Warm Art for a Cold Season

On an island paradise in Maine a tall, soft-spoken man with full black moustache and greying beard walks the summer beaches in search of sea glass, shells, bones, and driftwood - with which he creates hand puppets to tell his favorite African folk tales. Or he has set up shop in a spacious garden, easel before him, preserving in oil the riot of hollyhocks and day lilies that surrounds him. Or perhaps, in the confines of his barn studio, he is laying out, sketching, and rendering the woodcuts he will use to illustrate his latest picture book: a collection of black American spirituals for children.

To the blustery snows of Hanover, Ashley Bryan, Dartmouth's winter term artist-in-residence, brought twenty-one scenes of his summer garden spot, sixteen cuts from his soon-to-be published songbook. Walk Together Children, and thirty other prints and drawings for display in the Jaffe-Friede and Strauss Galleries of the Hopkins Center - a warm exhibition for the coldest season.

For 25 years Bryan has divided his time between the summer retreat in Maine ("The minute I step foot on the island, it's heaven.") and the Bronx neighborhood where he grew up. In Maine he paints flowers and builds puppets out of natural materials and papier mache, in New York he teaches (at Queens College) and paints street scenes - often pictures involving his nieces and nephews. The common denominator is children.

Community programs consume his time in the Bronx; he takes part in teaching activities centered around the local Headstart, and church-sponsored social programs. "I use art as my 'other way of speaking,' encouraging the creativity of others with my own. I love to teach children, especially those under twelve, and participate in their development both as artists and people."

Children are constant visitors to his Maine studio, bringing bits of glass and bones and smooth stones that they've picked up off the beach - "things which have always been there but you don't start noticing until someone first calls them to your attention." Some time ago he began picking up bits of driftwood, seeing in them possibilities for masks. Soon, recognizing these images as vehicles for telling his African folktales and other stories, he made his first puppets.

Bryan's interest in things African and black-American started far back. A graduate of Cooper Union and Columbia University (in philosophy), he first had the idea of filling out and illustrating folktales in the late 1940s but it didn't reach fruition until the publication of The Ox of theWonderful Horns two decades later. He has also taught black poetry at Lafayette College.

The "very special quality of quiet dignity and personal charm" which characterizes Bryan "is clearly - delightfully - evident in his work," writes Acting Director of Galleries Churchill Lathrop in his introduction to the Hopkins Center catalogue. "His paintings of the Isleford Garden series dance with light and have the slow, quiet pulse of summer. The life drawings are bold and strong. The woodcuts speak softly and gently, sometimes with sadness, sometimes with joy. The pleasure of having this art and this man in the Hopkins Center is profound and most satisfying."

Ashley Bryan, Dartmouth's winter term artist-in-residence, poses with two of his puppetsfashioned in Maine from sea glass, shells, bones, and driftwood.