Diane Stanley

I grew up in a family of adventurous, creative, gifted women who, with the single exception of my mother (who published three books, including a children's biography, The Last Princess, which I illustrated) never thought of using their talents professionally.

I didn't think about a career either, until that heart-stopping moment when I realized I was about to graduate from college with an interdepartmental major in the social sciences and no clear way to support myself. How I reached my senior year without giving this matter any thought is a wonder. I could blame it on growing up in the 40's, 50's and early 60's, when women weren't encouraged to have careers. Or maybe I just had my nose in a book the whole time. I will say this for my college experience: it was not clouded by pre-professionalism. I learned for the joy of learning.

By the last semester of my senior year in college, I had completed all my requirements for graduation. I flipped through the catalog in search of some interesting electives. I had always wanted to take an art class. Life drawing sounded fun, so I signed up. The class turned out to be much more than just fun; it was thrilling, engaging, life-changing. Standing at the easel, charcoal flying across the cheap paper of my newsprint pad, I entered a state of perfect, intense, joyful concentration. Time went away. After three hours, I was surprised that the class was over.

A week before graduation, my professor called me into his office. He said he wanted me to know that despite the fact that I was the only one in the class who wasn't an art major, he was giving me the only A. He said I had talent. It was a turning point.

And so began my circuitous route to work in children's books. I went back to school and took pre-med courses and more art (design and lots more life drawing) and applied to the Johns Hopkins Medical Illustration program. Two years later I had a master's degree and an honest-to-God profession, which shortly thereafter I heartlessly abandoned.

I came to children's books through my daughters. Having been an avid reader all my life, I figured that what you did with children was, you read to them. I started visiting the library every week and bringing home stacks of children's books. And the more I studied them, the more I was dazzled by the variety of topics that could be explored through words and pictures, by the power they held to delight and inform and enrich their readers. For the first time in my life I knew what I wanted to do. I put together a portfolio, took it to an editor at Little, Brown, and got my first contract. That was thirty happy years and fifty books ago.

Perhaps the most striking aspect of my work is its variety. I write and illustrate, do picture books and novels, fiction and nonfiction. I chose this course consciously, though it probably has hurt my career, due to lack of “branding.” But I wanted to stay fresh and excited by my work, and not grow bored by repetition. I have followed my own interests, especially history, never quite knowing where each project would take me and what would come next.

Even the media I've used and the style of my art has varied from book to book. I have worked in pencil, colored pencil, pen and ink, ink resist, pointillist dots, watercolor, gouache, pastels, acrylic, egg tempera, and many combinations of the above. For inspiration, I have channeled nineteenth century engravers, Persian miniature painters, pre-Renaissance egg tempera artists, and monks in the scriptorium.

Related Exhibitions: Journeys - Diane Stanley (1998)