  | Full Text Reviews: Booklist - 01/01/2014 *Starred Review* Richly colored, large acrylic paint and paper collage pictures illustrate the life of Vasily Kandinsky, one of the first painters of abstract art. As a young boy, Vasya was given a paint box, and when he first mixed colors, he was amazed to find he could hear the colors he created. Throughout his early life, Kandinsky struggled to live as others expected but couldn’t forget his exhilarating experiences with painting. Even after giving in and taking lessons, he was unable to suppress the need to create his own style of art. He would see colors and hear music, hear music and see colors. Art should make you feel. Like music. Narrow white frames surround the wonderfully dense illustrations that reveal the sounds the colors make to the artist. The rich word choice is a delight: pistachio, cobalt, and saffron introduce readers to colors while hissing, blaring, and whispering reveal the sounds of the colors. This not a full biography, but rather a revelation of a real and talented person striving to express himself—and succeeding. The author’s note and source list impart more information. This is a beautiful blend of colors, music, and life. - Copyright 2014 Booklist. Bulletin for the Center... - 02/01/2014 This fictionalized biography of artist Vassily Kandinsky starts with his childhood, where young Vasya lived a stiff and proper Russian life until he received a gift of paints, whose colors he synesthetically heard as sounds (“The swirling colors trilled like and orchestra tuning up for a magical symphony”). Despite his joy in painting, Vasya turned his back on art and grew up to become a lawyer; when he could resist his colors no longer, he dove back into creating, studying with various painters and eventually debuting his own completely abstract art. While the blend of fiction and nonfiction is a little confusing, the story of a young kid who wants to shake things up will appeal to many junior artists, and the details of Vasya’s sonic joy in color may inspire further artistic exploration. GrandPré’s acrylic illustrations, occasionally enhanced with touches of paper collage, ably convey the gloomy respectability of young Vasya’s household with deep smoky tones weighted down by fusty brocades. Unfortunately, they’re not very successful at expressing his break with propriety; the creamy backgrounds and misty textures undercut the pop of his colors and sometimes lack compositional focus; additionally, the layout, with its tidy borders and common font (save for some peculiar breaks into san serif), has a stodgy conventionality at odds with its subject. Winter’s Just Behave, Pablo Picasso! (BCCB 5/12) is a more effective picture-book treatment of an artist who shattered the rules, but this could add dimension to an exploration of that artistic era or prompt a project combining music and art. An author’s note gives more details about Kandinsky’s life, and a quartet of Kandinsky paintings are reproduced alongside it. DS - Copyright 2014 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. School Library Journal - 02/01/2014 Gr 1–4—A stirring tribute to a prominent pioneer of abstract art, Paintbox follows the life of Russian-born artist Vasya Kandinsky from his childhood to adulthood, conveying the astounding imagery conjured in the painter's (probably genetic) condition, synesthesia, which caused sensory fields to collide in explosions that enabled him, for example, to hear colors. In this delightful homage, Rosenstock's crisp visual language unites with GrandPré's deeply expressive and whimsical paintings to re-create the intriguing world of art as seen through Kandinsky's distinct lens. The book offers diverse potential for different types of study, whether one is reading for information or for pleasure. Outstanding.—Kathryn Diman, Bass Harbor Memorial Library, Bernard, ME - Copyright 2014 Publishers Weekly, Library Journal and/or School Library Journal used with permission. Loading...
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