Richard Scarry (1919-94)
I love
Richard Scarry's books. I have all my life. One of the perks of being an aunt has been getting back in touch with Scarry's art, and seeing how much it tickled the kids. Of course, late in life, and posthumously, Scarry has become a huge "thing," thanks to the Nickelodeon BusyTown animated series. I'm strictly a Scarry print fan-- and thanks to my bro's and sister-in-law's TV policy, so are Evan and Fiona.
What i think I love most about Scarry, who was mind-bogglingly prolific (300+ books), was the exuberance and whimsicality of his imagination, and how he was always sneakily (and not-so-sneakily) bringing elements of chaos into his own BusyTown. BusyTown itself was incredibly detailed, with immaculately precise renderings of oddly European half-timber architecture (he lived part of his life in Switzerland), and Scarry seemed to take pleasure in setting up an orderly environment, and gleefully subverting it. BusyTown was populated by an impossible mix of lovingly depicted cats, rabbits, pigs, foxes, bears and hippos, living amicably, if not quietly. All his structures eventually seemed like the framework for his imagination to go wild, drawing plethorae of his wide-eyed anthropomorphic animals in motion in all manner of crazy, fanciful vehicles (e.g. the immortal pickle car), almost inevitably leading to a monstrous pileup of cars, trucks, helicopters, biplanes, pickle, apple and banana cars, with rivers of spilled watermelons, surrounded by frantic bunnies and pigs, and presided over by the harassed Officer Flossie-- and of course, nobody was ever hurt.
