Following the Path
By Becky Rodia, Senior Editor

Diane tells us the story behind one of the paintings in her book, Leonardo da Vinci (HarperTrophy, 2000). It turns out Diane's husband is the basis for both men in the picture - Leonardo, and the cadaver on the table! "He doesn't actually look that old!" Diane laughed.

When author and illustrator Diane Stanley was a little girl, she used to dream about co-authoring books with her mother, Fay. That dream was rooted in an exciting reality: Fay was, in fact, an author. Her first book, Murder Leaves a Ring, was published in 1950, making an indelible impression on young Diane. "I could hardly believe that my ordinary-seeming mother got paid to write books," she recalled.

Despite having a mother who wrote whodunits, it was a long time before Diane gave much thought to making a career out of writing and illustrating children's books. Her college major was the social sciences, and it wasn't until she opted for a figure-drawing class in her senior year that her path began to take shape.

Medical matters. Diane likened her first day in drawing class to getting on a bicycle for the first time, and knowing how to ride it immediately. At the end of the term, the instructor told her, "You're the only non-art major in the class, and I'm giving you the only 'A' in the class."

Diane took her newly-recognized talent to graduate school at Johns Hopkins, where she studied to be a medical illustrator, a course of study that required her to dissect a human cadaver. She wrote her masters thesis about the anatomy of a tiny species of monkey – a creature so small that she had to dissect its hand under a microscope.

Head-work and heart-work. It was then that Diane's path changed yet again. "After having done all that work in graduate school," she told us, "I decided to do something else – get married and have children." As Diane was raising her children, she went to the library to check out book after book for them. Diane's increasing love for the colorful books she read to her children opened up a new possibility for what to do with her life and her art.

"The decision to be a medical illustrator was made with my head," Diane said. "The decision to become a children's author was made with my heart."

She received her first assignment, illustrations for a new edition of The Farmer in the Dell, in 1977. Since then, Diane has published more than 40 books, all of which contain equal measures of head-work and heart-work – the research and precision of the medical illustrator with the enthusiasm and creativity of the young mother who loved books.

Lives in words and pictures. Diane has written novels (A Time Apart [HarperCollins, 1999], The Mysterious Matter of I.M. Fine [HarperCollins, 2001]) and picture books (including the "Time-Traveling Twins" series, published by HarperCollins) but it could be said that the works for which she's best known are her biographies and fairy-tale retellings in picture-book format.

Diane, who has been called the "consummate picture-book biographer," says the biographies are a way of satisfying her instinct "to write longer books at a more advanced level" while exercising her talent as an artist. She also uses artwork to emphasize the culture of the person being profiled in the book – you'll find mosaic page borders in Leonardo da Vinci (HarperTrophy, 2000) and, in Cleopatra (HarperTrophy, 1997), the legendary queen wears Greek clothing (she was actually Greek, not Egyptian).

"What's probably not obvious is how much research goes into the artwork," Diane said. She showed us a page from Shaka: King of the Zulus (Morrow, 1989), on which the artwork featured such cultural clues as a page border painted to look like African beadwork, and a depiction of Shaka's mother wearing a straw belt that signifies she has had a child.

Diane's books include a number of picture-book biographies and fairy-tale retellings, such as Bard of Avon, the story of Shakespeare's life, and Goldie and the Three Bears, a retelling in which the golden-haired girl makes a furry new friend.

Flights of fancy. Diane's retellings of fairy tales also feature intricately-detailed artwork, but with a whimsical twist. If you look closely at the pages of Rumplestiltskin's Daughter (William Morrow, 1997), you'll find that the vain king dresses his little dog in outfits that match his own, and that the walls of the palace are hung with portraits of the king, rendered in the styles of da Vinci, Picasso and other famous artists.

There's plenty of whimsy in the stories as well, especially since Diane's reason for writing a retelling of a fairy tale is usually dissatisfaction with some aspect of the original story. In the case of "Goldilocks and the Three Bears," it always bothered Diane that Goldilocks simply ran out of the bears' house at the story's end.

"It's not a very interesting ending," Diane said. "It's not a natural outgrowth of what's come before. Goldilocks ends up being kind of a villain, doesn't she?"

So Diane wrote and illustrated her own version, Goldie and the Three Bears (HarperCollins, 2003), in which Goldie is looking for a little more than a just-right bed and a bowl of porridge – she's looking for the perfect friend. When she stumbles upon the bears' cottage, she does give their beds a try, and munches on their sandwiches, too. But the end of the story gets a new twist when Goldie ends up jumping on the bed with the littlest bear – her new best friend.

We met with Diane at Marta Valle School in New York, NY, where she spoke about her work to 50 students. It was the first program ever presented in Marta Valle School's brand-new library. Principal Matt Angrisani (left) introduced Diane to the students.

What's next. Diane's next book, The Giant and the Beanstalk (HarperCollins, 2004), features the giant coming down the beanstalk to look for that runaway rascal, Jack. He keeps finding all the wrong Jacks, however: Little Jack Horner, Jack Spratt, Jack and Jill and other Jacks of fairy tale and nursery rhyme fame.

"I put in every Jack I could find," Diane laughed. "I forgot to put in an illustration of kids playing jacks, though. That would have been a fun visual cue."

Her next picture-book biography will be about Austrian composer Mozart. "I'll be back in the Western canon once again," she commented. "I'd like to write about someone from Asia, but the right idea hasn't come to me yet."

We're sure it will come to her eventually. Ever since getting on that "bicycle" in her college drawing class, Diane Stanley's changing path has never steered her wrong.

May 2004, Vol.34, No.8