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Mystery of the Green Cat

Mystery of the Green Cat by Phyllis Whitney, 1957.

Things just haven’t been the same for twins Andy and Adrian Dallas since their mother died two years ago. Now, their father has remarried to a woman he met through his work, and Adrian has been having an even harder time coping with it than Andy has. The twins have always been different from each other, not identical in appearance or personal interests, but now, Adrian is frequently angry and moody, and he’s getting on Andy’s nerves.

Their new stepmother, Emily, isn’t bad, and Andy can tell that she’s trying hard to be nice to them so that they’ll like her, but it does make the boys uneasy that their father seems to be having an easier time moving on from their mother’s death than they are. Also, Emily has two daughters, Jill and Carol, who have been living with their grandmother. Now that Emily has remarried, Jill and Carol are coming to live with her, her new husband, and the two boys in San Francisco. Emily has been saying that they’ll all be one big family now, but all of the children have misgivings about it. The twin boys have never lived with girls before, and they’re not looking forward to having a bunch of girly stuff around or Carol practicing her dancing in their new house. Meanwhile, the two girls aren’t sure that they’re really looking forward to suddenly having a couple of brothers. Carol is optimistic and thinks it might be fun, but Jill remembers that she hasn’t gotten along with the brothers of some of her friends. This new blended family is a major adjustment for everyone.

Adrian is so angry and upset about the coming of the girls that he refuses to go meet them at the airport with the rest of the family. Andy goes, although he is uneasy about meeting his new stepsisters, and Jill can tell that he’s not really happy to see them. Andy’s father explains Adrian’s absence by saying that he had a summer school art project to work on, although he does warn Jill that Adrian might need some time to get used to being around girls because he doesn’t make friends easily. Jill bluntly asks if that means that Adrian doesn’t want them around, and her stepfather says that it’s more that Adrian is still mourning his mother and having trouble adjusting to his new stepmother. But, he adds that he and his sons have really been lonely since his first wife’s death, and they’ve really needed someone like Emily in their lives, and he’s sure that Adrian will eventually realize that. He asks Jill, as the oldest girl, if she would try to make friends with Adrian. Jill’s not sure how she’s going to do that if Adrian doesn’t want to be friends with her. (This is a recurring theme in other mystery stories by Phyllis Whitney. The solution usually involves shared experiences binding people together, and this is partly the case in this book, too.)

The Dallas family house is situated on Russian Hill, and as they approach it, Jill’s mother points out another house higher on the hill, which she calls a “mystery house,” knowing that Jill loves mystery books. Her stepfather says that there are two women living there, Mrs. Wallenstein and Miss Furness. The two women are somewhat reclusive, and nobody really seems to know much about them. Andy says that Mrs. Wallenstein is a baroness, but his father says he thinks that’s just a rumor. The two elderly ladies also have a Japanese family working for them. The wife is their cook, and the husband is their gardener. Later, Jill spots someone spying on the Dallas house, peeking down from a wall surrounding their property, and Andy says that’s probably the daughter of the cook and gardener. Andy and Adrian have seen her around before, although they haven’t spoken to her much.

While they’re all sitting at the table, eating and talking, someone suddenly throws a rock through one of their windows. The rock came from the baroness’s house, so the father of the family says he’s going to call her and talk to her about it. However, when he calls, Miss Furness answers the phone, denies that anyone at her house would do such a thing, and hangs up. The boys tell Jill that this isn’t the first time someone has thrown rocks, but the last time, the rock just landed on the terrace and didn’t break anything. The boys haven’t wanted to tell the parents about the last time. Jill asks why not, and Andy refers to a “green cat” but doesn’t really explain what that means.

Later, the Japanese girl from the house next door stops by and introduces herself to Jill as Hana Tamura. (Hana’s English is imperfect, and this is one of those books where the author tries to write like the character is speaking to reflect the accent. Hana switches her ‘r’s and ‘l’s when she speaks in that stereotypical way Asians in old movies speak.) Hana admits to breaking the window and says that she did it by accident. She was just climbing the wall to see the new children who moved in next door when she kicked a stone loose from the wall that broke the window. She offers to pay for the damage. Jill’s mother says that won’t be necessary, but Hana insists that she accept some money. Jill’s mother invites her to stay and visit with Jill and Carol, but Hana says she can’t because Miss Furness doesn’t like her visiting with neighbors. Miss Furness doesn’t seem to like people much. Jill is disappointed because she could use a new friend in her new home, and Hana is interesting because she’s the first Japanese person Jill has ever met. (That’s interesting to me because Jill and Carol were originally from New York, and I would think that they’d see all sorts of people there.) Before Hana leaves, Jill asks her if she knows anything about a green cat. Hana refuses to answer, but Jill can tell that she’s a little disturbed at the mention of the cat. Jill’s mother is a little concerned that Hana isn’t being allowed to associate with neighborhood children and says that she’s going to try to talk to Miss Furness about it.

It turns out everyone has completely misunderstood the relationship between Miss Furness and Mrs. Wallenstein (“the baroness”). Rather than Miss Furness being the housekeeper for Mrs. Wallenstein, she’s actually Mrs. Wallenstein’s sister and the head of the household. When Jill spots Mrs. Wallenstein watching her with binoculars, Adrian says that she’s done that before and also finally confides that Mrs. Wallenstein was the one who threw a rock at him and Andy when they were on the terrace, not Hana. The “rock” Mrs. Wallenstein threw was actually just a little pebble, and Andy scooped it up, refusing to even show it to Adrian, although he doesn’t immediately explain why.

