Illustration

Profiled: Maurice Sendak and his new book Bumble-Ardy

Skip to comments

Alan Gardner September 22, 2011 1 minute 0 comments

A good read in the Washington Post about an illustrator legend:

Sendak feels old, but happy, relieved to have escaped youth and all its worries. After the death of his longtime partner, Eugene Glynn, and after triple bypass surgery, he continues to compose daily and is busy with a project about noses, the bigger the better. Mortality is an appointment he is resigned to keeping.

?I want to be alone and work until the day my heads hits the drawing table and I?m dead. Kaput,? he says. ?Everything is over. Everything that I called living is over. I?m very, very much alone. I don?t believe in heaven or hell or any of those things. I feel very much like I want to be with my brother and sister again. They?re nowhere. I know they?re nowhere and they don?t exist, but if nowhere means that?s where they are, that?s where I want to be.?

His new book, Bumble-Ardy, is his first in 30 years.