Across his journey of fifty years as an artist, Pinkney has succeeded in viewing the world from a different and better perspective and coming up with outstanding images that reveal his love for life, race, community and culture. His works of art offer a significant proof that good acts, no matter how minute are never a waste when displayed in beautiful images (Llanas 45). Initially created for product advertisements, greeting cards, covers and pages of periodicals, postage stamps and well-travelled historic sites, Jerry’s have also been displayed in more than one hundred illustrated books. One of the most famous quote by Jerry Pinkney is that ‘books offer a great feeling of artistic and personal satisfaction. This satisfaction comes from the marks on the paper, its magic.’
Jerry Pinkney was born in 1939 in Germantown, Philadelphia and his passion for drawing began at the tender age of four. America was still recovering from the Great Depression and most children learned about those events from short clips displayed before cartoon movies (GREGERsoN 13). The great depression greatly affected the parents of Jerry and as a result had an impact on the young boy’s life. Most parents at that time would hide magazines so that children do not see the bad state of the country, but Jerry would steal them and flip pages of photographs. To turn away from this bad reality displayed in magazines such as the war in Russia or the killing of people in Germany, Pinkney embarked on artwork.
Pinkney experienced great difficulty with reading as he was diagnosed with a dyslexia disorder in elementary school. Dyslexia children are most of the time anxious and usually experience a low self-esteem due to their condition (GREGERsoN 13). Despite this fact, Jerry was enthusiastic and his love for art helped to raise his self-esteem and get the attention of his fellow classmates and teachers. Pinkney’s passion for drawing is incredible, at a very young age when he worked as a newspaper boy, he used his breaks or any spare time he could get to draw. His passion for drawing may be attributed to his two older brothers who enjoyed drawing photos and comic books thus creating footsteps for their younger brother. Also, his parents nurtured this passion as his father used to supply him with simple materials like sketchpads, scraps of paper and tools such as pencils. Later, he went to the extent of shining shoes on Germantown Ave so as to earn money to purchase his own writing supplies.
In a matter of time, he quit his work at the newsstand as he realized that he would rather draw than sit around doing other things. It is vital to note that while working at the newsstand, Jerry liked to draw people as they passed and this is how met with John Liney, an American cartoonist who encouraged Jerry to pursue the career of an artist and showed him how to make money from it. In response to this and determined to succeed, Pinkney focused on commercial art as a teen in Dobbins Vocational School and achieved a full scholarship to the Philadelphia Museum College of Art (currently called University of Arts). Upon his graduation from Philadelphia Museum College of Art, he was awarded as the best greeting card designer (Llanas 61). This reward encouraged him to look for a job at a greeting card company and he eventually began Kaleidoscope Studios with a group of artists. Later, he began his own studio named ‘Jerry Pinkney Studio’ in which he focuses on drawing pictures in children’s books.
Discriminated individuals always find a way to get over the issue, some fight in response, others embark on killing, some hurt themselves while some like Jerry put it all in drawing and writing (McNair 64). At a certain time in his life, Jerry’s father viewed art to be a waste of time because it took a significant amount of time for Jerry to complete a single drawing. As a result, Jerry felt as if he was not living to his father’s expectations. They used to live in six room story house and most of the time he needed to get away from all the noises and the bad situation in America at that time. To get over experiences such as bullying in school, sweaty palms when asked to read an essay in class, dyslexia, racial discrimination and struggle to please his father, he would embark on drawing. Drawing enabled him to feel safe as it meant getting off from the real world into a world of imagination and the act of making pictures.
Jerry’s images of living culture have been a vital component of American visual landscape since 1960. They have been used in covers of picture books, periodicals, greeting cards and postage stamps. Additionally, Jerry has written his own books and displayed his visual landscape skills on their covers (Llanas 37). This may have been inspired by his parents who viewed storytelling as an oral tradition. Jerry’s parents were migrants from the south and often narrated classic folk tales in that captured the imagination of Jerry at a tender age. Most of his books show as a sense of cultural belonging such as the Ugly Duckling and adventures of Uncle Remus.
In the 1970, Jerry’s art for modern people reflected the real life opinions of people with colour. This was an achievement to his because one of his dreams was to be a role model to African-Americans. During that time, blacks were viewed as a lesser race and the cover images he made for books such as Roll of Thunder and Hear my Cry became the hope and attention for living as they breathed characters that the readers could believe in. Jerry’s commissions included well researched and powerful art for the National Guard and National Geographic which were vital cultural documents (Arizpe 176). These cultural documents showed the experiences of being an African-American and how this race also contributed to the society. With these, he has been seen as a role model to the African-American and it also reveals how he has shown his children the possibilities that lay ahead of them.
A majority of his illustrative work such as ‘Goin Someplace Special’ often include African American motifs. Pinkney has worked as an art professor in a number of universities including Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, University of Delaware and the State University of New York. Moreover, he has established workshops over the years and has been invited as a guest speaker in many art school and universities across America. Jerry has more than thirty, one man exhibitions in different venues including the California African Museum in Los Angeles, Art Institute of Chicago and the Charles H. Wright Museum of African History in Detroit. Additionally, he has done more than one hundred group shows within America and other countries such as Taiwan, Bermuda and Japan. Jerry Pinkney is a significant inspiration to his race, this can be seen in his many speeches whereby he says he wanted to prove that African Americans can also be nominated on a national level in artwork. He was determined to be a role model not only to his family but also to African-Americans. As such, he always searches for projects that display his culture and the life of African-American.
The children story book written by Jerry are more than just stories because they inspire children to become better in different ways. In Lion and the Mouse, the reader is challenged to create their own story. At first, it seems easy as one may think it is all about looking at the pictures as they reveal the plot of the story. However, the child is challenged to explore more and bring out details of the pictures that hide a lot of clues of this story. The most recent work by Pinkney, Three Little Kitten represents the innocence and energy of the little children. The pictures used are colorful attracting the attention and helping children to read in a pleasant way. These two books are just examples of more than one hundred book that have earned him the Caldecott honors (Grzegorczyk 93).
It is evident that Jerry Pinkney loves the act of making marks on papers to develop images. Additionally, he is a story teller at heart and this is actually the reason why he was drawn to books with pictures. From his children books, it is clear that he aims for clarity with a direct link between the art and the text and that his stories are illustrated based on how he sees them and not how he imagines a child sees them. The search for beauty, symmetry, emotion and order is what drives his narratives as he hopes to be able to find something that touches children of all generations.
Works cited
Arizpe, Evelyn. "Meaning-making from wordless (or nearly wordless) picturebooks: what educational research expects and what readers have to say." Cambridge Journal of Education 43.2 (2013): 163-176.
GREGERsoN, A. N. N. E. T. T. E. "Constructing Race in Traditional European Tales." Fairy Tales with a Black Consciousness: Essays on Adaptations of Familiar Stories (2013): 13.
Grzegorczyk, Blanka. "Fairy Tales with a Black Consciousness: Essays on Adaptations of Familiar Stories. Eds Vivian Yenika-Agbaw, Ruth McKoy Lowery and Laretta Henderson. Jefferson, NC, and London: McFarland, 2013. 244 pages." International Research in Children's Literature 8.1 (2015): 91-93.
Llanas G “Jerry Pinkney: Children's Illustrators Set 2 Minneapolis,” MN ABDO Publishing Company, 2012. Print
McNair, Jonda C. "I Didn't Know There Were Black Cowboys." YC Young Children 69.1 (2014): 64.
