In a minute I shall melt away, from The Wizard of Oz, 1991, by Charles Santore (Collection of the artist)
with text, the more they can pick up details in the
SANTORE: When Random House first asked me to
art. I want my books to have a long shelf life.
do The Wizard of Oz, I said no because I didn’t like
VALERIO: One of the things that makes your work
so astounding is the use of scale. In The Wizard of Oz, your cyclone is larger than life. Dorothy is small and the things that are happening are big: a child’s point of view. TOW: It’s beyond her control. One of the things
that I find amazing about the Lion in the field of poppies is that you capture the truth about the scene. Having watched the movie as a kid, I never knew why the Lion and Dorothy fell asleep, but the Tin Woodman and the Scarecrow did not, until I read Frank Baum’s story. Dorothy and the Lion are affected by the poppies because they’re the only ones who are flesh and blood. When I saw your painting, it was just so clear.
the movie. Then I thought, well, maybe I should read it. The minute I read the first page, and it said Dorothy was an orphan, the metaphor for the whole story fell into place, and the yellow brick road became the journey. All of a sudden it made sense, and I decided I wanted to do the book. That’s when I began to see how important the choreography needed to be. Certain images in these books are iconic: the poppy field in The Wizard of Oz, the caterpillar in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. When I worked on The Wizard of Oz, one thing that was in the back of my mind was that I didn’t want to disappoint people— everybody knows this story, everybody has an image of Judy Garland as Dorothy. So there was the movie to deal with and everybody’s preconceptions and expectations. I had an interesting meeting with Random House on this subject. I said, “I’m very
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WOODMERE ART MUSEUM