Sadness

I know that it has been months since I updated. I am going to be coming back to the blog world I promise, within the next few weeks. Today something happened though that broke my heart a bit. My very favorite artist, Maurice Sendak, passed away. I always wanted to write him a letter and tell him what his art meant to me. I was always too nervous to do so. So I'm going to try and express my joy and admiration of such a wonderful artist. His books are probably the first ones that I remember as a kid. "Where The Wild Things Are", "Outside and Over There", "In The Night Kitchen", and The Little Bear Series. I remember relating to Max in wild things. I too believed that there were monsters in the world, and Maurice took me to a world where that was not a silly thing to think. It was real. In Outside and Over There, I could see myself in the big sister that has to go after her baby brother and save him from creatures in the forest. Little Bear was always so curious and turned ordinary things into unimaginable fun. Looking back on his art now I don't really know if I would be the artist I am without his influence. Would my art still try and take fantasy and the normal world and meld them. I learned from Sendak in a way to look at things differently. To express them in a way that could be interpreted differently by many different people. My mom remembers me as a kid often wanting to look at his books, of which we have quite the collection on the shelves at the house. He took me to another world as a kid, one that I could understand and one that didn't talk down to me just because I was a child. As an adult he has taken me to a place where I want to inspire what he did in me. I want people to be thoughtful about what I do. He was a glorious person and FUNNY(if you haven't seen him on his recent interview on the Colbert Report, he is sharp as a knife in the whole thing)and he inspired so many children who later became artists/illustrators. I really will miss his work. He gave so much wonder to so many. Rest in peace Maurice Sendak. you will always be my inspiration.