After a visit to the house next door to deliver a letter for Mrs. Wallenstein that was accidentally delivered to the Dallas house, Jill comes to realize that Miss Furness doesn’t treat her sister well, reading her mail and keeping people from her, and that Mrs. Wallenstein is in need of help. Andy finally explains to Jill that the rock Mrs. Wallenstein threw had a note tied to it, asking them to help her find her “little green cat.” He didn’t want to tell Adrian before because he didn’t think Adrian would take it seriously. The kids aren’t sure what the “little green cat” is, but both Jill and Andy want to help poor Mrs. Wallenstein.

Miss Furness doesn’t really mean to be mean to her sister, but she is extremely overprotective of her and keeps her isolated from other people because she has been suffering from ill health and memory problems. Mrs. Wallenstein went through hard times in her life after her husband died, and she was badly injured in an earthquake in Japan, which is why she’s now confined to a wheelchair. Sometimes, when Mrs. Wallenstein starts reminiscing about the past, she becomes confused about what’s past and what’s present, and it all begins blending into one. Her sister has been trying to shield her from past traumatic memories, but Mrs. Wallenstein has the feeling that there’s something important that she wants to remember, and she can’t quite figure out what it is. The key to unlocking Mrs. Wallenstein’s memory and learning the truth about the past lies in finding the little green cat.

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.

Themes and My Reaction

Adjustment to changing family situations is a common theme in Phyllis Whitney’s young adult mystery stories, but this one is a little different from most. Most books by Phyllis Whitney are told only from the point of view of a girl, using third person limited. Even when boys play a major part in stories, the focus is usually on the girl. This book is told mostly from Jill’s perspective, but Andy is the one who begins the story, giving some insight into how he and his brother are feeling before the girls arrive. Although the boys and girls are separate when the book begins, their feelings toward each other are pretty similar. All of the children are trying to adjust to major changes in their lives and having misgivings about suddenly having new siblings of the opposite sex.

I think it’s also important to point out that, although the story focuses on a blended family, there is no divorce in the story. The two parents who are entering into a second marriage were widowed. This book was written in the 1950s, and in the first half of the 20th century, people didn’t talk about parents getting divorced as much. In children’s books of this time period, single parents and remarriages were usually the result of the death of a parent. It’s not that divorce was never mentioned; it’s just that it wasn’t nearly as prevalent in children’s literature, partly due to the social stigma against divorce at the time. I’ve sometimes thought that, in some ways, it was also probably easier for authors to explain the loss that accompanies a parent’s death, which would not have been the parent’s choice and was just a tragedy that couldn’t be helped, than the reasons why parents would willingly choose not to continue living with each other or why one parent would no longer live with the children. This is different from modern children’s books, where it’s usually more common to see divorced parents than dead ones. In fact, quite a lot of modern children’s books include divorced parents. Both death and divorce involve feelings of grief and loss, but if the loss is from a death that just couldn’t be helped, the author can avoid addressing the painful questions of “why” the separation happened. In real life, the reasons for a divorce can involve complex and sensitive issues that many adults would find difficult to discuss with children, including marital infidelity, emotional neglect, financial problems, addiction, and physical or psychological abuse. There’s never a happy reason for a divorce, so saying that the absent parents in the story died allows authors to skip over all of that. Death is sad, but it’s a little more self-explanatory. Andy and Adrian’s mother died from an unspecified long-term illness, and there’s no need for the characters to explain more than that. I could be wrong about some of my theories here, but that’s the impression that I sometimes get from older books. There is less social stigma surrounding divorce in modern times, and the prevalence of divorce in society has made it increasingly important to address children’s feelings about divorce in children’s literature, which is why there are now more books about it. That being said, the loss of a parent because of death is something that children still experience today, and the author of this story makes some important points about the feelings that someone can experience when they lose someone close to them.

As Jill gets to know Adrian, she comes to learn some of the reasons why he’s really unhappy. It’s partly because, when they moved to the new house after his dad remarried, he and Andy had to start sharing a room to make room for the two girls. Adrian and Andy have very different interests, and sharing the space has been particularly hard on Adrian. Adrian is a tidy person, and he’s very serious about art. He needs space to work on his artwork, and Andy is messy and likes to hoard pieces and parts for building things. Jill starts making friends with Adrian when she figures out how to make a better working space for him, but she upsets him again when she accidentally breaks the vase holding his brushes, which reveals the second reason why Adrian is unhappy. When the family moved to the new house, his father got rid of many of the things that used to belong to his first wife. Adrian has been blaming his stepmother for the loss of many of these sentimental reminders. Adrian doesn’t have many reminders of his mother left, and the vase was one of them, so now he blames Jill and her mother for the loss of that. As all the little reminders of his mother seem to be disappearing and Emily and her daughters are moving into the space, Adrian is afraid of losing all of the memories he has of his mother. It’s a situation that’s somewhat similar to Mrs. Wallenstein’s problem, using physical objects as a reminder of the past.

Mrs. Wallenstein has suffered sadness and trauma, which is part of the reason why her memory is so faulty. However she badly wants to remember some of the things she’s forgotten since her injury in the earthquake because they hold the key to the truth about her husband’s death. He died or disappeared under mysterious circumstances, and his business partner was murdered. Some people claimed that her husband might have actually killed his partner, but Mrs. Wallenstein doesn’t believe that. The clues to what really happened are tied up with the mysterious green cat.

