Old MacDonald Had a Farm
PreSchool-Grade 1 --Yet another example of the English school of illustration: solid craftsmanship, attention to all sorts of details, low-key humor. This text does not accumulate the farm animal sounds. Rather, each left-hand page is a fully developed scene of a kindly white-bearded farmer in some part of his modest farm with all the animals as they are mentioned. On the right are the three repeated lines about Old MacDonald having a. . . . In the middle of this page is a hole, two inches in diameter, exposing a part of the next animal in the picture on the following page. The picture, when fully exposed by turning the page, is equally detailed, and the hole frames the farmer's face from the previous picture--a consistently neat piece of design. Jones' approach is naturalistic with a soft overlay of humor: this is a happy farm. Her fine black inked lines structure a benign world that is as peaceable a kingdom as one could wish, an animated rather than static one. The transparent watercolors create a lush, late-summer bucolic comfortable rightness where all the animals, birds, frogs, insects, rodents, and man live in peace. If this is indeed nostalgia (no TV, electric wires, or even any machines), it is symbolic also of a better symbiotic relationship among nature's creatures than we now experience. --Kenneth Marantz, Art Education Department, Ohio State University, ColumbusCopyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.