Continuing our series of illustrator posts, today we feature Australian Gaye Chapman. Gaye is a well-respected painter with an international reputation, but beyond her painterly skills, she’s also had what she feels is the ideal life for a children’s book illustrator. Her bush childhood remains an inspiration. Childhood dreams of a life full of travel, art and adventure have been fulfilled. “I have sailed in an Indonesian fishing boat around the Arafura Sea, jumped out of airplanes, designed posters for the National Theatre in London, hitch-hiked through the Sumatra, motor-biked across Java, lived with a hill-tribe in Morocco and been artist-in-residence in a rainforest.”

Gaye uses ”any materials at all to make a picture, including real objects like mud, feathers and grass. I then cut out my finished paintings and paste them down again in new ways.” Her work has an Asian feel. She collaborates with serious writers getting across important ideas. In her first children’s book, Heart of the Tiger (2004) with Glenda Millard, a tiger sacrifices himself to bring green back to the earth. Breakfast with Buddha (2005), with Vashti Farrer, recounts the saga of a proudly independent cat who learns humility from monks in a temple. Kaito’s Cloth (2007), again with Glenda Millard, is a delicately rendered study of loss.

When I visited Ann James, illustrator of Ready Set Skip!, at Books Illustrated, she mentioned that there’s an Australia-wide shortage of book illustrators. To help address the problem, she’s recently taught two workshops on book illustration for aboriginal artists, sponsored by Magabala Books.

Becoming a children’s book illustrator isn’t always a direct path. Ann started out as an art teacher. Gaye Chapman, illustrator of Breakfast with Buddha, had been a graphic designer and professional painter for many years when her first children’s book, Heart of the Tiger, came out in 2004. Sally Rippin, illustrator of Becoming Buddha, started out writing and illustrating picture books, first published in 1996. Her novel, Chenxi and the Foreigner, begun while she was studying Chinese painting in China years earlier, was published in 2002, and an adult version is now in process. Sally teaches writing for children at Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, where Ann is now studying with an eye to writing children’s books in addition to illustrating them.

Ann James and her partner, Ann Haddon, long-time promotors of children’s book illustration as an art genre, also produced Making Pictures: Techniques for Illustrating Children’s Books. They have had an exhibition space for children’s book art at their studio/bookshop for years and have recently begun organizing traveling exhibitions of children’s book illustrations on multiple continents.

While these illustrious illustrators illustrate books, their stories illustrate the many paths that can lead to a career in children’s book illustration.

Not all spiritual books for kids are obviously so at first glance. Fiction may help children deal with spiritual questions even better when there is not direct spiritual content. A librarian friend offers three of her multicultural favorites for older kids. Crash, by Jerry Spinelli, documents the growing friendship between a Quaker boy and an agnostic jock. Samir and Yonatan by Daniella Carmi, is a Batchelder Award-winning memoir of a Palestinian childhood. In Iqbal, by Francesco D’Adamo, a fictionalized account of a Pakistani boy sold into slavery, children develop spirituality without any wholesome adult influence. (At PaperTigers, see a review of Susan Kuklin’s Iqbal Masih and the Crusaders Against Child Slavery, a non-fiction account of this tragic but inspiring story.)

Two recent Australian animal picture books are among the many endearing examples of spiritual books for young children. Breakfast with Buddha, by Vashti Farrer and Gaye Chapman, is a first-person account of an ego-filled cat’s encounter with Buddhist monks and his consequent lesson about humility. Samsara Dog, by Helen Manos, beautifully relates the story of a dog’s several lives as he develops the spiritual qualities that finally free him from the cycle of rebirth.

And a Buddhist nun friend from Taiwan highly recommends Kate Decamillo’s The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane. “I read it six times,” she said with a smile, “and cried every single time.”

The deep themes of human life are everywhere, for eyes that see. Non-didactic fiction gives children a way to explore large spiritual questions without being “spoon-fed” opinions and views.