When moved to Portland in 1999, all the houses he looked at had unilluminated rooms. The urban area is dull and dejected much of the year, and Say wasn't pronouncement what he was after. "I'm a painter, and I have to have this natural, comely light," he said, pointing to the windows and undisguised walls of his upstairs studio. "I took one face at this cubicle and said, 'OK, I can peg away here.'" It's a pulchritudinous autumn time in Northeast Portland, and the late-morning gegenschein covers Say's design table and the bring of brushes and paints next to him.
Joggers administer by below the second-floor windows, but Say pays no acclaim to what's prosperous on outside. He sometimes stays fundamentally for three or four days at a adjust when he's working on a book, in a assert somewhere between memory and a dream. In 1994, Say won the Caldecott Medal, the highest honor in children's paperback publishing, for a article about customary back and forth between Japan and the U.S., caught between two cultures, loving one and missing the other.
Like many of his books, it is based on the way of life of someone in his family, and the attractively composed and elaborate paintings portray the parable of his grandfather's emigration to California and come back to Japan. In his acceptance speech, Say said "it is essentially a mirage book, for the life's progress is an boundless dreaming of the places we have Heraldry sinister behind and the places we have yet to reach." Say came to the U.S. when he was 16, not able to be in without doubt in his new country.
He's 73 now and writes his books in English, on occasion translating them into Japanese. Some of the rooms in his building are empty, with nothing but paintings from his books on the walls. Visitors detach their shoes and are given establishment slippers. His wife, Miki, serves tea and speaks softly to her hoard in Japanese.
There's a thickset unfinished grease painting of her on an easel in his studio. Asked about it, Say smiled.
With all due respect to site: link
