Draw on walls: A Story Of Keith Haring — Enchanted Lion Books

A Story Of Keith Haring — Enchanted Lion Books

$18.95

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★ A 2021 Rainbow Book List selection

★ A New York Public Library Best Book for Kids of 2020

★ A Washington Post Best Children’s Book of 2020

★ A Kirkus Best Picture-Book Biography of 2020

★ A Chicago Public Library Best of the Best Pick of 2020

★ A 2021 Capitol Choices Noteworthy Book for Children

★ 2020 Eureka! Nonfiction Children’s Book Gold Award

★ A 2022 Texas Topaz Nonfiction Reading List selection

Written by Matthew Burgess

Illustrated by Josh Cochran

Truly devoted to the idea of public art, Haring drew wherever he went: from the Berlin Wall to the unused advertising space in New York’s subway. Haring’s iconic pop art and graffiti-like style transformed the New York City underground art scene in the 1980s. A member of the LGBTQ community, Haring died tragically at the age of thirty-one from AIDS-related complications. This inspiring, celebratory book honors Haring’s life and art, along with his very special connection with kids. “I would love to be a teacher because I love children and I think that not enough people respect children or understand how important they are.” —Keith Haring.

Thoughtfully written by Matthew Burgess, the much-acclaimed author of Enormous Smallness, and marking the debut picture book of illustrator Josh Cochran- himself a specialist in bright, dense, conceptual drawings- this book is truly a joyful veneration of the transformative power of art.

ISBN: 978-1-59270-267-1

9.5” (W) x 12.5” (H) • 64 pages • HC • Ages 4-8

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★ “Cochran uses a thick black line to suggest Haring’s creations, and renders figures in a Haring-esque style without seeming gimmicky…the story, including a respectful acknowledgement of Haring’s death from AIDS, makes the subject seem immediate and real—and presents a compelling vision of answering the call to create. ” —STARRED REVIEW, Publishers Weekly

★ “This big, beautiful biography of Keith Haring includes illustrations that effectively capture the sense of movement and fluidity of Haring’s work… A bright literary work packed with well-researched and well-written biographical notes on Haring’s short life and the impact he made on the art world and public art. An ideal choice for primary school through high school libraries, especially ones geographically represented in the story (New York, Pennsylvania).” — STARRED REVIEW, School Library Journal, Samantha Hull, Ephrata H.S., PA

“Drawing on Walls is a tender and beautifully written biography of Haring’s short life. Matthew Burgess, the book’s talented writer, set out to tell Haring’s tale without embellishment, sugarcoating or regret. The result is a joyful celebration of Haring’s world.” —Frank Viva, The New York Times

“Often featuring a bold black line, Cochran’s painterly illustrations drive the narrative—bursting with movement and color—utilizing a wide variety of perspectives and both spot and full-bleed illustrations to dance around the text in a suitably neo-expressionist tribute to the subject. Without erasing or dwelling on any particular aspect of Haring’s personal life, author Burgess outlines Haring’s relationships with art, with children, and with his partner, Juan DuBose, in straightforward, accessible language—from his childhood in Pennsylvania to his “final mark” in Pisa, Italy (five months before his death)—with the same bold honesty and vibrance visible in his subject’s art career…an inspired, and inspiring, continuation of Haring’s intention. ” —Kirkus Reviews

“Drawing On Walls: A Story of Keith Haring is gorgeous and deeply inspiring…this large padded hardcover book is beautifully constructed and illustrated with a thoughtfully told story.”—Inclusive Storytime

“Like other bios of artists written for children, Burgess and Cochran’s consideration of Keith Haring could easily have explained with hoity-toity words why all good little children should know the man’s work. Instead they tell you the facts, and in doing so show you why the man deserves to be remembered. Never taking its eye off of what matters (that kids should find picture book bios interesting and not just something their parent/guardian/teacher/librarian makes them listen to) Drawing On Walls justifies its very existence by justifying the very existence of its subject. And my inner child critic is appeased.”—Betsy Bird, Fuse 8

“Bright and bold as Keith Haring’s art, this book follows the artist’s ever-energetic creative drive. Author Burgess and illustrator Cochran show how generous a person he was, and how children played a central part in his life and work.”—The Washington Post

An Illustrated Homage to Keith Haring, His Irrepressible Art of Hope, and His Beautiful Bond with Children – The Marginalian

Growing up in Bulgaria, one of my most cherished objects was also one of the first fragments of American culture to enter our home after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise of the Iron Curtain — a small square desk calendar in a clear plastic clamshell, containing twelve illustrated cards, each vibrantly alive with tiny black-contoured figures dancing in various jubilant formations amid a festival of primary colors. I would look up to savor its mirth between math equations and domestic disquietudes. However gloomy a day I was having, however sunken my child-heart, these figures would transport me to a buoyant world of sunlit possibility. I knew nothing about their creator beyond the name on the back of the clamshell: Keith Haring (May 4, 1958–February 16, 1990). I knew nothing about the bittersweet beauty of his courageous life, nothing about the tenacious activism behind his art, nothing about the enormous uninterrupted chain of human figures bonded in kinship, which he had painted on the remnants of the very wall whose collapse had placed this miniature monument to joy on my desk.

