The Catskill Chronicle

Story and photos by Carol Montana

GRAHAMSVILLE, NY (August 14, 2011) – When Daniel Pierce Library Director, Joann Gallagher first asked Helena Clare Pittman to design and paint a mural for the children’s room, Pittman’s response was, “No Joann, I can’t do that … no, no, no …”

“I knew it was an enormous project,” says Pittman, “and I knew how many people had donated to the library, and I knew I couldn’t do it for donated time.”

That’s because Pittman makes her living as a painter and also as a prolific children’s author of “The Snowman’s Path,” “Crow Flies,” “A Dinosaur for Gerald,” “The Angel Tree,” “A Grain of Rice” and 12 more books, plus many stories and illustrations for Cricket Magazine. She also illustrated most of her books and is currently at work on her first novel.

After moving to Sullivan County approximately 14 years ago, Pittman began utilizing the Daniel Pierce Library for research, and to get away from the distractions of her home to concentrate on her writing.

At the library she became close with Gallagher who, in turn, has invited the artist to become an integral part of the library’s resources including workshops for children and adults.

So, while taking Pittman on a private tour of the still-under-construction new addition to the library in the early spring of 2010, Gallagher knew exactly who she wanted to paint the children’s room mural.

As Pittman vehemently responded in the negative, Gallagher, just as vehemently insisted. “But we want you. …Yes, darling we do, there is nobody else we want to ask. …”

And that’s when the magic started to happen. In spite of her protestations, Pittman turned to look up at the space, “and I just suddenly saw what I could do with it. I was hooked, I was gone.”

So the pair negotiated over the next several weeks. “I started daydreaming about it,” says Pittman, “and I started visualizing it when I was driving to Long Island where I teach.”

Through the years, Pittman and Gallagher have become creatively in-sync. “She has facilitated some very ambitious programs that I’ve done here – like building kites and puppets from scratch,” says Pittman, who thinks of Gallagher as her muse.

So, it was inevitable then, that Pittman accepted the project. She began to make thumbnail sketches, essentially like designing a book, which she has done so many times before.

“I wanted to do it in oil because it’s very luminous,” says Pittman. “I love oil. I realized I was putting together my painting skills that are based on direct observation and response to light to shadow to tone to color, and my children’s illustration skills.”

The mural is filled with sudden changes of colors. Pittman says that’s one of the things that thrills her. “If you look at my books, every page changes from warm to cool to night colors, there’s always that change.”

And, as the ideas coalesced in her mind, she knew the mural was going to be historical – early book characters to current. “But what I really saw,” says the artist, “was the opportunity to make a frieze of figures, which is something I love to do, figures coming into motion and beginning to dance. And at first I had the idea of children imagining it, but because of design constraints and also because I got the concept of the characters coming out of the books rather than living in the imaginations of children, the characters had a life of their own. And that came as part of the process of thumbnail drawings.”

Between the time limits, (Gallagher originally asked for delivery by September 2010), and the typical problem associated with the beginning of a big project, Pittman says she “couldn’t get started.” She coined the term “creative terror,” which she describes as being akin to performance anxiety. “You try to do something with your sequential thought that you can’t do until you’ve done it.”

So Pittman kept trying to get more specific with the thumbnail drawings and blaming herself for “malingering. Now I totally understand why I couldn’t get specific: because the characters had yet to define themselves. So I just started doing anonymous figures in motion and even lines of rhythms. By that time I knew I wanted characters coming out of the books, the sky changing from dawn to mid-day to night, and everybody getting back into the books.”

To help herself in getting over the creative terror, the artist hired her son, Galen Pittman, a brilliant musician and artist in his own right.

“He doesn’t go through this creative terror. He’s a deep, profound painter. We have a good creative, collegial communion. We teach together, we feed off each other.”

And that proved to be a turning point, as Galen not only loved her concept, but helped her with the research. “He was very affirming and he did a lot of footwork. I gave him character lists, which Joann and I brainstormed.”

Gallagher had solicited area librarians about which characters from which children’s books should go into the mural. After the list was compiled, Pittman gave it to her son, who in turn got the images. “I needed references; I wanted children to be able to recognize these characters.”

Pittman says the research was the most daunting part of the project. She had started out by going to the library and pulling books off the shelf, but that proved exhausting. So then she started checking books out of the library. “My studio was cluttered,” says Pittman.

Into this studio filled with paints, easels and canvasses, and well-over 60 children’s books, came Galen, who would travel to Sullivan County from his home on Long Island, where he teaches, along with his mother, at Haven Art in Port Washington.

The two artists began to feed off each other. “We’re both very good figure drawers, we teach that class together,” Pittman says. “We started to do this pattern thing of these figures in the books. I said, ‘Galen, those are so gorgeous, I can’t believe what you’re doing.’ And he would say, ‘But look at what you’re doing.’ He was pulling out illustrations and animating these figures and doing such funny things. …” Pittman points out the figure of Mike Mulligan that became Phil Coombe, who was the major mover and shaker when it came to building the library addition.