However, part of the story also involves selfishness and self-centeredness. Mrs. Wallenstein’s husband’s business partner was a very selfish man, always needing to be the center of attention and taking credit for things that Mrs. Wallenstein’s husband did, and that’s tied in with the story of what happened to the two of them. In his own way, Adrian is selfish, too. It’s true that he’s still grieving for his mother, but the way he shows his grief is selfish, and Jill finally tells him so. Just because his stepmother isn’t his mother is no reason for him to be constantly cold and rude to her. Adrian is also rude and inconsiderate to other people, including Jill, their new friend Hana, and his own brother. Each of them is also dealing with something hard in their lives, but all Adrian cares about are his own feelings. While they all tiptoe around him, trying to make friends with him and be extra careful of his feelings because he’s “sensitive”, he says rude and condescending things to them or suddenly goes into a moody pout if he’s reminded of his mother’s death and/or his father’s remarriage. As Jill says, he’s sensitive, but only about himself; Adrian has no sensitivity for anyone else’s feelings. He’s even careless with Mrs. Wallenstein’s green cat after he learns that it has no monetary value, not considering what it means to her and her past. For someone who’s hyper-aware of belongings that have meaning for him, it’s an incredibly selfish thing to do. He not only doesn’t try to help the others solve the mystery of the cat, but when he finds out some information on his own, he deliberately doesn’t tell them until he can show off how clever he is while taunting the others about how they’re not as clever as they think they are. I honestly thought that he was going to be more help to the others in the story and reconcile his feelings through their shared adventure, but only Andy does that. Adrian resists right up until the very end, when Emily has a very honest talk with him about his feelings and hers.

I was a little annoyed at the way Hana’s speech was shown in the book because it always annoys me a little when authors try to show someone’s accent through spelling. It often seems to detract from what characters are actually saying, and the r/l swapping when Asians speak has a stereotypical feel to it. It’s not that Asians in real life never do the r/l swap, but it’s usually way overdone when it appears in books and movies, so it gets on my nerves. The real life r/l phenomenon is really based on the fact that Asian languages have a tendency to use the same symbol to represent r/l sounds, and the sound those symbols represent is about halfway between the two, depending on the language. In that case, it’s not really so much “swapping” the sounds as making one sound that is more in the middle than English speakers are used to hearing. The speaker may not actually be hearing the difference if they’re not accustomed to thinking of a difference between those two sounds, while listeners who are accustomed to listening for a difference in those sounds are confused about which of the two sounds they’re actually hearing when someone makes a sound that’s kind of in-between.

That being said, the perceptions of Asians, particularly Japanese people, in the book is favorable. This book was published about 12 years after WWII, so I thought it was nice that the characters were looking at the Japanese characters favorably. Jill is genuinely interested in being Hana’s friend, and Jill’s mother wants Jill to be friends with Hana. Later, Hana tells Jill and the boys a little about her own history, how her parents were married before WWII, but because her mother was unsure about coming to the United States, she ended up staying in Japan without her husband for a time. Hana was born shortly before the war started, and her father was unable to come to see her or bring his wife and child to the United States during the war. In fact, Hana and her mother were only reunited with her father a year before the story starts, so she was 13 years old the first time she met her father. Although the other children in the story have had their share of loss and family problems, Hana’s story about her own life helps to highlight that other people have their troubles, too.

The author, Phyllis A. Whitney, spent the first 15 years of her life in Asia because her father worked for an export business. She was actually born in Japan and also lived for a time in China and the Philippines. Because of all of the travel in her early life, Phyllis Whitney’s books often include travel to various countries around the world, people from different cultures, and children getting used to new homes or living among unfamiliar people, for various reasons.

There are some interesting tidbits of information about Asian cultures in the story, particularly about Japanese culture. I thought the part about how Japanese traditionally calculate age was interesting. There are also some interesting pieces of information about San Francisco and its landmarks. I’d heard of Telegraph Hill before, but I didn’t know the origin of the name until the book explained it.

I liked the book, both for the interesting tidbits of information and for the plot itself. This mystery is one of what I think of as the “mysterious circumstances” type of mystery. That’s a name I made up to describe mysteries where no crime (or at least no obvious crime) has been committed but yet there’s evidence of strange happenings and unknown events that must be figured out. I honestly wasn’t sure what direction this story was going to take when it started out, and I changed my mind several times along the way, but it has a very satisfying ending.

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Da Vinci

Da Vinci by Mike Venezia, 1989.

This book is part of a series of biographies of famous people from history. I’ve been familiar with the part of this series about famous artists since around the time the first ones were published. I was in elementary school school at the time, and we had the books because my mother used to teach the Art Masterpiece program at the school. She would come to class and talk about famous artists and show their paintings, and there would be an art project for the kids to do based on the style or subject matter of the artists. So, when I was young, we had books from this series (among other art books) around the house that she used for the art classes and a lot of arts and crafts materials (a tradition which exists to this day). At the moment, this is the only book from the series that I have because the book about Leonardo da Vinci was my favorite.

Leonardo da Vinci was one of the most famous artists of the Italian Renaissance, particularly known for his paintings The Last Supper and the Mona Lisa, but he was more than just a painter. The book is full of interesting facts about his life as well as his work. Aside from showing photographs of da Vinci’s work, the book also has humorous cartoons about da Vinci’s life, which is one of the things that makes this series of books fun.

