Like the readers of her books, many of Deborah Nourse Lattimore’s characters are children. With names like Merit, Frida, Two Flint and Kwan Yin, they come from diverse cultures and centuries long past. Some travel through dangerous lands and battle evil spirits in a quest for justice; others struggle to obey their elders while preserving their individual identities. These insightful young crusaders ask challenging questions and often have something to learn or teach about moral behavior, honesty and goodness. Lattimore, a Pacific Palisades resident who grew up in Beverly Hills in the 1950s, says she was always inventing stories as a child. Her imagination was fueled by frequent trips downtown to the old Los Angeles County Museum of Art with her grandmother, Leona Wilcox, who was a painter. They used to sketch together at the museum and at the Rose Garden in Exposition Park, remembers Lattimore, the youngest of three daughters raised by her grandmother. Growing up, ‘we all had diaries,’ she remembers. ‘Mine was about the Phoenicians.’ At the time, Lattimore says, there were few books on ancient history for children, so she looked at ones written for adults. The first picture book she owned was ‘The Egyptian Book of the Dead,’ a compilation of spells from different Egyptian dynasties which were said to help the deceased on the trip through the netherworld. In sixth grade, she began illustrating stories and won a local newspaper competition for her original story, ‘Egypt from the Camel’s Point of View.’ ‘When you feed a kid’s curiosity, you open doors,’ says Lattimore, who also used to play cello and sing. ‘The more art you see or music you hear that’s real, the more it’s a springboard to go off and do it yourself.’ Decades later, with a degree in art history and Egyptology from UCLA, she wrote and illustrated ‘The Winged Cat: A Tale of Ancient Egypt,’ designed in the style of the Egyptian Books of the Dead with hieroglyphics and pages painted to look like papyrus. Lattimore’s dozens of illustrated books combine many elements’mythology or history, art and fiction’and tell colorful stories with important messages for children. In ‘The Dragon’s Robe,’ a poor Chinese orphan named Kwan Yin (after the goddess of mercy) must weave an elaborate robe for the rain dragon in order to help an ill old man protect the land from evil. Through hard work, honor and persistence, she is able to complete the task. Lattimore’s intricate illustrations of ancient 13th-century Chinese landscapes seem to move and come alive on the pages. A brilliant rainbow-colored phoenix emerges from leaping flames, and the spirit of the rain dragon unleashes an ocean of rainwater that fills two pages with swirling color. Even the text boxes on each page are framed and adorned with imperial tassels, and some with partially woven images that evoke the work of Kwan Yin. This book earned Lattimore the 1991 PEN Center USA West Award in Children’s Literature. A similarly heroic tale is ‘The Fool and the Phoenix: A Tale of Old Japan,’ which is set during the Tokugawa dynasty’the greatest peace period in Japan’s history, dating from 1603 to 1868. Lattimore imagined what might happen if all was not peaceful and a small-town official became jealous of the shogun’s wealth. In an author’s note to this tale, she tells us that 20,000 works of art were produced during this period. Her own sweeping, detailed illustrations for the book cover every inch of the pages. ‘In poignant moments, the art has more diagonals,’ she points out. ‘It moves you across the page faster; it’s more emotional.’ Lattimore usually uses pen and watercolor for her illustrations, and prefers to paint on French d’Arches paper, a 90-lb. slick, hot-press paper because ‘you can work it hard and it’s forgiving.’ She learned a lot about the basics of art from her grandmother, who taught her how to look at color and draw perspective. ‘If you want a color to be really strong within itself, use three colors,’ Lattimore says, explaining that the sea could be blue, lavender and green, or three shades of blue. When she was 14, she got a scholarship to take college-level art classes at the Art Center College of Design, which used to be on Third Street and has since moved to Pasadena. The following year, she won the ACLU award for an original abstract oil painting about civil rights, a piece she later traded for a pair of gold-framed glasses. Some of her books are based on popular fairy tales or stories from her childhood. She created ‘Cinderhazel’ about a blond witch because she was frustrated with the perfect, obedient character of Cinderella. ‘As a little girl, I loved Cinderella but I wondered why she was so stupid,’ Lattimore says. ‘When the stepsisters leave the house, that’s when she should lock the door, because it’s her house!’ Asking questions, especially questions children would ask, is part of her artistic process. She and her grandmother used to ask all kinds of questions about the art they saw in the museum galleries. She remembers staring at an 18th-century painting of a woman in an extravagant dress, and her grandmother wondered what ‘marvelous undergarments’ the dame might have worn. Years later, Lattimore explored the use of undergarments around the globe and across history in ‘I Wonder What’s Under There?: A Brief History of Underwear.’ ‘You can see how an illustrator feels about a character by the way [he or she] has drawn the character’s undergarments’by the way they walk, the way their feet turn in or out,’ she says. Her interest in how people move physically when they’re dressed a certain way, inspired her to write a humorous story set in 18th-century France called ‘The Lady with the Ship on her Head.’ She captured the authentic furniture and big, ornate dresses of the time by studying art in museums, researching the period at the library and visiting MGM’s costume collection. She used acrylic paste to give the pages a canvas look as a backdrop for her elaborate illustrations. Lattimore has used modeling paste to duplicate limestone and to create fresco-like paintings. In ‘Frida Maria: A Story of the Old Southwest,’ set in 19th-century California, she used watercolor and colored pencil over the paste to authenticate her illustrations of the art and architecture from missions of the time. The rough lines and scratches add texture to the lively paintings, as if readers can feel the cool tiles or the dust rising under the horse’s hooves. Lattimore’s family had a keen interest in California history and lore, and she spent many afternoons at Olvera Street, where her mother performed as a flamenco dancer. Her grandmother told her stories about the ranchos of the Old Southwest, and she remembered one in particular about a famous horse race in 1842, when Jos’ Sepulveda (from Los Angeles) and Pio Pico (from San Diego) pitted their horses and towns against each other. That story inspired ‘Frida Maria.’ ‘I try to write stories that have some kind of threat involved,’ she says. ‘But I’ll never kill a kid or make fun of a kid in a story.’ Lattimore, who has traveled in Central America and Western and Eastern Europe, completed graduate work at UCLA in Near Eastern languages and pre-Columbian, Egyptian, and classical art history. She’s been teaching in the writer’s program at UCLA for about 18 years, as well as teaching art at Pasadena Art Center and four-part workshops on bookmaking with Every Picture Tells a Story. She’s currently working on a comprehensive picture book of ancient Egyptian mythology and a graphic novel for middle-school students called ‘The Attack of the Giant Liver.’ A mother to two grown children, Lattimore says she hopes her books will encourage kids to ask questions”even if they’re nosy and rude questions.’
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