“That’s Galen’s animation, very creative, very mobile and fluid, very ambulatory. Galen is very fluid,” says the proud mother.

But rarely is any artistic collaboration without a crisis of some kind. And this project was no exception. “Galen thought we could do this in three weeks,” says Pittman. “We came to a real existential crisis between us.” So Pittman explained to her son, that this wasn’t just a commercial project for her. “I said, ‘This is something for the community I live in. This is a life’s work. This is something I want to give to the children, to the community.’”

Pittman reports that the crisis took a few weeks to iron out and “It was very hard.”

What was also difficult was finding the time for the pair to work together because Galen had his own commitments.

“When he came back up the second time, I believe it was August 2010,” says Pittman, “we had all the research. I had now categorized it in folders, alphabetically, of who we wanted to get in there. Oddly enough, I thought there would be endless room, but there wasn’t. We didn’t get everybody in.”

Pittman knew the mural was going to be done on panels. She knew she needed to do it in manageable pieces that would fit together and had started off working at the library. But the artist soon realized she had too much equipment at home, her research, her paints, her brushes …

So Gallagher – who Pittman says is a whiz at math – quickly figured out how many panels it would take to fill the space, and the carpenters went to work cutting, sanding and delivering birch-faced plywood panels that measured roughly 3-feet- by-2-feet to Pittman’s home.

As an artist, Pittman doesn’t think sequentially. “I think much more convergently; I see everything at once. But I do have this process; I can break everything down into segments from book publishing.”

The next step was to make a template for each of the panels – essentially a piece of paper the same size as the panel. “You do a thing like this in baby steps,” says Pittman. “Yeah, I can do this; I can do that … I can see it now … It’s a many-layered process of tuning and refining.”

And speaking of refining, choosing which characters to include in the mural was not easy. How did Pittman decide who to include and who to leave out? “I didn’t – that’s the thing, that created terror,” says Pittman laughing. “It was like a gut thing. ‘Yeah, that’s who has to be there … I don’t know who’s going to be there … grab some books … yeah, that works.’ And then those two characters would start interacting, like Eloise and Wimpy Kid, and Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys, or Charlotte and the slave Jim from Huckleberry Finn.”

Pittman explains that her son was against using the latter character. “Galen didn’t want anything that might be construed as racist. But I read about the character and found out that Jim is a ‘wisdom figure’ and I said, ‘He’s going in.’”

The artist explains that “The creative process is such a deep place to go to once it’s in full swing, once it’s in momentum. You’re in another world, and the things that occur to you … I mean the imagination and the creative force in the universe – are like – where does one stop and the other begin? I don’t think there’s a boundary.”

After making the templates, the mother-son duo spent another weekend drawing the characters. Pittman says she would have skipped this step if not for Galen. And, unfortunately, that was the beginning of a creative crisis between them. The son works quite differently from the mother. “Galen can work for hours,” says Pittman, “He has this stamina that I don’t know I ever had when I was young.” Galen would be in the studio, on his feet, drawing for hours, while “I would breeze in, draw for half-hour, breeze out, do laundry, cook lunch … this is how I work.” And “the way I see things is arranged very differently inside me than the way Galen sees things.” So to prevent future frustrations, Pittman started bringing some of the work to Long Island, so the two artists wouldn’t get in each other’s way.

While Galen was doing the drawings, Pittman was working on sample panels, starting with acrylic paint. She began painting figures coming out of the books and lots of sky colors, morning, noon and night. …”

At one point, Pittman realized that she still had lots of questions about the light and the narrative. “If some characters are coming out of books here, is it going to be those characters who are dancing?” She soon came to the realization that the timeline she had originally imagined wasn’t going to work.

Turning to the work of N.C. Wyeth – an illustrator she very much admirers – Pittman realized that “the lighting has to be consistent with the painting. It can’t be realistic lighting.”

Adding to the pressure was a looming presentation for a meeting at the library, which was trying to find a sponsor for the mural. But the presentation inspired Pittman. “The stuff I brought in filled the room with color. It was thrilling.”

At that point, the library was due to open in October 2010. And Pittman was feeling the pressure. “Every time Joann and I spoke, I would think ‘how am I going to tell Joann I can’t do this in time.’ So I kept saying ‘I don’t know, Joann, I can’t rush this thing.’ And she would say ‘I don’t want you to rush it, I don’t want you to compromise it.’

As it became obvious to all involved that the library was not going to open by the original deadline, another crisis hit in the form of serious illnesses among the principals.

Gallagher, Coombe and Pittman all became ill. Pittman lost over five weeks of work as she recovered from pneumonia. And she also missed her muse. “I couldn’t talk to Joann, so I internalized her, she was like my editor. I didn’t talk to her for two-and-a-half months. When we finally spoke, we realized that it might not be done in time for the opening (now scheduled for June 2011). It was more in the course of conversation, catching up. It was never a confrontation. The work was always the most important to her and to me, too. But I honestly never thought I’d get it done for June.”

