Everyone Knows What a Dragon Looks Like
Four Winds, 1976
After reading dozens of picture books, I was beginning to feel my eyes dulling to a range of illustration styles. There is the brightly colored, folk-vernacular approach, and then there is the dreamy, evocative vision, and then there is the fine detail and brilliance of watercolors. After this steady diet, Mercer Mayer's illustrations came like a surprise feast.
With ink pen and colors, Mayer captures in an uncanny way the sensitive line and signature conventions of Chinese landscape painting. To that he adds, peasants, officials, and warriors who are a fresh mixture of Chinese figure painting with their medieval cousins like elves and trolls and knights (think Tolkien) with a dash of visual wittiness a la Maurice Sendak. Such mixing can be tricky, but apart from the glowing dragon in the sky, I was happily seduced into Mayer's visual world. The art historian in me smiled a knowing smile at Mayer's visual reference to the masterful knickknack peddler paintings by Song-dynasty painter Li Song.
Mayer's knotty, gnarled pine trees set against rocky cliffs create the seemingly timeless setting for a pre-modern Chinese city where Jay Williams' tale unfolds. The city has reason to expect an imminent attack, and among several strategies, the city's Mandarin determines to pray to the Great Cloud Dragon for aid. Then a fat, bald, old man (think the auspicious Buddhist character, Budai) appears claiming to be the Great Cloud Dragon. The powers that be predictably dismiss him, but the young gate-keeper Han motivated more by humanity than belief offers hospitality. Han's virtue saves the city, reminding us to keep our eyes and our hearts open to magic, miracles, and all that good stuff that can be appear in the wrappings of the everyday.
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