Broadcast: January 30, 2005
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ANNOUNCER:
Now, the VOA Special English program, PEOPLE IN AMERICA. Today, Shirley Griffith and Steve Ember tell about the life of Barbara Cooney, the creator of many popular children’s books. She died in March, two thousand.
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VOICE ONE:
For sixty years Barbara Cooney created children’s books. She wrote some. And she provided pictures for her own books and for books written by others. Her name appears on one hundred ten books in all.
The last book was published six months before her death. It is called "Basket Moon." It was written by Mary Lyn Ray. It tells the story of a boy who lived a century ago with his family in the mountains in New York state. His family makes baskets that are sold in town. One magazine describes Barbara Cooney's paintings in "Basket Moon" as quiet and beautiful. It says they tie together "the basket maker’s natural world and the work of his craft."
VOICE TWO:
Barbara Cooney was known for her carefully detailed work. One example is in her artwork for the book "Eleanor." It is about Eleanor Roosevelt, who became the wife of President Franklin Roosevelt. Mizz Cooney made sure that a dress worn by Eleanor as a baby was historically correct down to the smallest details.
Another example of her detailed work is in her retelling of "Chanticleer and the Fox." She took the story from the "Canterbury Tales" by English poet Geoffrey Chaucer. Barbara Cooney once said that every flower and grass in her pictures grew in Chaucer's time in fourteenth-century England.
VOICE ONE:
Barbara Cooney wondered at times if her concern about details was worth the effort. "How many children will know or care?" she said. "Maybe not a single one. Still I keep piling it on. Detail after detail. Whom am I pleasing -- besides myself? I don't know. Yet if I put enough in my pictures, there may be something for everyone. Not all will be understood, but some will be understood now and maybe more later."
Mizz Cooney gave that speech as she accepted the Nineteen Fifty-Nine Caldecott Medal for "Chanticleer and the Fox." The American Library Association gives the award each year to the artist of a picture book for children. She received a second Caldecott Medal for her folk-art paintings in the book, "Ox-Cart Man."
VOICE TWO:
Barbara Cooney’s first books appeared in the nineteen forties. At first she created pictures using a method called scratchboard.
The scratchboard is made by placing white clay on a hard surface. Thick black ink is spread over the clay. The artist uses a sharp knife or other tool to make thousands of small cuts in the top. With each cut of the black ink, the white clay shows through. To finish the piece the artist may add different colors.
Scratchboard is hard work, but this process can create fine detail. Later, Barbara Cooney began to use pen and ink, watercolor, oil paints, and other materials.
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VOICE ONE:
Barbara Cooney was born in New York City in nineteen seventeen. Her mother was an artist and her father sold stocks on the stock market. Barbara graduated from Smith College in Massachusetts in nineteen thirty-eight with a major in art history.
During World War Two Barbara Cooney joined the Women's Army Corps. She also got married, but her first marriage did not last long. Then she married a doctor, Charles Talbot Porter. They were married until her death. She had four children.
VOICE TWO:
Barbara Cooney said that three of her books were as close to a story of her life as she would ever write. One is "Miss Rumphius," published in nineteen eighty-two. We will tell more about "Miss Rumphius" soon.
The second book is called "Island Boy." The boy is named Matthias. He is the youngest of twelve children in a family on Tibbetts Island, Maine. Matthias grows up to sail around the world. But throughout his life he always returns to the island of his childhood. Barbara Cooney also traveled around the world, but in her later years always returned to live on the coast of Maine.
VOICE ONE:
The third book about Barbara Cooney’s life is called "Hattie and the Wild Waves." It is based on the childhood of her mother. The girl Hattie lives in a wealthy family in New York. One days she tells her family that she wants to be a painter when she grows up. The other children make fun of the idea of a girl wanting to paint houses.
But, as the book explains, “Hattie was not thinking about houses. She was thinking about the moon in the sky and the wind in the trees and the wild waves of the ocean."
Hattie tries different jobs as she grows up. At last, she follows her dream and decides to "paint her heart out."
