As a kid, I always saw these Polish circus posters
in doctors' offices. |
I would stare at the text, not understanding
that Polish word with certainty. |
I thought the word for "circus" was the
name of the poster artist, not realizing there
were various artists. |
By Arthur Szyk (1894-1951) - The Arthur Szyk Society, Burlingame, CA 94070 www.szyk.org CC BY-SA 4.0, The grandeur of this print was emphasized with gilded accents! |
When I was nine, I discovered the work of Arthur Szyk via an edition of Hans Christian Andersen's Fairy Tales. I pored over these images and tried to understand how someone could accomplish such feats. How could I focus love to come out of MY hands and onto paper?
I couldn't remember Arthur Szyk's last name because it was not a word or arrangement of letters that I was used to understanding.
Tonight, after years of intermittent attempts to rediscover him (and accidentally searching for variations on the words "Cyrk" or "Czyk") I succeeded after searching for illustrated Andersen editions on abebooks! And I learned that Szyk was an activist! |