Tomie and the Saints

Tomie DePaola may not have been a saint himself, but he recognized them, venerated the love of God in their lives, and drew them in such a way that we can see that love shining through his friendly folk art icons.

Through the Year with Tomie DePaola, text by Catherine Harmon and John Herreid, illustrations by Tomie DePaola, foreword by Sarah Mackenzie (135 pages, Ignatius Press, 2023)

If you’re looking for a great gift for a godchild, a newly baptized baby, or even a first communicant, you really can’t do better than Through the Year with Tomie DePaola, a book of saints and feast days illustrated with the late artist and author’s distinctive illustrations.

March 30 will mark four years since the announcement of DePaola’s passing. At the time, I memorialized him under the title “Tomie DePaola: A Child’s Imaginative Conservative,” noting that one of the most important aspects of his storytelling and illustration was that it “includes not only the child-protagonist’s sense of self, but also the sense of self of the other children and indeed the adults in the stories.” Tomie DePaola showed that all human beings, whether saints, villains, or those in between, are indeed human beings marked with the image of God. That demonstration was not just a function of his ability to tell stories well, which he certainly possessed. It was also a function of how he drew those human beings.

I quoted the poet and critic Sally Thomas who observed how DePaola’s “stylized human figures, with their almond eyes and austere, often inscrutable faces, recall iconography—if icons were friendlier and more like folk art.” Friendly folk art iconography is a good way to describe his work, especially when the ones being depicted really are saints. And DePaola did draw a lot of saints.

After he spent some time discerning a call to monastic life in one of their monasteries, the Benedictines were a particular love of his. The Holy Twins: Benedict and Scholastica, his collaboration with writer Kathleen Norris, suffers at times from Norris’s feminist insistence, but there is nothing to be faulted in his illustration of the story. He depicted the two lovingly and realistically. It is no surprise, then, that there are not a few figures from the Benedictine traditions that feature in the collection at hand, including St. Scholastica and St. Benedict, but also St. Bede, Ss. Maurus and Placid, the Holy Abbots of Cluny, St. Bernard of Clairvaux, St. Hildegard of Bingen, and St. Wiborada of St. Gall.

But this is not just a book of Benedictines. It is a book of the Christian year as a whole. The illustrations all come from a practice DePaola started before his death of making an illustration a day to be sent out to email and Facebook followers of his. This was called “Art Mail,” and it yielded up enough illustrations of saints and images from liturgical feasts to be collected into this fine book. Catherine Harmon and John Herreid of Ignatius provide short but pithy accounts of the saints or the feast days in question, usually giving three to five paragraphs of narration and explanation, sometimes providing a short text such as the Magnificat, a few lines from St. Patrick’s Breastplate, or St. Junipero Serra’s motto—“Siempre adelante, nunca atras” (“Always forward, never back”). These are perfect to go over with a young child or to be read by older ones even as they look at DePaola’s marvelous pictures.

That friendly folk iconography is indeed a delight. It takes in details both from the tradition and from historical circumstances. St. James is depicted with a scallop shell hanging around his neck, a symbol gathered by pilgrims who walk the Camino to Santiago de Compostela in Spain. St. Denis is depicted carrying his head in his hands. St. Christopher, though canceled somewhat by post-Vatican II historians (he was removed from the universal calendar of saints), is here, depicted carrying the Christ Child across the raging river. St. Francis is cradling a bird and St. Jerome is speaking to the lion said to have become a pet to his monastery in The Golden Legend. St. Boniface, patron of brewers, holds a foamy glass of beer in one hand and his shepherd’s crook in the other. St. Edith Stein, killed in Auschwitz, is depicted standing inside of a barbed wire fence. St. Maximilian Kolbe, a “martyr of charity” who volunteered to be starved to death in the place of a father and husband, is seen with his Franciscan habit underneath and the striped garb of a concentration camp being put on his left shoulder.

Or is the message that no matter the exterior garment, this man was always clothed in the Franciscan habit as his particular way of being clothed in Christ? These are the kind of things small children and children at heart will be spurred to ask.

DePaola was sufficiently interested in the Catholic Church through time to have drawn a very good selection of ancient, medieval, and modern saints who provide a balanced walk through the Church year. Harmon and Herreid include at the end of each month a list of other important saints DePaola did not draw that readers can look for. If kids become interested in the stories told in this volume, it’s a good bet they might be interested enough in the other figures and feasts to look them up or ask their parents to do so for them.

In her foreword to this volume, children’s author Sarah Mackenzie tells the story of how DePaola realized at a certain point that “a white bird kept showing up in his paintings—almost on its own.” He interpreted this mysterious presence as a symbol “that his talent did not come from himself.” Nor did it point to him alone, despite its distinctive quality. It pointed instead to the love of God and those who received and passed on that love of God so well. Tomie may not have been a saint himself, but he recognized them, venerated the love of God in their lives, and drew them in such a way that we can see that love shining through his friendly folk art icons.

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