Interview with Peter Sis

Abstract

Interview with Peter Sis Michael Joseph (bio) and Lida Sak (bio) Born in Brno, Czechoslovakia, in 1949, Peter Sis was trained at the famous Academy of Arts and Crafts in Prague. During the early part of his career, his primary interest was film. Heads (his tribute to Arcimboldo), took the coveted German Golden Bear Award in 1980. Film also helped Sis slip under the Iron Curtain. In 1982, Czechoslovakia sent him to Los Angeles to make an animated film for the 1984 Olympics. When the Eastern Bloc countries withdrew, Czechoslovakia ordered him to return. He chose instead to remain, believing at 31, “If I didn’t do it now, I’d never do it.” Since illustrating his first children’s book in the United States, George Shannon’s Bean Boy (Greenwillow, 1984), Sis has lent illustrations to several more celebrated collaborations, including The Whipping Boy by Sid Fleischman (Greenwillow, 1985), Oaf, by Julia Cunningham (Greenwillow, 1986), and The Dragons are Singing Tonight, by Jack Prelutsky (Greenwillow, 1993). Sis’s first solo effort, Rainbow Rhino (Knopf, 1987) gained recognition from both Time and the New York Times, who placed it among the year’s outstanding children’s books. Works of steadily increasing artistic maturity have followed, including Follow the Dream (Knopf, 1991), A Small Tall Tale from the Far Far North (Knopf, 1993), and The Three Golden Keys (Doubleday, 1994). His newest work, Starry Messenger: Galileo Galilei, will soon be published by Farrar, Straus, & Giroux. This interview is based upon a conversation the authors had with Peter Sis in January 1995, shortly after The Three Golden Keys won the Silver Medal from the Society of Illustrators. Peter Sis lives in New York City with his wife, Terry, a son, Matej, and a daughter, Madeleine. Q: How do you like New York? PS: I like the energy of New York, the opportunities in New York; I like New York in the autumn, have some problems with summers and winters and some of the stuff I find in the streets when I walk with my children. Q: When did you first realize that you were an illustrator? [End Page 131] PS: I first realized that I am an illustrator when I came to New York. Because until then I was an artist. Q: Did your parents encourage your art? PS: Very much so; I would even get assignments and deadlines from my father at a young age. A lot of the time he traveled around and he would come home and tell me about lots of things which I then felt like drawing. And my mother was an art student herself. Q: Were you encouraged to pursue art in school, as well? PS: First, yes, then no. I went through a terrible time in primary school because I had a teacher who thought that if you draw a duck, it should look like a duck. Later, I went through another terrible time in art school—which was like art high school—and again, the traditions were very academic. I had a teacher who would always select the best pictures and the worst picture. And, I always ended up with the worst! I ended up in the hospital because I just couldn’t take that guy. When I am teaching now, I try not to say if somebody is better or worse: it’s just my opinion anyway. It has nothing to do with reality. Q: Do you feel you have been influenced by other artists—Czech or American? PS: Obviously; a lot. I was very lucky in college because I was selected by Jiri Trnka to be his student. However, he died a year after that, but I had a wonderful man, Miroslav Jagr, who was his assistant, and he lifted me up and encouraged me. I liked Mr. Jagr very much, but it’s true that, when we ended college, all of us who graduated were drawing just like him: including the Vietnamese students. Then, in the 1960s, San Francisco poster art really interested me. Because we followed the magazines like Graphis and Gebrauchsgraphik, it is mind boggling for me to be in New York and to work with people I used...