Some people don’t remember what it’s like to be a kid.
If that misfortune has befallen you, take heart. You can once again behold the world with a fresh sense of wonder with a visit to the exhibition “Walter Wick: Games, Gizmos, and Toys in the Attic” at the Vero Beach Museum of Art.
Based on the world view of popular children’s book illustrator Walter Wick, the exhibition is as infectious as a case of the hiccups in a third-grade classroom. Not even a serious museum professional like VBMA curator Jay Williams is immune to its charms.
“What he does really connects to me because it takes me back to my childhood,” he enthuses. “He helps you visualize the way kids see things in their imaginations.”
Wick’s work is not just for kids, but make no mistake about it: everything he creates is directed to children – or rather, to a child’s irrepressible sense of curiosity.
Perhaps the most astounding thing about Wick’s illustrations is that they are photographs, a medium that the adult mind might regard as too earthbound to enter the realm of make-believe.
The show opens with a large photograph from “Dream Machine,” one of the “Can You See What I See?” series of books published by Scholastic. It is of a rainbow-hued metropolis, an art deco vision of the future. The bird’s eye view looks down past the be-spired and bubble-domed cupolas of the city’s skyscrapers to the tiny cars in the streets below. A silvery edifice at the composition’s center has a robot’s legs, and turrets for arms.
Below the photo, lined neatly against the wall, child-like buildings made of painted cardboard, paper plates and plastic food trays echo the ingenuity – and the origins – of the materials that went into the making of the grand city above them.
Williams explains that the story behind “Dream Machine” begins in a child’s room in an ordinary house, with just such an improvised toy city.
“As the book progresses, it goes from the kid’s bedroom to a complete land of the imagination,” he says.
And as the visitor progresses around the gallery, Walter Wick’s creative powers will never cease to amaze and astound.
Posted near the entrance of the exhibition, a chronology for the artist informs you that Wick was born in Hartford, CT, in 1953 and studied photography in the early 1970s at the Paier College of Art in Hamden.
But what of his own childhood?
“I always tell my young readers that I was a kind of reluctant reader as a kid,” Wick says. “I got into photography and art at a very young age because it kind of saved me.”
Saved him?
“Saved me from having to be a complete failure at academics and not having something I could excel at,” he says.
In college he studied photographers like Ansel Adams, whose work helped to establish photography as a fine art form. In emulation of Adams, Wick’s earliest photos were austere landscapes shot in black and white.
While still a student, Wick got a job at a small commercial photo studio and began to concentrate on what he calls the “interior landscape” of studio photography, where objects are arranged and lit just so. There he learned the tricks of the trade: the photographic illusions that make products appear better, larger and more appealing than in life.
Wick opened his own commercial photo studio in 1979. In a bid to attract clients, he created a photograph that presents the illusion of six cat’s eye marbles floating within a space defined by the walls of an open-ended white cube.
“Floating Marbles” was made with no post-production, “because in 1980 there was no digital photography, no computerized tricks,” Wick says. He explains that the marbles were glued to “little stems” that were hidden by the angle of the shot.
Wick says that he became known as a “clever photographer” who specialized in magazine covers. His favorite client in the early 1980s was Games magazine, for which he initially photographed a visual puzzle on spec.
That puzzle, “The Amazing Mirror Maze” attracted the attention of the magazine’s editors (among them Will Shortz, now the New York Times crossword puzzle editor) who asked him, “Do you have any more ideas?”
“Games was a think tank, an incubator of puzzle magic, games and illusions. So that was really very influential to me,” Wick says.
A photo of some hardware that he had been sorting in his studio later inspired a sorting and classifying puzzle poster for Let’s Find Out magazine, a Scholastic publication. Wick’s series of posters for Let’s Find Out later led him and the magazine’s editor, Jean Marzollo, to create the wildly popular “I Spy” series of children’s books. Wick’s colorful, busy compositions on themes such as “School Days” and “Blast Off!” hid imagery that kids could find using Marzollo’s rhyming clues.
“There are eight original ‘I Spy’ books and a lot of spin-offs. And there are nine ‘Can You See What I See?’ books,” Wick says.
The later series is based on a similar search-and-find format with a rhyming storyline and a list of items hidden within the pictures.
“Can You See What I See?” reveals Wick’s inventiveness at its most complex. The current exhibition presents his enlarged photo illustrations along with the elaborate models that were constructed to shoot them. The latter include a castle, a creepy street, a seaside resort and a king’s banquet hall from “Once Upon a Time” (2006), “On a Scary, Scary Night” (2007), “Treasure Ship” (2009) and “Out of this World” (2013).
The models, with their intricately sculpted and painted details, fascinate, but Wick takes only partial credit. “I don’t do everything myself,” says Wick. “I work with a crew of freelance assistants and freelance artists.”
Wick dreams up the settings for his photos and creates detailed sketches for his fabricators to follow. He then arranges the components of what he refers to as his “sets,” and photographs them.
“It’s a labor of love, a mass market product, but made in love,” he says.
The inspiration for figures of people and animals in his photographs come not only from the world of fairy tales and classic toys, but also from art history. For example, “Out of this World” features the meeting of a robot from outer space and a medieval princess. Wick notes that the robot was inspired by “old-fashioned Japanese toys,” but the princess was inspired by a young woman in a 16th century Venetian painting by Vittore Carpaccio. A room in the castle’s interior was quoted from a moody 1632 painting by Rembrandt known as “Philosopher in Meditation.”
With so much work going into the creation of sets for the photographs, wouldn’t it make sense to create animated versions of his books? Shouldn’t he be making films instead of still photos?
“I try to create images so kids will think beyond the picture,” Wick says.
In other words, instead of being spoon-fed what happens next, Wick gives his readers an active role in the telling of the story. And they run with it.
Children, Wick says, tend to examine his pictures “forensically.”
He likes to tell the story of one young reader who found a continuity error in one of the books. A clock that displayed the time at the beginning of the book, displayed the hour a minute earlier than the same time at its end, which was supposed to be many hours later. Wick re-shot the scene to correct the discrepancy in subsequent printings of the book.
Does the man who can get inside the mind of a child have kids of his own?
“No. I’m the kid,” he says.
And if you don’t walk out of the exhibition feeling like a kid again, there’s no hope for you.
The show is on display in the Holmes Gallery through Sept. 28.
