The Artist Who Painted a Blue Horse
Am I the only one who thinks that nothing of Carle’s has ever quite measured up to The Very Hungry Caterpillar?
Here, instead of a story, we have animals as works of art, improbably coloured.
Pre-schoolers will enjoy naming the animals and making up their own stories for the orange elephant, the purple fox, the red crocodile, and so on.
The book is a tribute to artist Franz Marc who, like Carle, grew up in Germany (Marc died at the front in World War I).
Carle’s polka-dotted donkey is a protest against the rigours of realism. Kids understand such freedoms. Like Carle and Marc, they know how to make a horse blue.