H is for Harold

This week's entry for AlphaBooks is a fellow who inspired continual torments of envy when I first encountered him as a child. Harold's purple crayon enables him to create whatever he can imagine, & he inhabits his drawings as real environments. I longed fiercely for this magical ability when I was little (& still feel residual pangs now & then, to be honest!) but I've since come to understand that in a sense, all artists live at least part of their lives in the imaginary worlds they create. I'm sure that's one of the reasons we do what we do!

I still love Crockett Johnson's Harold and the Purple Crayon. It is a perfect, simple, brilliant little gem of a book. The art is so pure that it made me a little sick to interpret Harold in my own style, much like the way I felt when Hergé's ligne claire was mangled into 3-D/motion-capture for the recent Tintin movie... (shudder)... 

So Harold, I owe you two heartfelt apologies. For my endless daydreams of getting hold of your magic crayon when I was little, & for messing with your gorgeous clean lines today. Please forgive me!

Acrylic on text scanned from Harold & an ad for Milton Bradley crayons scanned from Primary Education magazine, January 1923, ~6"x3.3"

Oh yes, about the "H"s-- this one is rather like those brain-teasers where you have to find all the overlapping squares in a geometric drawing. You have to imagine some lines out of the way. And in this case, imagine one line segment in. ;-) (Confession-- even I didn't bother to count them!)