Nearly three decades later, having traded Bulgaria for Brooklyn by some improbable existential acrobatics, I encountered Haring’s work again in a magnificent mural he had painted for a young people’s club in New York City in the final year of his twenties, not long before his death, which my friends at Pioneer Works had resurrected and brought to our neighborhood. The same rush of irrepressible gladness poured into the grownup heart from the twenty-five-foot wall as had poured into the child-heart from the five-inch calendar. I grew attuned to the echoes of his sensibility bellowing down the corridor of time, reverberating strongly in the work of established artists in my own community.

Long before he moved to Brooklyn in pursuit of his own calling, poet Matthew Burgess had a parallel experience of Haring’s world-expanding art, which he first encountered on the cover of a Christmas record at fourteen, living behind the Golden Curtain of suburban Southern California as a budding artist and young gay man trying to find himself. “For those of us who grew up before the internet became ubiquitous, a bright fragment from the outer world can feel like an important discovery — and a call,” Burgess writes in the author’s note to what became his serenade to the artist who opened minds and world of possibility for so many.

A decade into teaching poetry in public schools, Burgess encountered Haring’s work afresh in a retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum. After mesmeric hours in the galleries, he wandered into the museum bookshop and went home with a copy of Haring’s published journals, which he devoured immediately. On its pages, he realized that the special native sympathy between children and Haring’s art is not an accident of his line and color but at the very center of his spirit. In an entry from July 7, 1986, Haring writes:

Children know something that most people have forgotten. Children possess a fascination with their everyday existence that is very special and would be very helpful to adults if they could learn to understand and respect it.

Having previously composed Enormous Smallness — the wondrous picture-book biography of E.E. Cummings, another artist who so passionately believed that “it takes courage to grow up and become who you really are” — Burgess was impelled to invite young people into Keith Haring’s singular art and the large heart from which it sprang. And so Drawing on Walls: A Story of Keith Haring (public library) was born — a splendid addition to the most inspiring picture-book biographies of cultural heroes.

Burgess’s tender words, harmonized by muralist and illustrator Josh Cochran’s ebullient art, follow the young Keith from his childhood in small-town Pennsylvania, drawing at the kitchen table with his dad and dipping his little sister’s palms in paint to make her a mobile of handprints, to his improbable path to New York City.

One fateful day, home for the holidays from Pittsburg, where he had gone to study commercial art but had grow disillusioned with the prescriptive form, hungry “to be spontaneous and free,” Haring chanced upon The Art Spirit — Robert Henri’s 1923 masterwork, which would go on to influence generation of artists as sundry as Georgia O’Keeffe and David Lynch. “Rise up if it kills you,” Henri had written to O’Keeffe’s best friend. “I’m for the person who takes the bit in his teeth & goes after what he believes in.” Henri’s book — an invitation, an incantation, to “do whatever you do intensely” — invigorated the young artist to take the bit of his own talent and unexampled creative vision in his teeth and go toward that intensity.

After hitchhiking across the country with his treasured copy of The Spirit of Art, he went to New York City.

At twenty, he enrolled in the School of Visual Arts. (Cochran, whose illustrations bring Haring’s life to life in a rare acrobatic triumph of honoring another artist’s art in art that is both deliberately referential and thoroughly original, now teaches at the School of Visual Arts — a lovely testament to Robert Henri’s conviction that “all any man can hope to do is to add his fragment to the whole.”)

One day, he foraged some rolls of paper lying in the gutter between the bustling New York sidewalk and the bustling New York street, and spontaneously “began making bigger and bigger pictures.”

Burgess writes:

Keith especially liked painting on the floor by the open door where the sunlight poured in.

People passing on the street would stop to watch or talk with him about what he was making. Keith loved it!

He didn’t believe that some people understand art while others don’t — or that art should be hidden away in galleries, museums, and private collections.

Keith wanted to communicate with as many people as possible. “The public has a right to art… Art is for everybody.”

Tracing Haring’s inviting self-discovery on vacant subway billboards and graffiti-populated walls, Burgess affirms this credo by spontaneously breaking into his own art-form — the delightful surprise of the book’s sole verse:

Maybe it makes them smile,
maybe it makes them think,
maybe it inspires them to draw
or dance or write or sing.

