Show draws on couple's colorful life's work

February 28, 2006|Greg Cook, Globe Correspondent

AMHERST -- It was 1943 and the war was on. Martin Provensen left his job sketching character designs and storyboards for Disney films -- ''Pinocchio," ''Fantasia," ''Dumbo" -- and signed up with the Navy. His assignment: Make military training films at Walter Lantz Studios in Los Angeles. Taking a break from his classified labors one day, he wandered into another part of the studio and met a woman named Alice who was animating films featuring Lantz's 3-year-old star, Woody Woodpecker. Did he sense how fateful a meeting it was?

''Picturing the World: The Art of Alice and Martin Provensen," at the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art in Amherst through March 12, offers an exquisite selection of drawings and paintings from the 51 books the Caldecott Medal-winning couple, who married in 1944, illustrated together over the next 44 years. The 70 works shown are a parade of wise and curious children, kooky dreamers, barnyard beasts, and fairy-tale critters.

The show opens with tiny tempera and watercolor spreads from the Provensens' classic Little Golden Books ''The Fuzzy Duckling" and ''The Color Kittens," both from 1949. Living in New York City after the war, the couple shed studio animation styles and invented their own look. ''The Fuzzy Duckling" is painted in a soft yet precise manner, the cartoony critters wandering a three-dimensional landscape. ''The Color Kittens," a primer based on Margaret Wise Brown's great poetic script, shows how the Provensens flattened their forms. They composed many of their illustrations for the next two decades from broad shapes of color with details picked out by fine lines on top. It is one of the signature looks of the era.

After they moved to a farm not far from Poughkeepsie, N.Y., in 1951, they experimented stylistically while working at back-to-back drawing boards. (It was around here that they also dabbled in advertising, helping create Tony the Tiger for Kellogg's.) For 1962's ''Shakespeare: Ten Great Plays," they made beautiful mottled ink drawings by sketching atop wet paper. Another time, Alice said, ''We'd paint the whole background and run it under the faucet, and whatever stayed on was the background."

Their most wild expressionist work appeared in their 1964 take on Alfred Lord Tennyson's ''The Charge of the Light Brigade" and the 1965 book ''Aesop's Fables." In ''Light Brigade," white splashes of paint become the blasts of cannons all around the doomed cavalrymen. The strong painting was not enough to keep this gloomy book from flopping commercially.