Slowly but surely, Pittman got back to work. “If you think you can’t work more, just work under deadline, because time telescopes. I didn’t take breaks. I would sit in there for hours and forget to eat. The whole day would pass. There’s a wonderful organic pressure that comes in, and it’s really your own desire. It’s your own love of the work. I found more time – time opened. I worked late into the night, and there were times during the winter when I worked during the night when I couldn’t sleep.”

Pittman reported different experiences as the work progressed: “ … walking around with it on my shoulders, and then painting and being totally engrossed. ‘Wow, look what’s happening between these two figures.” It was incredible what was being born here.’”

She reports being okay as long as she was painting. But as soon as she stopped, she had to remind herself, “Just get in there Helena and do your best. One stroke at a time, one figure at a time.”

By mid-winter she thought she’d never finish it at the rate she was going. “Every time I thought I was done, I was really only done with one layer, because then it had to be refined.”

Eventually, as with many creative things, the mural took on a life of its own. “I think the turning point was the momentum, it was the life of the mural itself, and my desire. I realized I didn’t want to open the library with 10 panels or 9, without that closing impact of the night sky,” says Pittman.

And an additional pressure was put on the artist. She was to be guest speaker at a meeting of area librarians, which had been scheduled even before the mural’s conception. She had been slated to speak about her upcoming book. “I could not imagine speaking to the librarians without the whole thing. I was just painting, painting, painting my hands off,” says Pittman. “And doing all these tricks to facilitate. So I called and I said ‘Tell Joann that I’m ready to start delivering the panels.’”

And so she did. Nine down, three to go. “I started brainstorming, thinking how to simplify these images,” says Pittman. “It’s very hard for me to be simple. I love the congestion, and it’s very hard for me to sacrifice it, but now time forced me. And the mural really needed it. The mural needed a real winding down to end.”

Pittman came up with the idea of ending the mural with the “cow jumping over the moon,” a process she knew would take “like 8 hours to paint. And then I thought of the stars. What a solution! And the turtle (from the Turtle and the Hare fable) kept coming up. I couldn’t let the turtle go back into the books. … You never see the turtle come out, but he appears pretty early, probably panel three along with the hare … and in panel 10, the turtle keeps going on while the hare is resting between two books.”

And with three weeks to go before the librarians’ meeting, her heart finally lightened and she started working on the remaining panels at the same time. “There was so much I had to figure out while I was working. … There were times when I would just have to tell myself ‘Get in there, just get in there and paint one figure.’ I’d tell myself in the morning “block in five figures, block in three figures. Finish so and so, develop The Snowman. That was how I did it.”

She did it, indeed. The mural was done and she knew it was finished, “But I did two or three brush strokes beyond when I knew it was done, but that’s always the case.”

Pittman reports that upon completion her heart was so light.” There it is; there are those constellations. The stars worked, and I knew anymore stars and it would lose the magic, so I think I did three extras and I stopped and said, ‘Oh, I’m done.’ It was a kind of shock and euphoria.”

When she delivered the last three panels on Friday, June 3, 2011, Pittman reports that she was “very high because of the response. People were knocked over. … The circumstances for people seeing art have to be right. People responded to this because they could recognize characters and that brought them. People respond to Van Gogh and Monet because they recognize them … it’s their Monet, and their Van Gogh and it’s their Harry Potter. It’s really only a very, very, very few who see without all that stuff. And I have to tell you that I think Joann is one of those people and that is the wonder of all this.”

The following Monday at the librarians’ meeting, Pittman says “One of the librarians asked ‘when did you finish it?’ and I said ‘last week’ and they laughed. But I wished I would have said ‘Friday.’ That would have been really funny.”

Look closely and you’ll see that Pittman signed her name on a book in every panel. “And on the last panel, I signed it with the date,” she says.

Look more closely and you will see characters from Pittman’s own books. “I needed things in the sky, below and climbing up the books,” she says. So there’s Crow from “Crow Flies,” Daniel from “Once When I Was Scared,” and the Nightbird from “Martha and the Nightbird,” along with Peter Rabbit, Jiminy Cricket, Harry Potter, the Cheshire Cat, Babar, Stuart Little, Tigger and Pooh, The Velveteen Rabbit, Madeline, Peter Pan, Tinkerbell and many, many more characters beloved by children the world over.

At the grand opening of the new Daniel Pierce Library on June 12, 2011, one of the many things Phil Coombe mentioned in his speech thanking everyone was Pittman’s creation of the mural. “He was so pleased that I had made Mike Mulligan (of “Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel” by Virginia Lee Burton) a tribute to him.”

Coombe wasn’t the only one who was pleased.

Library Director Joann Gallagher has a few things to add about the artist as well. “When Helena walked through our doors … it was like an answer to a prayer, because she has so many gifts and talents that we could use here for the children and for all of the patrons, so that they could learn how to write, learn how to draw, and also her expertise with teaching, which we have used as well. And of course the crown is the mural. So we’re thrilled to have her be part of the library.”

It’s a feeling that both Pittman and Gallagher share.