Parsons Illustration Chair Steven Guarnaccia was recently interviewed by Bradford Shellhammer over at the Sundance Channel’s Full Frontal Design blog. They talked about Steven’s collection of Rooster ties, his children’s books, and his style in general. Here’s a snippet from the interview:
B.S.: Aside from ties, what else do you collect?
S.G: At one point I had something like 39 discrete collections. I had to count because for a couple of years I was on Art and Antiques’ list of the 100 top collectors. I’ve calmed down a bit since then. But some of my other collections are black-and-white things (dice, dominoes, aces of spades, etc., about which I wrote a book for Chronicle called, oddly enough, Black and White), skeletons, vintage illustrated children’s books, and kids’ card games.
B.S.: You’re also a lover of modern design and architecture, as evidenced in your booksGoldilocks and the Three Bears: A Tale Moderne and The Three Little Pigs. What made you re-create these classic kids’ stories with a modernist slant?
S.G: I had been doing monthly stand-alone illustrations for Metropolitan Home and thenAbitare, in Italy, and became very interested in the history of modern furniture design and architecture. I was invited to contribute to a French exhibition about Russian children’s-book illustrator Feodor Rojankovsky. He had illustrated Goldilocks and the Three Bears for Golden Books, and as I reread the book, I realized what a little design critic Goldilocks is: This chair is too hard, this bed is too big. It came to me that I could illustrate the book using classic 20th-century furniture throughout the book and teach kids a soft lesson about design at the same time.
Read the rest of the interview here.
Way to go, Steven!