Leonardo began showing an interest and talent for drawing while he was still a child. Throughout his life, he also developed and practiced many other skills, including architecture and mathematics, music, and sculpture. He was a scientist and inventor, experimenting in many different areas, from the mixing of different types of paints to weapons design. Along the way, he found creative ways to combine his various interests. He used his drawing skills to develop his scientific ideas, and he used his knowledge of science to make his art appear more realistic.

You might wonder how one person could find so much time to do so much, but part of the answer is that he didn’t finish everything he did. He is known to have left some of his work unfinished, possibly because he got distracted by other, more interesting projects and pursuits or because he just couldn’t finish them to his satisfaction. Not all of his designs for inventions really came to anything, and not all of his experiments worked out, either. Some of his paintings are now deteriorating because the experimental paints that he mixed didn’t quite work out.

However, Leonardo da Vinci was a perfectionist, and the paintings that he did complete show excellent techniques and a high degree of realism that have been an inspiration to later artists for centuries.

One final thing I’d like to add is that this book is part of the reason I thought The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown was a dumb book. As I said, I grew up with art lessons. I read and loved this book about Leonardo da Vinci when I was a kid, and it has some very basic information about the life and work of Leonardo da Vinci that anybody who was seriously interested in him really should know. One of the cringiest parts of The Da Vinci Code for me was the part where our heroes are stupidly trying to figure out a message that is simply written backward. As this picture book about Leonard da Vinci points out, it’s common knowledge these days that da Vinci wrote notes using mirror writing. Some people, like the book suggests, think that he did that to make his notes harder for other people to read, although there’s also a theory that he did it because he was left-handed and that he decided that it was easier for a left-handed person to write that way. Left-handed people often complain about getting ink on their hands when they write left-to-right, but they don’t have that problem if they write right-to-left, so this might have been his attempt to get around the problem of ink-stained hands. Either way, if the people in The Da Vinci Code were such experts, they should have know this about da Vinci, and it should have been one of the first things they should have checked for. That’s not the only problem in The Da Vinci Code, but it’s one of the ones that rankled me the most because of how long I’ve known about this. (Also, The Da Vinci Code totally ripped off the albino assassin from Foul Play with Chevy Chase and Goldie Hawn, but that’s another issue.)

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.

Posted on by TracyC

Famous French Painters

Famous French Painters by Roland J. McKinney, 1960.

This book is part of a series of Famous Biographies for Young People. Reading older non-fiction books can be problematic because non-fiction books are often updated with new information. In this particular book, there are people who are described as being still alive because they were at the time of the book’s publication, but they are not alive anymore. However, older non-fiction books sometimes interest me both because they are an indication of what people knew and studied at the time of publication and they sometimes cover odd topics that don’t commonly appear in new books. So far, this is the only book I own from this particular series, but the other biographies in the series

It begins with a section of black-and-white prints of famous French paintings and an introduction to the history of French painting in general. The introduction begins with a discussion of illuminated manuscripts in the 15th century and the artistic and architectural endeavors promoted by King Francis I in the 16th century. Francis I was particularly fascinated by Italian art, and he hired artists of the Italian Renaissance, including Leonardo da Vinci, to work at his court. Francis I helped to fuel an increasing interest in the arts in France called the French Renaissance. Although the French Renaissance was initially heavily influenced by the Italian Renaissance, French artists continued to develop their own styles. Popular subjects in French art were portraits, realistic landscapes, scenes from Classical mythology, and religious themes. The introduction ends with artists who painted during the late 18th century and early 19th century, explaining how their departure from neoclassical styles led to the development of new art styles.

After the introduction, there is a series of short biographies of famous French artists, beginning in the early 19th century and leading into the early 20th century. One of the first things that struck me about the list of artists included in the book is that, when their birth and death dates are included, none of the artists were born later than the 1880s, and the last two in the book have no death dates listed. Since the book was published in 1960, those last two artists were still alive at the time of publication, although they have died since then.

The artists included in the book are:

Eugene Delacroix (1798-1863) – He was a leader in the Romantic style of painting and one of the first French artists to use watercolor paints, which the French learned from English artists.

J. B. (Jean Baptiste) Camille Corot (1796-1875) – Originally, he trained in business, but he didn’t think he was suited to business and decided that his future was in art. He was particularly known for his landscapes, which were his specialty. He was also known as a charitable benefactor.

Edouard Manet (1832-1883) – Manet’s parents originally wanted him to become a lawyer, but it soon became apparent that he did not have the interest or temperament for a law career. When he first began his art studies, he quarreled with his teacher over the teacher’s strict insistence on realism in art because Manet preferred a more creative form of expression. He eventually developed a more simplified realistic style that did not focus on small details, a style that contributed to the development of impressionism.

Edgar Hilaire Germain Degas (1834-1917) – His specialty was portraits, and following the lessons that his teacher impressed on him, he emphasizes the importance of lines and drawing in his work. Much of his work was in oil paint, but he switched to pastels because he found that it was easier to work with and less of a strain on his eyes. Some of his best known works were of ballet dancers.

Paul Cezanne (1839-1906) – He initially doubted his own artistic talents, but a fellow painter, Pissarro, advised him to stop trying to imitate others and put his focus on studying nature. Cezanne’s association with Pissarro helped him to develop his own style.

