A Talk in the Woods with Batik Artist Harriet Peck Taylor.

"I love animals and the outdoors. I could happily camp in a tent in the mountains for much of the year ... I'm always happiest and most at peace in the woods."

The books of Harriet Peck Taylor demonstrate her zest for both nature and art. They also show an interest in Native Americans which goes back to her days in elementary school when she was already writing picturebooks about both animals and Native Americans. "Reading was very important to me," she recalls. Her world as a child in suburban Chicago was filled with both books and a wide variety of pets.

Batik: An Entrancing Medium At the University of Colorado at Boulder, where she earned a BFA in Fine Art, she took a course in batik "and immediately became entranced with the medium." She has worked in it for almost twenty years. "The liquid wax lines and textures give a very clean, graphic look to my shapes. I paint the dyes on the fabric in a very loose, watercolor fashion. I love the contrast between the two elements, the hard edge of the wax lines played against the fluid, vibrant look of the dyes as they move along the fabric."

Her love of the outdoors has led her to settle in Colorado, where she draws strength from both the animals and the landscape she encounters. She works from sketches and photographs she makes in the wild, in museums and zoos, even at home, where she draws her sometimes uncooperative dogs.

Picturing a Story

"Since I think of myself as an illustrator first and an author second, I generally see a story in my head in pictures. However, to begin a book, I write my story first. I often structure my text in such a way that it will allow me to illustrate a particular picture that I have in mind. I am attracted to painters and craftspeople from many cultures. I've been influenced by the art of Native North Americans, by their decorative use of geometrics and patterns, as well as their symbolic use of signs and symbols which reflect the close bonds they felt toward the natural world. I also admire painters like Paul Gauguin and Henri Rousseau.

Style and Design

My own style has changed and evolved over the years, becoming more whimsical, playful, and dreamlike ... the batik medium has been versatile enough to allow me to change and grow. Yet my subject matter would be the same no matter what medium I was working in."

But even with comfort in her style and pictures in her head, Peck notes, "The hardest part of doing a picturebook is the dummy. Sometimes I feel overwhelmed by how many choices there are in how to lay out the text and illustrations. I do several different rough dummies to try and decide the best way to balance text and art so that the plot flows smoothly. Once the rough dummy is done, I begin drawings for the final dummy.

Drawing takes Time

My animals and settings are more whimsical than realistic and so may look like they come easily; but that is not the case. To capture a particular pose and to arrange a drama on the page to my satisfaction takes me many hours, even days. After the final dummy has been approved by my art director and editor," she continues, "I blow up my drawings to large scale, some twenty to thirty inches per page, and trace them onto cotton for the batiks. This part comes fairly easily as my approach to color is very spontaneous. I work large for an illustrator because the wax line is very wide; I need the size to accomodate the detailed areas."

Taylor has used and developed her style in a series of well-reviewed books based on the Native American legends that interest her: Coyote Places the Stars (Macmillan 1993), Coyote and the Laughing Butterflies (Macmillan 1995), Brother Wolf: A Seneca Tale (Farrar Straus 1997), and most recently Ulaq and the Northern Lights (Farrar Straus 1998). On the latest she notes, "I redid almost every page in that book. When I was half to three-quarters of the way through, I was just not happy, not doing justice to the Northern Lights. I was trying for the fluid, ethereal quality.., they lacked a certain luminosity. Perhaps if I had been working with oils I could have achieved it better. When you lighten with water you lose some of the vibrancy."

A Different Kind of Project

But with Two Days in May (Farrar Straus 1999) Taylor has for the first time allowed someone else to do the illustrations for her story. When asked why, she replied that this was a story that she really wanted to do, based on a newspaper article about a real incident. "I was so moved by it that I wanted to turn it into a story. There are so few uplifting urban tales. But I know my limitations as an artist. With people, buildings, cars, buses, taxis ... I just felt that it would be beyond my capabilities. So I worked with Farrar Strauss and Giroux in choosing an illustrator. Leila Torres did a fantastic job, so much better than I could have done," she noted.

Currently she is back both writing on and illustrating a subject that interests her greatly: Secrets of the Stone is about petroglyphs. "I can't describe my art without saying that it is intrinsically linked to my love of nature and the animals that live there. And I feel very lucky that through picturebooks, with words and pictures, I can tell stories about what I love." And through these books, parents, teachers, and children can experience Taylor's feelings for both her art and her legendary tales.