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the July/August 2009 issue of The Horn Book Magazine Beth Krommes
That conversation led to Beth illustrating her first picture book, Grandmother Winter, by Phyllis Root. It also marked the beginning of our relationship and friendship. Four books and many good conversations later, I find myself more in awe than ever of Beth’s craft. There’s no denying the rare beauty of her accomplished scratchboard illustrations. But I continue to see more than beauty in her work. Beauty may draw us in, but it doesn’t hold us. Beth creates alluring, comforting worlds, sure, but also worlds that feel unfamiliar, at least to me. Brave new worlds from which, we sense, we may not return entirely unchanged. There is a sweet utopian quality to her work, yet also a freeing and mysterious one. Perhaps a look at Beth’s books can best reveal this tension in her work. In The Lamp, the Ice, and the Boat Called Fish by Jacqueline Briggs Martin, Beth illustrates a secure world filled with cozy domestic details of sewing boots and cooking around stoves — but also one where the children’s home floats on shifting ice and where at night they listen to the eerie sound of the ice cracking around them. In The Hidden Folk by Lise Lunge-Larsen, Beth brings to light benevolent creatures who live in and protect flowers — but also dangerous ones with dark holes in their backs who offer poison in golden cups. And in Butterfly Eyes and Other Secrets of the Meadow by Joyce Sidman, about the seemingly benign and familiar world of the meadow, she precisely observes a hawk that talks to its prey — before eating it. Her art invites, welcomes, says please come in, but also warns: You may be a little surprised by what you find here. Her art for The House in the Night by Susan Marie Swanson asks us to make room for paradoxes, too. This spare manuscript — which began as a poem written for an exhibit with the theme of “home sweet home” for a nonprofit housing organization in the Twin Cities — offered great freedom and challenge for Beth, for she needed to construct the entire story line. Susan Marie wisely and graciously gave the artist free rein, and as Beth scratched away the dark on her black ink surfaces, she began to create a universe with pattern and order but also one that introduces the very young to seeming contradictions. Here is a universe where the sun is in the moon, where the child is both reading about and riding on the bird in the book, where the home at night, after all lights have gone off, is dark yet filled with light. This book reveals, as the Kirkus reviewer said, “that light and dark, like comfort and mystery, are not mutually exclusive, but integral parts of each other,” and in doing so, it leaves the reader’s world a little larger. I happily concede that this is just one of many interpretations of this book. We have by now heard several fine ones, which I take as a healthy sign, for don’t the best books invite us into worlds that we partly create? Born in Emmaus, Pennsylvania, Beth now lives in a charming small town in southern New Hampshire with her husband, Dave, and her two girls, Olivia (16) and Marguerite (13), who remain her most trusted critics. Beth is a perfectionist and demands more of herself than perhaps any artist I know. At times it was a great relief to ask: “Well, what does Marguerite think? She likes it, doesn’t she? She says it’s wonderful, right?” Beth’s family provides the sort of vital support and encouragement that is far beyond an editor’s ability or reach. Beth’s scratchboard technique is one of the most time-consuming and exacting of mediums (each book takes a year to complete), and the world of publishing is not always a nurturing one. Her family believes in her talents; they keep her going; and for that I am most thankful. For most of our working relationship, Beth had only one car (her husband walked to work) and no cell phone. Until quite recently, she had no e-mail, a choice I both envy and admire. Though I’ve never visited Beth’s house, I imagine it tall, like the New Hampshire pines that surround it, with a turret-like studio — because many times when we’re talking on the phone, she’ll say, “Wait a second, I have to run down five flights to get something.” I also imagine it a home filled not only with art (including Beth’s own beautiful casein meadow paintings) but with music, since her husband and girls play the violin and clarinet and French horn. And with dancing, since both of her girls dance. And probably with discussions of nature, since they live in rural New Hampshire, after all, and since Beth’s husband has a Ph.D. in zoology, which I know because he was able to tell us about the eating habits of that red-tailed hawk in Butterfly Eyes. I also like to think of her home displaying beautiful fabrics and textiles, since Beth is inspired by textiles, from the bold Finnish textiles of Marimekko to the intricate medieval tapestries at the Cloisters in New York City, which she likes to visit with her girls. And on that bright January morning, I like to imagine Beth in her tall house by the tall pines close to her family when she received the news. I like to think that she did not have to run up and down too many flights of stairs to answer the many other phone calls she received, though I suspect she did. I only know two things for certain: first, that her line was too busy for me to
From the July/August 2009 issue of The Horn Book Magazine |
everal years ago I was in a bookstore in Duluth, Minnesota, and the art on the cover of Cricket magazine caught my eye. It was of an Inuit woman — rounded, strong, striking — and though it reminded me of traditional Inuit soapstone carvings, it also felt wholly unique. Luckily, the inside cover of the magazine gave me the information I needed: Beth Krommes, Peterborough, New Hampshire. Not long afterwards, I heard a woman answer her phone: “Hello, this is Beth.”
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