Pierre Auguste Renoir (1841-1919) – Early in his life, Renoir was known for his singing ability, but his parents insisted that he learn a trade. He started learning how to decorate china, but this was the era when factories began using machines to decorate china. For a time, Renoir decorated fans and window shades, but his focus on improving his drawing abilities led him to a career in art. He became a friend of Monet, and the two would discuss art techniques with each other, although they had different styles.

Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) – He was originally from the Netherlands but lived in France. He was a contemporary of Gauguin, and the two were even friends. Unfortunately, van Gogh was plagued by mental illness, leading to the fit where he cut off part of his ear after an argument sparked by ridicule from Gauguin. Eventually, he committed suicide. He was not a famous artist during his lifetime, partly due to his mental illness and early death, but his work became famous after his death.

Paul Gauguin (1848-1903) – Although he was originally from France, Gauguin is known for his travels to islands in the South Pacific, where he eventually died. Much of his work was inspired by his travels in the South Pacific.

Henri Matisse (1869-1954) – He was a leading figure in a group of artists known as the fauves, which mean “wild beasts.” They painted in an unorthodox way that included few details and ignored perspective.

Pablo Picasso (1881- ) – Picasso was originally from Spain, but he lived in France for most of his adult life. He began studying art at a young age and is known for his work in surrealism and cubism. He was alive at the time this book was written, but he died in 1973.

(Odd fact not included in the book – Picasso was actually born one day before the shootout at the OK Corral in Tombstone, AZ. It doesn’t mean anything and isn’t important, but I noticed the date and just thought I’d tell you.)

Georges Braque (1882- ) – Braque was a contemporary of Picasso, and the two artists were instrumental in the development of cubism, although they each did their own work. The collaboration between the two artists was interrupted by the outbreak of WWI. Braque was alive at the time this book was written, but he passed away in 1963. On the subject of limitations in art, he once said, “Progress in art does not lie in extending its limits, but in knowing them better.”

Something that struck me was how much artists who were contemporaries of each other worked together, met to discuss and analyze each other’s art, and were actual friends. I prefer collaboration to competition, and I like that many of these artists seemed to appreciate and learn from each other’s skills and techniques.

I was also surprised at the number of artists whose parents initially wanted them to become lawyers, like Manet, Degas, Cezanne, and Matisse.

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.

Posted on by TracyC

The First Book of Painting

The First Book of Paintings by Lamont Moore, 1960.

This book is meant to be a beginner’s introduction to understanding and appreciating paintings. I thought it was interesting how, in the book’s introduction, it points out that the word “art” is based on the Latin word for “skill.” Art work is skilled work, and it explains how other types of skills are referred to as “arts.” Artists are people who are skilled at making things, but they also have an ability to see things more clearly than most people, form strong mental images, and convey those mental images and their feelings about them through their art.

The book is divided into sections that focus on different elements of paintings and artistic principles, explaining their role in art and providing examples of their use. The elements of paintings are line, shape, space, light, and color. The artistic principles covered in the book are pattern, balance, rhythm, contrast, and unity. Some of these sections also include suggested activities for readers to try that demonstrate these concepts.

Line – The lines of a painting define shapes in the painting. They also convey the idea of movement and direct the eyes of the viewer to important points of interest. This section shows a cave drawing a rhinoceros and suggests that readers trace it onto another piece of paper but change some of the lines to see the difference it makes.

Shape – Shapes are defined by lines. Shapes are flat, but their placement can create the illusion of depth and distance. The book suggests studying shape in drawing by drawing a friend’s silhouette.

Space – Shapes occupy and fill space. The placement of shapes within space create balance and suggest depth.

Light – Light is used to create the illusion of three-dimensional shapes because physical objects have sides that reflect light and cast shadow. It can also be used to give viewers a sense of substance because metal objects in paintings should look particularly reflective. Lighting can also convey mood in a painting. Part of this section explains how impressionists use light to give paintings more of an appearance of depth when viewed at a distance.

Color – The colors help to convey the mood of the painting. Certain colors also look better in combination with each other.

Pattern – Patterns are repeated features, like repeated shapes, lines, colors, and/or repeated light and dark spaces. Patterns can be used turn a few simple elements into part of a larger concept.

Balance – The concept of balance means that elements of a painting should balance each other, like placements of shapes and objects, points of interest, and areas of dark and light colors. If elements are out of balance, it can unsettle the viewers and give them the impression that something is wrong and needs to be fixed.

Rhythm – Rhythm in a painting suggests movement and energy, like the subjects of a painting are alive and moving.

Contrast – Contrast in a painting creates visual interest. If the elements of a painting are too much alike, they can look dull. The contrast could be in the placement and grouping of elements in the picture (such as some objects in the picture being grouped while others are isolated) or contrast between light and dark elements, making some of them stand out from others.

Unity – Unity refers to how well all of the elements of a painting combine to form a whole. All of the previously listed aspects of a painting need to work together effectively to convey the subject of the painting and the mood and message of the artist.

One of the things I like about this book is that is uses a wide selection of paintings from different countries and time periods as its examples, from cave paintings and paintings on Grecian pottery to Renaissance portraits and modern art.

At first, when I was reading the book, I was annoyed that almost all of the pictures of paintings in the book are black-and-white. Then, I discovered that the pictures in the chapter about the use of color in paintings are full color. That is the only place in the book (aside from the cover) where there are color images. I think the reason why they did that is to draw attention to the colors in that chapter while emphasizing other aspects of painting in the other chapters, but I think I would still prefer more color images throughout the book.

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.

