What I find really fascinating is the way so many traditional art styles and design motifs have traveled around the world, carried by cross-cultural migrants to new locales, only to influence and be influenced by the traditions and styles in those new places. Art, I have come to see, is a conversation – a visual conversation.
I call this sharing of design styles, motifs and elements World Art. World art is like World Music, but for your eyes. And I see my work as a part of that ongoing visual medley; I believe I am contributing to the artistic narrative of cross-cultural sharing that takes place at the level of people interacting with people, people sharing with and learning from one another.
The range of my artistic style has been captured in Paisley Pig & Friends, a multi-cultural ABC book that combines various folk color palettes, familiar and strange insects, birds and animals, and lessons in geography, culture and art into a beautiful book that children love to explore and adults love to read.
I am also an entrepreneur. Like the artists and illustrators of the many traditional cultures I’ve sampled, I believe art is for decoration, and I want to produce art that gets into people’s hands; into as many hands as possible. So I look for ways to reproduce my illustrations inexpensively.
Over the last few years, I have reproduced my work as t-shirts, cards, prints, bookmarks, and stickers. Early in 2011, I was accepted into the stable of licensed illustrators represented by McGaw Graphics. I like the affiliation because their goal is to find manufacturers to mass-produce art, which is exactly what I want.
It is a relationship that makes this happy children’s illustrator even happier. It gets me up in the morning, eager to get back to my pen, paper and computer.
So, please: look around. I hope you enjoy the images you see here. And I hope you will want to decorate a little bit of your world with some of my smiling World Art.
–Willow
