Muddy: Behind the Art


I'm so excited about the upcoming release of the next book I worked on, Muddy: The Story of Blues Legend Muddy Waters, written by Michael Mahin! It won't be available until September 5, but here's a sneak preview and a little "behind the scenes" about the creation of the art for the book.

Research drawing from Clarksdale, Mississippi

With every new book comes a new research process! You can read more about the research for this book in two blog posts I wrote last year about my trips to the Mississippi Delta, where Muddy was born, and Chicago, where Muddy created his signature sound.


Research drawing from Chicago
 
Another part of my research is always to look at artwork to help create a visual style and language that is specific to the topic and the story. Whenever I do school visits (more info here), I like to talk to kids about this step. I hope that it will inspire them to take a look at artists and art they may not have known before.


For this project, I was very excited to get to take a deeper look at some of my favorite artists, including Ben Shahn, Matisse, Picasso, and particularly Jacob Lawrence, Romare Bearden, and William H. Johnson.



I also looked at quilts by the Gee's Bend Quiltmakers of Alabama, a group of African American women who have been creating unique, varied, and innovative quilts for decades and generations. Many artists of the Harlem Renaissance (including Lawrence, Bearden, and Johnson) looked to the African American quilt-making tradition and African art for study and inspiration, as well as contemporary European art movements.


The incredible composition and rhythm of their quilts inspired the design for the artwork in Muddy. If you look at the small color thumbnail pagination I made while planning the book (below), you can see the influence of the blocks of color of the Gee's Bend artists.

Color pagination of thumbnails for Muddy


I wanted the illustrations to show the journey of Muddy and his music from his roots in Mississippi, the electric explosion in Chicago, and his synthesis of the two. I showed this in a few ways:


One was in the newspaper collage. In sharecropper cabins, like the one Muddy grew up in in Clarksdale, Mississippi, they only had newspaper to wallpaper their walls. So I collaged newspapers from the local Clarksdale Daily Register from 1918 on the walls.

In progress collage

You can see what it looked like here before I painted on top of them. Here the headlines are mostly about small town things like the cost of cotton or stories about World War I.


When Muddy moves to Chicago, he is surrounded by the headlines of the Chicago Defender, a legendary black newspaper. Here the headlines are about African American triumph and struggle, and civil rights issues of the day. And once Muddy becomes famous, he finds himself among the headlines of African American heroes in the Chicago Defender.

Preliminary sketches for Muddy

I also used color and a style shift to signify Muddy's journey.

Final art scenes from Muddy in Mississippi

In Mississippi, Muddy is surrounded by warm, rich colors: the yellow, red, and brown of the earth and heat; the deep indigo of the Mississippi River; the yellowy green of crops; the black and white of the cotton fields; and the vibrant purple of his grandmother's dresses.

Final art scenes from Muddy in Chicago

But when he arrives in Chicago, he is surrounded by the clashing neon colors of the city. The green is no longer earthy, but slick and electric. The blue is not deep and powerful, but bright, cool, and modern. The bright red halo of Muddy's country roots makes him stand out among the city slickers.

But once Muddy begins to let his true self out in his music, everything begins to come together. There is the electricity and intensity of the city, but also the richness, and depth of the Mississippi River, the cotton fields, and the memory of his grandmother. Everything pieced together like a quilt.


 The illustrations themselves were pieced together like a quilt as well.


I drew out the composition, and then cut out each of the shapes to make stencils. Then I filled in the shapes thickly with oil pastel on top of a watercolor/gouache background. 


Then details and patterns were created by adding more oil pastel, or scraping it away with a palette knife to make textures and different effects.

Muddy learning the bottleneck slide from his hero, Son House

The whole progression of art throughout the book was to show how Muddy grew and changed with his music, but also how he always stayed true to himself.