Meanwhile, we see the bower of the young artist’s imagination grow decorated with the experiences of a life fully lived — he falls in love, starts a club in a church basement on St. Mark’s Place with his friends, discovers the vibrant graffiti culture of Alphabet City, listens to his boyfriend’s music as he paints and they cook together.

Like artist Agnes Martin and the astonishing array of employments by which she sustained herself as she revolutionized art, he takes a series of odd jobs to survive in New York — bike messenger and sandwich-maker and gallery assistant in Soho and wildflower picker in Jersey and always, always his favorite: drawing with children at a Brooklyn daycare.

All the while, he keeps drawing on walls, savoring that small, enormous moment when a stranger pauses mid-stride in this unstoppable city for a colorful moment of unbidden wonder. Burgess writes:

For Keith, this was what art was all about — the moment when people see it and respond.

At last, four years after leaping into the glorious uncertainty of life as a young artist in New York City, his big breakthrough came — a major solo exhibition at a Soho gallery. It tipped a Rube Goldberg machine of opportunities and invitations, making the world his canvas — from the wall of an Italian monastery to the Berlin Wall to the wall.

Burgess writes:

But no matter how busy he became or where in the world he went, he always made time for children.

Keith understood kids and they understood him.
There was an unspoken bond between them.

And since children often asked him to draw on their t-shirts, skateboards, and jeans, he always kept a black marker handy.

In the remaining seven years of his life, as the art world grew to lavish Haring with recognition and plaudit, his drawings would come to cover the walls of orphanages and hospitals and daycare centers. When he spent five days painting the wall of a Chicago high school together with its 500 students, one walked up to him and said, with that special way children alone have of seeing into the heart of things and naming what is there without self-consciousness or pretense:

I can tell, by the way you paint, that you really love life.

Not long after that, Haring’s vivacity was stamped with the four letters that would spell certain death for so many young people of his generation. But even his AIDS diagnosis didn’t stifle his exuberant love of life — it only amplified it. Burgess quotes Haring’s diary:

I appreciate everything that has happened, especially the gift of life I was given that has created a silent bond between me and children. Children can sense this “thing” in me.

Keith Haring painting a wall at the Palaexpo Museum in Rome, 1984. (Photograph by Stefano Fontebasso de Martino; featured with permission.)

Drawing on Walls radiates that singular thingness with its sensitive, courageous homage to an artist whose short life cast a widening pool of light on so many, rippling across space and time. Complement it with Maya Angelou’s lovely verses of courage for kids, illustrated by Haring’s contemporary Jean-Michel Basquiat, and with the picture-book biographies of Wangari Maathai, Maria Mitchell, Ada Lovelace, Louise Bourgeois, E.E. Cummings, Jane Goodall, Jane Jacobs, John Lewis, Frida Kahlo, Louis Braille, Pablo Neruda, Albert Einstein, Muddy Waters, and Nellie Bly, then revisit E. E. Cummings — the subject of Burgess’s first picture-book biography — on the courage to be yourself.

Illustrations courtesy of Enchanted Lion Books; photographs by Maria Popova

What colors to paint on the wall in the apartment, on the street, in the room

When looking at the magnificent paintings, the question arises involuntarily: “what colors do experienced artists paint the walls with?”. Is it easy to find materials that allow you to achieve such a realistic and long-term effect? Let us consider in more detail which wall paints are best suited for home interiors.

Preparing the wall for painting

Before you start painting, you will have to decide on the style, technique, motive of the future image. When the main nuances are determined, a sketch is made, it remains for

small – decide which colors to use. We will dwell on this in more detail, but first of all, we will deal with the preparation of the surface for the application of coloring materials.

In order for the decorative coating to be applied well, it is necessary to level and plaster the wall. Some craftsmen use non-woven wallpaper designed for painting as a basis. An alternative solution is a special acrylic primer. Which option to choose is determined by the master individually.

The paint may only be applied to a well-dried wall free of stains, dirt, dust or grease. If you neglect these rules, the finished painting will turn out to be blurry and untidy.

In addition, the craftsmen recommend preparing for work not only the surface, but also the space around. Using a film, cover the floor, protect furniture and other interior items from splashes and blunders.

Basic coloring materials

Let’s take a closer look at what paints are best for painting walls in the interior. The choice depends on the room, as well as on the characteristics of the surface. For example, it is better to apply acrylic compounds to the walls in the kitchen. They differ in the following characteristics:

• resistant to temperature changes;
• withstand high humidity;
• do not lose their attractive appearance even after frequent washing.

