrap" the book. By this I mean that the first and last pages of the story contain pictures that occupy more than half of the page, running as they do across the canal pushing the words to the extreme left of the verso. And in the middle, we have the double-page spread that pushes the words to the very bottom of the page. Mostly, in this book the words balance the pictures both in terms of the space they occupy and in terms of the information they contain. Whereas in some picture books words and pictures are in tension, the words often providing information that differs from information in the pictures, here they are balanced. The surface remains unruffled; the connection is clear. And once again I am back to connectedness.
One final note: most of what I've considered here is what we refer to as paratext, that is, aspects of the book as object, not just the diegetic aspect of the book. Any book is more than that which it contains in its narrative. Books have covers, dedications, endpapers, introductions, afterwords, epigraphs, notes, and various other material extraneous to the story or the part that carries narrative or content in the normal sense, that part we usually turn to as we begin to read a book. My arguement in part is that a book such as Little Water and the Gift of the Animals is as much about how we read as it is a story; it is texture and to appreciate texture we need to run our hand or eye over surfaces, complete surfaces.
I'll end with one last example of what I am trying to express. In the double-page spread at the center of this book we have Wolf calling to his "brothers." I might note that females are not greatly in evidence in this book. But I'll not speculate farther on this. The creatures are "brothers," connected, kin, related. Anyhow, Wolf in his large picture occupies the extreme right. I find the drawing here as good as anything in the book. Wolf's mouth, snout, eyes and fur are not only naturalistic; they are also realistic. But the representation of Wolf is not realistic. Wolf rises out of the water, or maybe out of the ground. His fur is either rock or water at the bottom. His snout is a similar shade to the moon. It points to the sky as do the trees outlined in the moon. Wolf here is an elemental creature, of the earth, air, water and maybe fire. Nature and supernature connect. In this picture of Wolf we have a "natural supernaturalism." Perhaps the reason I end by liking this book is that it expresses a deeply felt Romanticism, and this Romantic spirit is nowhere more evident than in this double-paged spread.
