Hannah Coale - Illustrator

“First of all, I am a terrible housekeeper. Things jump off their shelves when I come in the room. Piles of clean laundry topple over and spill onto the floor when I look at them. Then the cats sleep there. I don't get it. I have seen clothes in drawers in other people's houses and clean dishes too, so it is no use pretending that it can't be done. A place for everything and everything in its place, people say with a brilliant smile. In my house, everything has it's own idea of where it wants to be.”

“With the publication of two children's books, I gleefully abandoned the world of art for grown-ups, something I never really understood anyway, and started making art for kids, who tend to be way more fun and discerning. It was a shock to find out that grown-ups like the stuff too. But, I can't help that.”

“I like to make art for kids who need it, especially those who need distractions, like kids who are staying in hospitals or lying in treatment rooms or waiting in clinics. Also, I make stuff for all those other kids just dreaming, doodling and putting off doing their homework. I mean, you just know they need something to look at besides the wall and a lot of word problems.”

“I like to know that what I make will be useful to someone,” she said, referring also to the many images she has done for Children's Hospitals and Clinics. “That is especially true of children who will see the images day after day; it is just irresponsible not to make the coolest, most real and hopeful images you can.”

With her first publication, in 1993 of Felix's Hat (a Children's Book of the Month Club selection) and subsequently, That's Philomena in 1995 (both Illustrated by Hannah Coale and co-written with Catherine Bancroft), Hannah Coale became an artist-for-children, an audience she considers much more fun and discerning.

Hannah's classical training as a painter at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, (the school of Mary Cassatt and Thomas Eakins) has “served her well,” she says, “though at the time it seemed very anachronistic.” "Because", she points out, "all the cool artists were covering themselves with honey or rolling in paint on the floor." Nevertheless, Coale has found that the life drawing she did as a student, and continues to do whenever she can, has been the wellspring of her work, from the Frog books to her images of kids and playgrounds and neighborhoods.

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