Celebrate your child's love of learning

© Wondertime

It has been years since I tasted actual butter. When I eat eggs, they come in little cartons with cute brand names instead of shells. The bread I eat is dark and crunchy with seeds and twigs in it. This is how we eat today, and I am the healthier for it. I am equally modern in my taste in illustration. I became interested in drawing during the golden age of cartooning.

There were remarkable experiments from filmmaker Norman McLaren, and the pop manifestations were Gerald McBoing Boing and Mr. Magoo. The new postwar style suggested something like Woody Woodpecker meets Maurice Utrillo, Paul Klee, and Joan Mir ó. There was a similar aesthetic shift in advertising art, domestic design, and in the illustration of children's books. Dr. Seuss led the way, and we are still following. My own drawings tend to simple outlines and bright color, and owe more of their ancestry to the Saturday morning cartoons than the art museum.

There is still realistic and painterly work to be seen in children's book illustration, but the descendants of Wyeth, Rackham, Parrish, and Pyle are not as much in evidence. Which is fine by me.

But maybe not at Christmas. Come the holidays, we want old-fashioned pastries made with real eggs and butter, and sweet sweets, savory and spicy aromas — and we want to see some gold leaf and tour de force draftsmanship. That leads us to illustrator Gennady Spirin. Spirin comes from Russia, and combines a little eastern iconic tradition with a love and understanding of classic children's illustration and old master painting. It's rich stuff, ranging from if-Breugel-had-better-art-supplies to if-Norman-Rockwell-had-too-much-eggnog-one-year.

I offer here a tiny sampling of Gennady Spirin's prodigious output. You can't go wrong with this artist: Stroll through the galleries, say oooh and aaah, and order books for your children that will not only look good under the tree, but will outdo the tree.

The Night Before Christmas (Marshall Cavendish)
Spirin goes Early American with the Clement Moore classic, with maybe a nod to Maxfield Parrish, plus an appropriate note of surrealism — I mean, an elf comes down the chimney! Who ya gonna call?

We Three Kings (Atheneum)
The song, with wow pictures. And an elephant on the cover that alone is worth the price of admission.

Martha, written andillustrated by Gennady Spirin (Philomel)
A visually elaborate crow-meets-family tale.

The Nutcracker, by E.T.A. Hoffmann (Stewart, Tabori & Chang)
Difficult to find, but a wonderful example of Book as Artwork.

The Tale of the Firebird (Philomel)
The well-known Russian folktale, gloriously retold and illustrated.

The Christmas Story (Henry Holt)
From the King James Bible yet! This one is bedrock. Beautiful like the others. Maybe not a great Hanukkah choice.