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Maurice Sendak Homage
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Spurred on by the tributes pouring in to "Terrible Yellow Eyes", I made my own "thankyou" for one of my greatest heroes.
Considering the huge impact that his work has had on my life and work, it is a great comfort to me to know just how much Maurice Sendak's influences mean to him.
And so, here, I celebrate my master by borrowing Max and the Wild Things and setting in motion a tribute to some of Maurice Sendak's own masters - Mozart, Mickey and Mantegna. (Melville and McCay are waiting in the wings). As he said himself "I'm old enough to steal it just as it is".
Maurice Sendak can whistle "a goodly chunk of the classical repertoire" on pitch and from memory. And so, it seems, can Max. And those Wild Things? Didn't you know, they're nothing more than puppets?!
Hanging in the sky is the moon. Tomi Ungerer pointed out that Maurice Sendak's moons made impossible lunar shifts - to which he said "The Moon appears in my books for graphic, not astronomical, reasons - I simply must have that shape on the page".
Maurice Sendak's first passion is music and Mozart has been his "saviour" since he was 16.
He says of "The Magic Flute", his favourite opera, that it "has everything I wish my own work had a scrap of - beauty of shape and design, a comic lowdown vaudeville vitality blended with dark serious truth telling, depth of soul and a generous unjudgemental view of human-kind".
Tamino (with his magic flute) and Papageno (with his bird cage) think he has achieved that in spades.
The Magic Flute opens with a lost prince being chased by a serpent (sea monster?). Jennie, Sendak's Sealyham terrier and his Alsatian Herman has been lulled to sleep by the whistling and obviously couldn't care less. As Jennie would have said “There must be more to life than having everything”.
Selma G. Lanes' "The Art of Maurice Sendak" is one of my bibles, and I recently read "Dear Genius" The Letters of Ursula Nordstrom, however, I was thrilled to find a speech that Maurice Sendak gave in 2003 online, and I listened to it while I drew.
It was here that I heard him speak of his deep love for the painting "Descent into Limbo" by Mantegna, and how it sums up "The Magic Flute" for him - and that, as he puts it, "it's a sublime image to steal from". Have a look at the cover of "We Are All in the Dumps with Jack and Guy".
In my version, Mickey Mouse, born in the same year as Maurice Sendak and one of the most dominant figures in his childhood, descends into limbo. "As a child, I assumed he was the exact image of God" says Maurice Sendak.
- This Picture
Max and the Magic Flute
- Exhibition
Terrible Yellow Eyes
- Gallery
Nucleus, LA
- Medium
Ink
- Year
2009
