CAROLYN LESSER

     This page and its subpages, show additional facets of my creative life that I weave into my writing and illustration life... as a chance to play with color and textures, as I muse over the words and sketches written and drawn on any given day. 

      I grew up watching my grandmother and aunts make things...lace...my dresses....100 aprons for the church bazaar...hats...quilts...pillowslips...sweaters... using balls of yarn, embroidery floss, hoops, ribbons, cloth, tissue paper patterns, pins, scissors, buttons, scraps of fabric...everything becoming something beautiful, as well as useful.  

     As evening came, and the supper dishes were done, they went into their quiet rooms, sat down in their favorite chair near the lamp with the good light, smiled, and "picked up their work," as they called it.  No one ever just sat.  Their beautiful hands were always gracefully "at work" as conversations swirled around them. 

     

     Great Polar Bear, gave me another opportunity to honor my legacy from the loving women in my life, especially one.....my grandmother, Minnie, who handed me a scrapbook, a scissors, a pot of paste, and a stack of old magazines, saying, "Maybe you can make some beautiful pictures."  

     

     As I illustrated the text I wrote for Great Polar Bear book, I could see her face, that gentle smile, as I evoked that child I had been with her, and tried to "make some beautiful pictures," for this book.

     

     Illustrating bought to life and synthesized all I have lived... firing up an exciting, mind-alive time for me.  New ideas come so fast... I carry my small, yellow, silk-covered Moleskin sketchbook with me from room to room to car to restaurants to movies to the theatre and homes of friends, so every single idea is written or sketched the moment, it arrives.  Wondering as I wander...what is next?