Mordicai Gerstein

My life has always been full of pictures, but I never dreamed I’d be an author.

The first place I remember is a green basement apartment in East Los Angeles.
The living room walls were hung with pictures that my mother cut from Life magazine. There were pictures of trees that I later learned were by a man named Cézanne, and a picture of some masked musicians by a man named Picasso.  I used to lie on the floor and look at a scrapbook my mother had made, also full of pictures from Life. A favorite was of an old man leaning over the edge of the cloud he knelt on, hair and beard floating in the wind.  My mother told me this was God measuring the world, and was by a man named Blake.  Then there were the pictures in a book from the library about a place called Mulberry Street, by a Doctor named Seuss.  I looked at Rembrandt and Superman, Matisse and Bugs Bunny, and began to make my own pictures.  Over sixty years later I am still making them.

 

As a child, the pictures I most liked to make illustrated how certain songs and music made me feel, and the things I saw when I heard them.  But I also did portraits of my family; and war pictures, in which I drew buildings, airplanes, and soldiers and then blew them up with scribbled explosions; and all kinds of comic books.  I also loved storybooks, tales of adventure and magic, and books that were funny.  I did drawings for all of them.  After high school, I went to Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles. I wanted to be a painter, but I still enjoyed illustrating stories and poems, and when I took a class in animated cartoons, I loved that, too.  I got a job in an animated cartoon studio that sent me to New York, where I designed characters and thought up ideas for TV commercials. It was mostly fun, and supported my new family, and I could still paint pictures at night and on weekends. And I loved New York with all its galleries and museums.  When a writer named Elizabeth Levy asked me to illustrate a humorous mystery story about two girls and a dog, I found that was really fun.  We made more books together, and I began wanting to make some on my own, so I started to write. At first I could only write stories one page long, which I put on my wall like drawings.  Over time the stories got longer, one led to another, and even if they were serious, they had to be funny, too.  After working at writing for about ten years, I wrote a story about a boy who was raised as a duck.  The story became a book and I became an author as well as an illustrator. I think every drawing I ever saw can be found somewhere in one of my illustrations; and every book I ever read, along with all the people I’ve known, and all the things I’ve done, or wished I’d done, can be found somewhere in one of my stories.

My stories still surprise me, and I like my pictures to surprise me, too.  I’m still surprised to be an author. I wonder what I’ll write next?

 

Mordicai Gerstein was born in Los Angeles in 1935 and currently lives in western Massachusetts. He is the author and illustrator of more than 30 books for children and received the Caldecott Medal for The Man Who Walked Between the Towers.