An alternative solution is water-based paint. It has similar performance characteristics. It is easy to paint walls with it, it does not require special care. The only negative is that the paint tolerates exposure to high humidity worse.

In the bedroom, where a person spends 8 hours a day, and in the children’s room, it is better to use materials that are 100% environmentally friendly. The most suitable option are latex paints. If it is possible to leave the house for a week, until the surface is completely dry, you can use oil paints to paint the walls in the room. They have a rich texture and are best suited for applying small accents. They are often used by professional artists.

There are other popular varieties on the market:

• fluorescent paints. Compositions in which there are luminous elements. With their help, you can create unusual fabulous and fantastic pictures. They are completely safe, therefore they are used both for the street and indoors;
• spray paints. These are compositions of various colors and textures that are great for painting large surfaces. They often paint walls with stencils. These paints are great for painting ceilings and uneven surfaces. They are matte or glossy.
• watercolor or gouache. These materials in the hands of skilled craftsmen perfectly convey rich shades, allow you to draw small details. To keep the paintings well, after completion of work and final drying, they are varnished.

If you figured out what paints are used to paint on the walls, it remains to clarify some important details regarding tools, as well as the most popular manufacturers.

Useful “needs”

The final important question concerns tools. Their list and characteristics depend on the technique and type of coloring materials:

• for a pattern made using a stencil, rollers of different thicknesses are selected;
• airbrush or airbrush is suitable for painting large planes;
• with brushes made of artificial pile of different thicknesses (from No. 0 to No. 10) draw complex patterns, perform small details.

In addition to tools, you will need special materials. The first thing you have to buy is a primer. You also need a base coat. Another important detail is color. This is a special paint sold in small jars. They are added to different compositions (oil, alkyd, acrylic, etc.). Kohler is combined with the base base to get the right color.

Artistic acrylic requires special attention. With it, you can combine all paints on one synthetic basis. It is sold in jars or tubes. Such materials are good to use when you need to paint a small section of the wall. Compact packaging allows you to save material.

The final tool you will need for this work is tempera. It is used for decorating surfaces, but this significantly increases the cost of work. It is characterized by high hiding power, allows you to create bright accents on a dark or light background.

When choosing paint for painting, it is best to give preference to trusted brands. This will create an image that will delight for many years with an attractive appearance, brightness of colors.

How to paint on the walls – Anna Koshkina

I’ll tell you a little about what people paint on the walls, how they do it, and how to choose paints for painting on the walls. How many colors to take, what paints and colors are needed to paint the wall.

Painted on the walls with brushes and airbrush. You can combine these tools, or you can use only brushes or just an airbrush. When using an airbrush, the drawings turn out to be more like a photograph, since it is easier to make a tone transition with an airbrush than with a brush. How are large drawings created? For example, you have a selected drawing – a sketch, and you want to draw it, where to start? And you can start by breaking the sketch into squares. Then draw a wall on which you will draw in large squares and transfer the sketch to the wall, enlarging it with the help of squares, focusing on the points. How can you “draw” a wall, you ask? This is very interesting, I read this method in one old book. This is done by two people, a rope is taken and dipped in paint, two people take this rope, pull it vertically or horizontally and press it against the wall, so you can make squares relatively quickly. This method is suitable for drawing on the wall of the house, that is, for a very large drawing.

If this is a wall in an apartment, that is, the drawing is relatively small, not like on a high-rise building, then you can draw a drawing on the wall yourself, without breaking it into squares.

Also stencils are very popular nowadays, or as they say “stencil painting”. A small stencil can be made independently. But for wall painting, a large stencil, it is better to buy a ready-made one, or choose a drawing on the Internet. You can also draw a pattern for the stencil yourself. A sketch can be made small in size, and at a stencil company, it can be beautifully drawn in one of the vector programs and enlarged to almost any size without losing quality.

How to choose wall paints. It all depends on the surface of the wall, what it is covered with. If it is painted with acrylic paints, then you need to choose acrylic paints (by the way, they are not only thick, but also liquid). If it is opened with ordinary paint – an emulsion (such as, for example, batteries are painted), then you need to choose a paint that includes oils (oil-based paint), for example, oil paints. If it is painted with ordinary water-based paint, then water-based paints can be taken, since water-based paint is also water-based, and instead of whitewash (white paint), you can use the same white water-based paint. For example, for painting a wall covered with a water-based emulsion (which is on the street), I used paint (this is not an advertisement), called PigmentMiХ, produced in Poland INCHEM POLONIA (universal liquid pigment concentrate), 80 ml each. For the second year, the paint has held up well, although the wall is not protected from the weather. Here is a link to the pictures.