 
Muddy: The Story of Blues Legend Muddy Waters will be released on September 5, 2017.
More information and pre-order links here:

 Muddy: The Story of Blues Legend Muddy Waters

Muddy Mississippi


One of my favorite things about being an illustrator is that when a project comes along, I get to learn about something completely new and different. I just got back from a trip to the Mississippi Delta where I went for research on an upcoming picture book about the blues legend, Muddy Waters. The book is called Muddy written by Michael Mahin, and it will be coming out in 2017 from Simon & Schuster. In learning about Muddy, I felt it was important to go see the environment where his music came from, and to find the soul of what he sang about.


I found a piece of that soul in Rolling Fork, Mississippi, Muddy's birthplace. (His actual birthplace was probably outside of town, and is no longer standing, but they have a "shotgun house" reminiscent of where he might have lived, as a monument in the center of town.) The outside was covered in bright colors of peeling paint and corrugated metal, while the inside was wallpapered with old newspaper.


I got to hear that soul in Clarksdale, Mississippi, the home of the Delta Blues. On my first night, I had the chance to see Bill "Howl-N-Madd" Perry and his band play at Red's Lounge. His daughter Shy sang, played keyboard, and gyrated with energy.


He gave a wink to his wife of many years at the door, as he sang about all that's great about "Delta women".


He had a cool, casual, light-hearted demeanor.


But when he sang, he had a gravelly power to his voice.


At one point, he began using a slide, to make the sounds screech and bend as his hand moved. Muddy originally learned this technique from his idol Son House, who used a broken bottleneck as his slide.


My favorite part of the performance, though, was when one of the players would just let loose in a solo. The harmonica player, instrument clasped to his face and hidden behind his hands, would suddenly erupt into a blazing, metallic riff, shimmering like heat on hot pavement. His body jerked from side to side, as the sound became a disembodied voice. Then came the electric bass solo, buzzing and vibrating the room with intensity. That unexpected explosion felt like the soul of Muddy's music, too.


Muddy worked as a sharecropper picking cotton outside of Clarksdale at a place called Stovall Farms. The building where he was first recorded for the Library of Congress, his first record, still stands on the farm along with a plaque where his sharecropper shack used to be.


Never having seen a cotton field in my life, I was astounded by them. They really stretch into infinity. But it's impossible for me to look at them and not see the brutal history, labor, and toil associated with them as well. The pain of that experience gave birth to the blues.


The sharp, dark stalks and leaves make such a rhythmic pattern branching out against the white of the cotton.


On Sunday, the town was empty until I noticed the rows and rows of cars parked outside of each one of a couple dozen churches throughout the town. Although Muddy grew up singing in church, the blues and the church did not often go together. But they were united by music that gave a place for expression of the raw emotion of the soul.


The force that gave birth to all of this region is the mighty Mississippi River. From what I heard, the river was very low when I saw it. The water usually extends far up the banks and past where I was standing on the sandy beach. Its constantly changing course, dangerous currents, and rich waters made the land fertile for cheap cotton, and gave Muddy his name.


But where I really felt the soul of Clarksdale was right on the front porch of my hotel, The Riverside Hotel. It was originally a hospital for only black patients (where the Empress of Blues, Bessie Smith, died in 1937), because hospitals were segregated. The building was rented, and then purchased by the enterprising Mrs. ZL Ratliff to turn it into a hotel. Because blacks were not allowed in most hotels at the time, it became the place to stay for traveling blues musicians, including Muddy Waters. To them, she became "Mama Z", and they became "her boys." She would feed them and give them a place to stay (sometimes even if they didn't have the money). In Muddy's case, she even gave him the kick he needed to move up to Chicago, saying he was too talented to stay in Clarksdale. The hotel passed into the hands of ZL Ratliff's son, Frank "Rat" Ratliff, who ran the hotel until he passed away in 2013.


The hotel remains in family hands, run by his daughter Zelina and his wife, Joyce Lyn Ratliff. Spending time with the two of them, among their friends, family, and long-term guests, let me see the warmth, hospitality, and sense of community of this place. This was the soul of the Delta, and the fertile soil that allowed Muddy's music to grow.

For more of Evan Turk's travel illustration, check out the link below: