This call invites participants of AFCC 2011 to send in existing illustrations which have appeared in children’s books, audio/video products, comics/graphic novels, games, or are standalone works. The festival will provide the space, the technical support and marketing/publicity, while the artists will bear the cost of resizing the illustrations, sending to and collecting from The Arts House. The BIG call ends on 31 March 2011. Participants of AFCC 2011 are invited to send soft copies of their illustrations to afccbig (at) gmail (dot) com for consideration. Please visit here for submission requirements.

My daughter and I recently had the opportunity to try the book and the CD out on our son’s brand new computer.  Using Windows media player which plays the music with accompanying graphics, we listened while flipping through the book.  The CD contains the poems read aloud followed by the musical pieces.  My daughter enjoyed anticipating which animal would come up next by looking at the pictures collected on the front page of the book and guessing through elimination which animal was next.  It was fun to see how image, text and music combined to create an overall effect or sense of the featured animals.  Sometimes, the poems were a reversal of the stereotypical image of an animal.  In “Tortoise” for example, poet Chernaik writes of a tortoise who “dreams of twirling on tabletops,/turning cartwheels,/kicking up her heels at the Carnival ball.”  My daughter disagreed with this picture, but I could see where the music might have inspired the poet’s notion of a tortoise as a dancer, say, in a slow but elegant waltz.  Here’s a video link to the poem and music: Carnival: Tortoise

Animals make wonderful inspiration for all kinds of art — music, poetry and drawing.  Carnival of the Animals is a great book for combining all these art forms to give a child a unique experience of text, image and sound.

This week’s Poetry Friday host is Wild Rose Reader.

All throughout the book as Alice recounts her life, she reflects occasionally on her love of dancing.  Only at the end of the book and the end of her life, does she suddenly come to an epiphany.  Looking on the ruins of her old farm house, she is overcome by a “wonderful feeling” that makes her suddenly exclaim, “Now I can dance!”  And as the book concludes, “And dance I do — all that I can.”

Music for Alice is an old woman’s meditation on the past.  Old age is its own frontier, and there are still things to learn and discover there.  Allen Say’s superb, nuanced illustrations evoke Alice’s life with clarity and depth.  I highly recommend his picture books which make wonderful reading for children and adults.