What would you do if your doodles became real? If they rose right off the page, turning tangible, and in them you could fly to the moon, or discover the deep sea? In Rocket Boy, this bewitchingly wordless picture book reminiscent of Harold and the Purple Crayon, one young child explores the boundless reaches of his imagination. Armed only with a pencil and a pad of paper, he transports himself into adventures where he meets new friends, visits unseen landscapes, and makes his way back home again to his own bed before dawn.

The inspiration behind the book:

Rocket Boy is the story of a child dreaming his way into maturity.  His dream begins with childish drawings, but in a dream begins drawing as he imagines all adults can draw, and then he draws too well, and his rocket drawing comes to life.   He sees it fly out over the city and begins to worry, and a feeling of responsibility dawns on him. He draws the first thing he thinks of, as young children tend to do, and chases his errant rocket down into an underworld of friendly animals and a lonely girl. They become friends and he draws pictures of the animals for her as gifts, and finally makes a portrait of her.   This is, of course, the way that I too entered the world of adults and of love. 

Finally a light blinks on his car’s dashboard, as a signal from his other life that it’s time to come home.  He regrets leaving his new friend and her animals, and she will miss him too, though she has his drawing of her to remember him by.   He blasts off and lands back in his bed, where he wakes, and rubbing his eyes, he quickly sketches the memory of his friend on a new page.  The new portrait covers his old childish drawings, as he feels a new emotion of having briefly loved a girl in a dream.

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The inspiration behind the book:

Aphorisms began as a project suggested to me by William Cole in 1991, then a Harvard University graduate student.  Bill’s uncle was a well known print dealer, and Bill aspired to follow in his uncle’s footsteps and was looking for an artist to create an original book in the tradition of French illustrated books.  During Bill’s years at Harvard, he had learned about the Bow and Arrow Press, and hoped to utilize its great collection of Vandercook printing presses and old lead type for his book idea.  

Each month, for nine months, I produced one woodcut to match each of eight of Bill’s aphorisms, and one for a title page. I based these on the style of German Renaissance woodcuts by Albrecht Dürer and his compatriots.    

To make the woodcuts, I made drawings which I then had to redraw in pen directly onto a cherry wood plank, and then sit for hours with a jeweler’s loop tipped in front of my eyes to cut with tiny exacto-knife blades. I could not print the images until I’d cut everything, because by inking the wood block I would have destroyed the drawing I needed to follow with my blade. So it was exciting to finally see the image on paper, of course in the mirror image of my drawing, when I printed them for the first time.

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