Posted on by TracyC

The FunCraft Book of Print and Paint

The FunCraft Book of Print & Paint by Heather Amery and Anne Civardi, 1976.

This is the American edition of a British book, and it’s part of a series of craft and activity books. When I was a kid, I was really into crafts, but I didn’t do even half of the crafts in the craft books we had. This particular book is interesting because I first thought that it was going to be about painting pictures, and it is, but it’s specifically about making “prints” with paint. Basically, the crafts involve using various objects, from leaves and veggies to your own hands and fingers as stamps to make pictures and designs.

I remember once taking part in an activity at our local library that involved making pictures with stamps make from cut potatoes, like the book shows in the section about vegetable prints. Our potato stamps weren’t as elaborate as the ones shown here, and it’s interesting that they thought of using other veggies to get some different shapes as well.

The range of objects and techniques that the book uses in making prints is also interesting. It points out that you can make some interesting patterns by painting on a page and folding it over or using string coated in paint to make swirls. There are tips for making using tools like stencils and rollers to make designs.

The book also includes some painting techniques, like how to mix colors, and some tips for how to enhance pictures you’ve made, like painting over parts of a picture with glue and then shaking on some powdered colors. It gives suggestions for different powdered colors, like colored sand, salt, or sugar or using powdered spices or cocoa from your kitchen (more expensive, but it will give your artwork a scent).

One of my favorite suggestions was a technique that I did like a lot when I was a kid, making scratch pictures with a simple form of sgraffito. You can buy kits and specially prepared paper for doing this today, which didn’t exist when I was a kid (at least, not anywhere where I could buy it). Instead, I had to do it the old-fashioned way, using the technique in this book – drawing a rainbow of colors on paper, covering of it with black, and then scratching the black off to make rainbow pictures and patterns.

There are too many tips and techniques for me to cover everything in detail. The last few pages cover uses of the techniques for specific projects, how to make prints on cloth, and how to have an exhibition of the pictures you’ve made.

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.

Posted on by TracyC

Drawing Fun

Drawing Fun by Carolyn Davis and Charlene Brown, 1988.

This book is part of the Beginners Art Series, and it teaches children basic drawing skills. The book is designed for readers to try out drawing techniques on their own as they read along and starts with a page that explains the materials they will need.

Because this is a beginning guide, the book begins by explaining that all objects and, therefore, all drawings, are made up of basic shapes. One of the keys to learning how to draw is studying the basic shapes and how they can be combined to create more complex shapes and drawings.

When beginning to draw, the reader should begin by sketching out the general shapes that make up what they’re drawing and then fill in the details.

Many of the drawing activities in the book focus on tracing shapes, drawings, and photos to learn how they are formed and practice drawing skills.

As the book continues, the techniques become more advanced and the drawings become more detailed. It gradually teaches readers how to use shadows and shading to make their drawings appear more realistic and three-dimensional. The subject matter of the drawing exercises ranges from basic apples to more interesting subjects, like teddy bears and people.

The book also explains how to use perspective in drawing to further add a three-dimensional quality.

I like this book because I think it’s a good introduction to a fun, artistic hobby, giving readers good beginning techniques.

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.

Posted on by TracyC

Patty Paints a Picture

Patty Paints a Picture by Laura Bannon, 1946.

Patty wants to paint a picture of her kitten, Happy, to hang in her room. However, she has trouble creating a painting that truly satisfies her. Her first attempt doesn’t really look like her kitten. Patty is taking an art class at a local museum, and her mother suggests that she take her picture of Happy to her teacher and ask her how to make it better. Through Patty’s efforts to paint a realistic picture of her kitten, she comes to learn more about art.

Patty’s teacher suggests that Patty actually bring her kitten to class so that everyone can observe and paint him. When Patty takes her kitten to her art class, the whole class looks at Happy, pointing out parts of the the cat, like his whiskers and his little padded feet with retractable claws. Every part of Happy, including the shape of his eyes and his powerful back legs that are good for jumping, is suited to making him a good hunter because cats often hunt for their food. Studying the form of the cat helps the children understand how to draw him.

The fun part of the book is when Patty studies all of the different ways her friends in class draw the kitten, seeing how everyone looks at the kitten differently and uses different art styles, some drawn better than others because all the artists are children. The children’s pictures in the book look like pictures that would be painted by real children.

The children in the art class paint the cat in different ways and different imagined settings, indoors and outdoors, depending on their interests and how they see the cat and his personality. The boy who drew Happy in a cartoon style, with a bird in his stomach and a caption, wants to be a cartoonist, which is why his style was a good choice for his painting. Patty, on the other hand, wants her painting to be realistic for the way she sees her kitten.

The book explains how Patty learns new art techniques to make her painting look more realistic. She studies the lines that people use in their paintings and compares them to her cat, seeing that curved lines for the cat’s body make him look more realistic. Patty’s teacher points out that one of the mistakes that she’s made in her first efforts is giving Happy a body more the size of an adult cat than a kitten. A kitten’s body looks smaller when compared to the size of the head. To make her picture more realistic, Patty has to learn to draw her kitten’s body parts and features in the right proportions. Patty also notices that the edges of another girl’s cat painting look fuzzy because she’s painting in watercolor and the edges of her painting are wet and running. Patty likes the fuzziness of that painting, so she decides to use that technique on purpose to make more realistic, fuzzy fur. Her teacher shows her how to use that technique with more control by putting a wet blotter under her paper. I like how the book describes Patty’s observations of both her kitten and other people’s pictures and how she uses them to improve her own painting.

