Author(s): Scott Gustafson

Folk and Fable

From non-sense to lessons learned, these forty five rhymes include the absolutely well known ("Itsy Bitsy Spider") and the slightly familiar, ("Hickety, Pickety, My Black Hen"). The truly fantastic pictures speak more than one thousands words in details as artist Scott Gustafson riffs in paint on themes present and imagined in each verse. Nursery rhymes are classic and so are some of artist's interpretations but other paintings are surprises, like an anthropomorphic baking bear, a pelican sea captain and Peter Piper as a pug on two legs. Welcome to a world where "There was a crooked man" is not about a hunched-back elder but rather a mad-cap, double-jointed dandy who might be "crooked" in more ways than one. Jack (Be Nimble) is a leaping cricket and Yankee Doodle a funloving mouse on a full-sized horse.