A World of Colour
The Mountains to Sea festival is in full swing this week in Dun Laoghaire with lots of children’s books events to delight school audiences and the general public. Don’t miss the wonderful exhibition of art by Italian-born, French-based writer-illustrator Beatrice Alemagna and Ireland’s own Chris Haughton.
These two picture-book creators have produced, in very different styles, work that oozes with respect for their target audience, reflecting a world at a child’s eye level, but, always, with something for the adult reader in it too.
Valerie Coghlan in her piece for the Irish Times (over here) sums it up:
“This exhibition reminds us that picturebooks are not only the preserve of preliterate children, recalling the words of Randolph Caldecott, the 19th-century illustrator, who is sometimes credited with being the father of the modern picturebook. Caldecott said that a good picturebook always has something there for the adult as well as the child. He didn’t mean that children were excluded, but that older children and adults see more – and perhaps interpret a visual story differently as their understanding develops.”
Beatrice Alemagna and Chris Haughton will be in conversation with Margaret Anne Suggs in the dlr LexIcon this Sunday at 12. More details here.
So head over to Dun Laoghaire and dive into a World of Colour: there’s something in it for everyone!
“[Alemagna] spends a lot of time observing children and her interest in childhood and its temporal fragility is evident throughout her work. Her most recent books The Marvellous Fluffy Squishy Itty Bitty (Thames and Hudson) and What Is a Child (Tate) evoke this, capturing the emerging individuality of the children who populate her pages.” (Valerie Coghlan)
