Illustration can be fine art, too, award winners say

By Laurie O’Neill — Laurie@concordbridge.org

More than a talent for telling stories with pastels, colored pencils, and paints connects Julia Miner and Ilse Plume. 

The two award-winning Concord artists and illustrators are showing their work at the Gallery at Trinity Church through November 4 in an exhibition titled “Beyond Labels: Illustration, Fine Art, or Both?” 

Miner and Plume both work in studios at The Umbrella, and many years ago Miner was a student of Plume’s when the latter taught at DeCordova in Lincoln. At the time, Miner was illustrating her book “The Shepherd’s Song,” based on the 23rd Psalm.

As children, each of them loved to draw as an outlet for their adventurous spirits. Miner fulfilled her passion for horses by rendering them on paper and loved losing herself in creative projects like making models of buildings.   

Drawing, says Plume, served as “a constant through life’s ups and downs.” She would sketch on walls and in the margins of her books. Growing up in wartime Germany, Plume had few toys, but among her picture books were Grimms’ fairy tales, which would later play a role in her work. 

‘A special privilege’

Miner was in the first class of women at Dartmouth and earned a master’s of architecture from Yale. She owns the local firm East Side Studio Architects. A friend once told Miner, “What you do for children counts twice,” a line that resonates with the artist. Illustrating children’s books — she has done four — “is a special privilege,” Miner says. 

Miner’s other picture books are “The Lighthouse Santa,” “Save Our Stream,” and “The Unbreakable Code,” which was named a Smithsonian Notable Book of the Year. Written by Sara Hoaglund Hunter, it is the story of a Navajo code talker who explains how the tribe’s language, faith, and ingenuity helped win World War II.  

The places Miner saw on a bike trip through Europe after graduate school, in later travels to Greece and Turkey, and while living for a while in Arizona, awakened in her a keen appreciation for the way light can strike a landscape and evoke powerful feelings. She continues to be passionate about plein-air painting. 

“I’m still transported by the creative process,” she says.   

A middle-of-the-night call  

Plume, who earned a BFA and MFA from Drake University and studied printmaking in Florence, Italy, has created the illustrations and sometimes the writing for 19 books, along the way winning an Ezra Jack Keats Award. She has often used stories from Latvia, Russia, and Sweden. 

The late Elsa Beskow, a Swedish children’s book author and illustrator often called the Beatrix Potter of Scandinavia, inspired Plume early on. Another muse was the late Jane Langton, a prolific writer of children’s books including “St. Francis and the Wolf,” which Plume illustrated.  

A thrilling, middle-of-the-night call Plume received in 1981 conveyed the news that “The Bremen-Town Musicians,” which she had written and illustrated, had been named a Caldecott Honor Book. 

In the story, based on a German fairy tale, a donkey, a dog, a cat, and a rooster have grown too old to be useful to their masters, so they run away, deciding to go to Bremen-Town to be street musicians. 

Plume’s tiny studio, where she is working on a children’s counting book, reflects the whimsical world of her imagination and her love of the natural world. Perched on her drawing table is a stuffed toy frog named Vivaldi and a giraffe dubbed Gerald, after Gerald Durrell, the British naturalist. 

An artist feels compelled to create, says Plume, and she provides this story as an explanation: “After Michelangelo’s death, someone found a piece of paper on which he had written, in the shaky handwriting of old age, a note to his apprentice. ‘Draw, Antonio, draw Antonio, draw and do not waste time’.”

“Beyond Labels: Illustration, Fine Art, or Both?” runs from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., Tuesdays through Fridays through November 4 at the Gallery at Trinity Episcopal Church, 81 Elm Street.