Reviews for Breaking waves :Winslow Homer paints the sea (J/Book)
Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Emphasizing 19th-century American artist Winslow Homer’s life in Prouts Neck, Maine, this picture book explores Homer’s love of painting the ocean. Winslow Homer was a successful American artist in his lifetime, and when he was 47, he left New York City to move to a southern Maine peninsula jutting out into the Atlantic Ocean. Here, in his converted carriage house/studio, he spent his time observing the sea and painting its moods. Rather than a biography, this book presents a contemplation on the fascination Homer felt for the Atlantic and the rocky shore—the inspiration for his well-known seascapes. Interspersing Homer’s actual words with imagined daily activities, Burleigh’s text brings readers into the artist’s sensibility and creative process. The watercolor-and-gouache illustrations (a medium that Homer also employed) stay within Homer’s palette in their color choices and are rendered in a loose, sketchy style. Both the style and the palette choice are effective creative decisions, delivering to the story a cumulative ambiance of an artist at work indoors and out, sketching, planning, seeing, and trying. Limiting the storyline to Homer in Prouts Neck effectively encapsulates Homer’s fascination with painting the sea while underscoring his dedication to his art. Extensive backmatter gives further detail about Homer’s life and travels, taking care to note his paintings that include African Americans (subjects not usually included in 19th-century American fine art). Quite authentically Homer. (Informational picture book. 6-10) Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Horn Book
(c) Copyright The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
For each of these two biographical picture books of American icons, Burleigh and Minor (Night Train, Night Train, rev. 11/18; Tiny Bird, rev. 5/20; and others) focus on one signal achievement in their subject's career. For Winslow Homer, they imagine the artist in his Prouts Neck studio, painting the Maine coast just outside the window. The text here is more effusive than fact-bearing ("Elated, Winslow steps to the very rim of the rocks, once more feeling the force of wind and waves stir his soul: majestic, free, wild, untamed -- forever!") but does convey the power of artistic creation, while the gouache illustrations themselves re-create the wild waves and obdurate rocks in a way that evokes Homer without imitating him. Wilbur Wright gets a more straightforward accounting, in this case of his six-and-a-half-minute flight around the Statue of Liberty in 1909. Technical information is slight, but Burleigh successfully imparts the drama of the flight (for both the aviator and the crowd below) and its place in the history of aviation and the Wright brothers' accomplishments. And where Minor's paintings for the Winslow Homer book are all power and passion, here they look almost lighter than air, fine-lined and delicate; just right. Both books include extensive back matter about their subjects in general and these slices of their lives in particular. [Review covers these titles: Breaking Waves and Wilbur Wright Meets Lady Liberty.] (c) Copyright 2023. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
