CHRIS RASCHKA

Any teacher in the arts and sciences has to maintain a sense of childlikeness to be truly inventive.

Can you really learn to knit from a diagram? Try it. Do you want to learn to ski or surf by yourself? You could drown or run into a tree.

I never quite know if what I do will be understood.

It will always take a certain audacity to write or to make art of any kind.

Openness is something any teacher strives to instill in his or her students.

Sometimes I worry about the amount of paper I waste.

The Caldecott Award has allowed me to keep doing what I'm doing for some time longer, for which I am ever grateful.

There has to be the right pacing of images to tell the story. I'm always stunned at how little you can put in.

With any book, I try to find where the manner of the making of the book is appropriate to the matter of the subject.

For a long time, I was brilliantly achieving drawings that were inert, suffocating and dark. If ever you need illustrations that are inert, suffocating and dark, I know how to do them.

For the continued survival of our planet and humanity, it is crucial that certain discoveries and skills and inventions made by people over the years be passed on from one human generation to the next, from one person, face-to-face, to another.

Hand any four-year-old a fist full of crayons, and it is a very, very few who don't get busy with them, drawing, coloring, scribbling. I have not stopped scribbling.

I want each and every entire brushstroke to be seen. I want the marks made by the tip of the brush to carry as much meaning as the marks made by the dragging tail end, the part that splits open as the paint pulls away, thins and dries.

I wasn't always minimal. In the early days, I was laying it on as thickly as I could, trying very hard to get it right. But I found that the harder I tried, the more tired whatever it was I was working on looked. And then I grew tired of it as well.

If it's just brushstrokes wrestling around, it isn't much of a picture book, is it? There still has to be a picture. And maybe it needs to be a picture of a dog named Daisy or a little girl riding a bike. So I have to be careful before I get too carried away in the manner itself.

If you labor heavily upon a work of art, then part of what you are saying is, 'This is a heavy work of art.' If you happen to be trying to say something about lightness, then the art should be light as well.

Part of why I like watercolor is that mistakes are visible, and you can't really repair much. It has to look easy. When it comes out, it looks easy, but to get to that point takes a lot of doing.

Somewhere in this process, I begin reading and showing my book to my audience. When I say my audience, I mean a single imaginary child who is a blend of myself as a young person, the students in my wife's classroom of first- through third-graders, and the students from two classrooms I visit regularly in the Bronx, New York.

To learn to ride a bicycle, as with the other great noble human inventions, is a hugely complex activity. Generally, it requires three things: the learner, the teacher and the bicycle, all in the same place at the same time, most often outside someplace.

Usually, a number of events will be going on around me to start me on a book. What I mean is, I will have read a poem or seen a picture that is lingering in my mind.

Whatever I'm thinking about has got to fit into thirty-two pages, the standard picture book size. So that's something. But the structure and the form for me are almost the most important, because these will express as much as words and images will the content of the work.

When I present the Charlie Parker book, I do a call and response that works quite well. With the Thelonious Monk book, I play the music and work with kids in a group to create a color wheel and show how the wheel can be mapped on a 12-tone chromatic scale.

Whether it's music, loss of something, loneliness or friendship - if that emotion is heightened in some way and painted to fit in between the covers of 32 pages, that can become a picture book.

I always try to treat the book itself as the artwork. I don't want you to stop while you're reading one of my books and say, 'Oh! What a gorgeous illustration!' I want you to stop at the end of the book and say, 'This is a good book.

My goal is to create a book where the entire book-text, pictures, shape of book-work together to create the theme. The placement of images and text on the page is crucial for me.