At one point in the story, Happy disappears from the art class, and Patty is afraid that she’s lost her kitten forever. Fortunately, she finds Happy hiding in the art room, taking a nap, and he is fine.

In the end, Patty produces a painting that satisfies her because it really looks like her kitten, the way she sees him.

This is one of those vintage children’s books that I would like to see in print again! It’s a nice story, and I really liked the way the book examines the different ways that people look at art and the styles they use. There’s no wrong way to paint something, but the book explains how learning different techniques can help artists to express themselves and their vision the way they want. Patty knows when she’s doing well at her painting when the picture she paints looks more like the vision she has of her kitten.

You can read this book online in your browser through the HathiTrust Digital Library.

Posted on by TracyC · 1 Comment

Bird Wise

Bird Wise by Pamela M. Hickman, illustrations by Judie Shore, 1988.

This is a beginning guide to birds and bird watching for kids. I thought that the guide was very helpful with nice, detailed illustrations. The book explains the appearance, biology, and lives of birds and offers activities to help readers understand and interact with birds.

The first section in the book is about the appearance and body parts of birds. It explains how different birds have differently-shaped beaks and feet and different types of feathers and how the differences help each type of bird eat the foods they like and live in the places where they live. One of the activities for this section is about how to start a feather collection. The book also explains that different birds have different styles of flying.

The section about how birds live explain about different types of bird nests and how they migrate and raise their young. The book explains different methods for making bird feeders and bird houses.

The book profiles certain specific types of birds, including owls (there is an activity about dissecting owl pellets, which I had to do when I was in elementary school), gulls, hummingbirds, and woodpeckers.

In the section about bird watching, the book offers tips for what to look for to identify a bird’s type. It also explains how to make bird blinds to avoid being seen and how to recognize types of bird songs.

The book also contains other helpful information, like how to care for injured birds and how to plant a garden that will attract birds. It also includes a board game that emphasizes some of the lessons about birds in the book.

Overall, I was pleased with the range of information in the book. It was interesting and well-presented.

The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive.

Posted on by TracyC

Starlings

Starlings by Wilfred S. Bronson, 1948.

The title of the book tells you what it’s about; this is a children’s picture book about starlings. That sounds pretty straight-forward and even a little dull, but there is more to learn about starlings than I imagined, and the author of this book has an imaginative way of explaining information. I love books that cover odd topics in detail, and I enjoyed the whimsical quality of this book. The pictures are detailed black-and-white drawings, some with captions like comics. Most of them explain the anatomy of the birds or their habits, but they have some unique ways of expressing educational information.

The book begins by describing the singing of starlings and then explains how farmers view starlings. Starlings can be a pest to farmers when they eat their fruit or the seeds the farmers are trying to plant, but they can also be helpful when they eat weed seeds and prevent weeds from coming up in the farmers’ fields. Of course, the birds don’t know when they’re helping or hindering because, as far as they’re concerned, they’re just there to eat any food that happens to be available at the moment. I like the little picture of the bird reading a mystery book, trying to figure out why farmers don’t mind when they eat some seeds and try to scare them away from others. That’s an example of the whimsy I was talking about.

The book continues describing what starlings eat and places where they like to roost, and it explains how they affect people living in cities (mainly, messing up their cars). There were times when people in cities considered them such a nuisance that they would shoot them, and some poor people hunted them for food. Actually, the entire reason why we have starlings in the US is that people over-hunted other types of birds (there is a disturbing picture of hunters with piles of dead birds at one point in the book), and birds are an important part of the ecosystem. Even though they can annoy farmers when they eat seeds and fruit, they also eat bugs that are pests to crops.

I was really struck by the passage that explained how starlings were first brought to the United States and why they were brought here:

“Some people think that starlings have no right to food or nesting-places because they are not ‘American birds.’ Yet all the starlings you see were born in America. So were their parents and grandparents and great-great-grandparents and all their relatives clear back to 1890. In that year their ancestors were caught in Europe and brought in cages to America. So many American birds had been killed at that time by our own ancestors that our crops were growing wormier and wormier each year, while insect pests grew worse and worse. So starlings were imported to help us fight the insects. They were freed in Central Park in New York City and left to look out for themselves.”

This explanation uses simplified language for children, and it also oddly evokes imagery of human beings. We don’t normally refer to animals as “foreigners” because animals don’t speak different human languages or have allegiances to foreign governments like people from other countries do. When we talk about new species that have been introduced to an environment where they did not originally belong and quickly spread out and multiple, we usually call them “invasive species.” In that case, the ecological concern is that the new invasive species will disrupt the balance of the natural environment and crowd out native species, but the author is trying to point out that the situation with the starlings was different. The starlings were introduced to the environment in the US on purpose, not by accident, and it was done specifically because they were meant to a solution to a problem. The environment had already been disrupted by humans who had moved into areas where they had not lived previously and where they killed too many of the native species themselves without regard to what that would do to the natural environment and their own farming. The introduction of the starlings was meant to restore a balance that had been lost. However, the people who had originally caused the problem didn’t see it that way, seeing the starlings as pests because they were “foreign.” While birds in general may occasionally be a nuisance because they don’t understand human priorities, they still perform useful functions for human beings as they go about their lives, just being the birds they are – eating annoying weed seeds and bugs and scavenging food from what humans throw out.

