Glenna Lang remembers the Saturdays spent at the Art Students' League in New York as her favorite times in high school. Under the tutelage of Agnes Hart, Ms. Lang learned to appreciate the smell of oil paints and the old wooden easels. It was at the University of Chicago, where she took a printmaking course and became engrossed in the process, that she decided to become an artist and printmaker. At the Boston Museum School, Ms. Lang found her voice in the subtle tones and simple shapes of black and white aquatint and her subject matter in the old city neighborhoods and their animal inhabitants. She acquired a job through the school's placement office doing line drawings for a book on… antique furniture. Then, drawing charts, graphs, and maps and using her knowledge of fine arts printing to prepare materials for commercial printing. She showed her work, personal and commercial, to publishers in Boston and Houghton Mifflin bought the rights to a print to use as an illustration and signed her to illustrate The Black Cat by Edgar Allen Poe. Continuing to focus on her own work, participating in gallery shows, and teaching printmaking, Ms. Lang also illustrated textbooks and magazines. She enjoyed using the articles and stories as a source of ideas to incorporate images from her own experience, express ideas, and still remain faithful to the text. Illustrating well-written short stories has been especially inspirational and satisfying, as it joins her literary and artistic interests. Her books combine her own self-expression with her daughter, Esme, as a model, objects from her life, and feelings and themes she wished to portray into a published commercial work. She discovered that the more freedom the illustrator is given and the better the match between the illustrator and the assignment, the less compromise or distance there is between fine and commercial art. Ms. Lang's past work includes illustration for Robert Frost's The Runaway, Robert Louis Stevenson's My Shadow, James Whitcomb Riley's When the Frost Is on the Punkin, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's The Children's Hour. Ms. Lang teaches at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Massachusetts, and lives in Cambridge with her husband and daughter and their dog.
Edmund Richardson is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the Department of Classics and Ancient History at the University of Durham.