“People who think that starlings should be starvelings because they are ‘foreigners’ should remember that these American-born birds save much of what they themselves throw away and are still helping us to fight insects as they did in 1890.”

I understand what the author is trying to explain about balance in the ecological system, but I was struck by the human imagery that the passage evokes: “Foreigners” who came to New York City, not unlike immigrants fresh off the boat from Ellis Island during the 19th century, set free to make their way in a strange environment among people who often regarded them as worthless pests, disliking them while still using the useful services they provided. The comparison still fascinates me. At first, I wasn’t sure that the author meant to make that broader comparison here. I thought he probably used that language just to simply the ecological concepts for children’s understanding, but the author does make another comparison a little further on:

“So let’s be fair. If American-born starlings are foreigners, then so are all people in America except the Indians (Native Americans). So are many kinds of birds, animals, and plants. Our ancestors brought them here from other countries. But if all these creatures, and ourselves, are American now, then so are the starlings. Yes indeed!”

So get off your high horse, starling-haters.

At several points in the book, the author compares birds to airplanes, explaining their muscles and flying mechanisms like machinery. I liked the page where the author compares different planes and helicopters to types of birds (cruisers being like gliding eagles and albatrosses, fast-turning speed planes like starlings and swallows, and hovering helicopters like humming birds). The parts that describe how birds cling to branches as they sleep and how their wings move look accurate and helpful. The part about how a bird creates eggs is hilarious. The text about the formation of the egg inside the bird isn’t bad. It completely skips over the subject of the fertilization of eggs (understandably), and the picture show the bird as a kind of egg-making factory with little men assembling the parts of the egg in stages instead of showing a bird’s reproductive anatomy.

In the upper right corners of this section of the book, there are little squares with a flying bird because part of the book is meant to be uses as a flip book to see a bird flying. The page shown above with the boy flipping through the book shows how to use the flip book portion.

There is a section of the book that explains how baby birds develop in the egg and eventually hatch.

There is also a section in the book that shows how adult starlings will prepare a nest for their eggs and how they raise their babies.

As I was reading the book, I wondered who the author, Wilfred S. Bronson, was. Bronson was an artist specializing in natural history, and he wrote and illustrated other books for children about animals and natural history. In the years before he wrote this particular book, he served in the US Army during World War I and painted murals for the Works Progress Administration (WPA) during the Great Depression. He also participated in expeditions to gather specimens and create illustrations of wildlife for botanical gardens and museums.

I haven’t found a copy of this particular book to read online, but it was republished in 2008 and is still available from Amazon.

Posted on by TracyC

Fishes

Fishes by Bertha Morris Parker, 1943, 1957.

This is a reprint of an earlier book, and it’s interesting because this was part of an educational science series. The author was from the University of Chicago, and the accuracy was verified by Walter H. Chute, the Director of the John G. Shedd Aquarium at the time.

As a child, I was never particularly interested in fish. My mother had a fish tank with pet fish, but I lived pretty far from large bodies of water and never went fishing. For years, this book, probably purchased at one of the many used book sales my family attended over the years, went unread. However, as an adult, I like reading children’s books about very specific topics because they often include some fun and usual facts.

The book begins by explaining to child readers how goldfish are similar to and different from human beings. It seems pretty straight forward, but they point out some thoughtful similarities and differences. Both fish and humans need to breathe, but they do it in different ways, which is why humans drown in water and fish effectively drown in air. The book also points out that goldfish cannot move their heads independently of their bodies in the way that humans do.

In the section called “The Story of the Goldfish”, the book explains how wild goldfish were first kept as pets in China and Japan. Wild goldfish actually have a variety of colors, but hundreds of years ago in China, people liked the yellow or gold ones best as pets, and they began deliberately breeding fish with these colors, which is how they came to be known as “goldfish.”

The book defines “fish” as creatures with gills, fins, and backbones but no arms or legs. It uses this definition to separate fish from other aquatic creatures like whales (no gills, actually a mammal with lungs), jellyfish (no fins, gills, or backbone), crabs (gills but no fins, arms and an exoskeleton instead of a backbone), and starfish. It also explains the difference between fish that live in salt water vs. fish that live in fresh water.

The book explains what different types of fishes eat, how they’re born (most hatch from eggs), how they defend themselves, and how they migrate. In one section, the book explains how fish have some or all of the five senses that humans have (sight, hearing, smelling, taste, and touch), but they have them to different degrees and use them in different ways.

The book presents information about some specific types of fish, and it even mentions that some types of fish are endangered species. I usually associate environmental messages with the late 20th century, but this book discussed the over-fishing of sturgeon and the ecological dangers of erosion caused by deforestation on river banks and factory waste dumped in water in the mid-20th century.

The book ends with a list of tips for observing fish.

The book presents a pretty comprehensive beginner’s guide to fish in general, and I really appreciated the mentions of environmental issues. My one criticism is that the book could use more pictures and especially bigger pictures. All of the pictures are in full color, but most of them are rather small, just in the corners or edges of the pages, which are mostly full of text. I just think that larger pictures would be more appealing and more child-friendly. There are even places where the edges of the pictures and their captions are cut off by the edges of the book (as shown in two of the pictures of pages above), which looks clumsy and annoying. The book seems pretty authoritative, but I think it could have been presented better. I’m not sure how people who originally read this book looked at it, but I didn’t like the size and positioning of the illustrations.

I couldn’t find an online edition of this vintage nonfiction children’s book, but I did find online editions of other nonfiction books for children by the same author through Internet Archive.