#ashleybryan

Congrats to luminary artist Ashley Bryan on receiving two Coretta Scott King Awards and a Newbery Award for his beautiful children’s book “Freedom Over Me”!

Meet Ashley Bryan, photographed in Islesford.

“Here’s some nice light. You should take my picture here,” he says.

I make a few digital photos under the sky light. He’s right, the light is really nice. Of course, he would know — he’s a renowned artist. It’s 2016 in late September in Islesford on Little Cranberry Island, off the coast of Mount Desert Island.

I’m eating breakfast with 93-year-old Ashley Bryan, who is known not only as an artist but also as a writer, a humanitarian and a performer whose everyday speech seems to come out in verse.

“You got other visitors today?” asks his friend, Phillip, moments later. It’s an appropriate question. Ashley often has summer visitors, sometimes by appointment, often unannounced. But this time of year the off-island visitors slow down. I have some rare quiet time with him, aside from a few island friends coming in and out of his home, including my hosts, Donna and Henry Isaacs. Phillip is here to draw and brought ham and cheese from off the island, for lunch.

“I don’t know if anyone’s stopping in,” says Ashley, who was born in Harlem and raised in the Bronx. He first lived on Great Cranberry Island in the late ’40s and eventually made Islesford his home in the mid-’50s.

Phillip wants to know why I’m visiting Ashley. It’s the early days of this project, and Ashley is the first person I am photographing for it. I’m not accustomed to explaining the project clearly and I stumble with my words.

“I think it will mean a lot, Yoon, because Maine has so small percentage of non-white people,” Ashley saves me as my explanation trails. “The more others see images, the more they think about more than just their own little area, which does not include any of these people.”

I feel relief and some validation for an idea that I was finally putting into motion. Ashley is no stranger to being in the minority. Despite growing up in a diverse neighborhood in the Bronx, he was the only black student at The Cooper Union, a prestigious art college that accepted him on the quality of his portfolio while other colleges had rejected him on the basis of his race.

He was drafted while in college into a segregated U.S. Army and spent his post-graduate years studying at Columbia University and traveling through Europe on a Fulbright. He’s published over 50 books and received numerous awards including the Coretta Scott King–Virginia Hamilton Lifetime Achievement Award, Laura Ingalls Wilder Medal, and the New York Public Library’s Literary Lions award. Libraries, children’s rooms and festivals are named after him in the United States and Africa. Little Cranberry Island is also home to the Ashley Bryan Center and the Ashley Bryan Storytelling Pavillion. He retired from teaching as a professor emeritus from Dartmouth College.

-

“Oh, that makes such a difference,” he says later in his upstairs studio, stepping back with his arms behind his back and looking at the few brushstrokes he’s made. He’s painting flowers from his neighbor’s garden. Ashley explains that he’s constantly seeking to discover something new in his work, while maintaining a “family resemblance” to his past work. I ask him how he maintains that motivation after a lifetime of work and achievements.

“The one thing that I tell people is remembering the child in you; that spirit of discovery and adventure with each day,” he says. “Now children, each day they’ll start out with this desire to explore. They’ll wake up with ‘Wow, I don’t know anything. I’m going to go at it.’ It’s that spirit of adventure and discovery of the child that I try to retain.”

“Good morning,” calls Susan, a neighbor and artist.

Ashley brings me to the desk in his studio to read me work by a poet that has inspired his new book. He then shows me a beautiful painting inspired by that work. At 93, he is busy creating. He has just published a children’s book, “Freedom Over Me,” based on slave documents from 1828, that was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize.

“Now what’s happening today for us?” Ashley says to Susan as she comes upstairs.

“You’re having people for dinner tonight,” she says.

“Oh, that’s right,” he says, and Susan reminds him that he’s cooking lobsters for his guests. They chat for a few minutes and she turns to go. “Enjoy your walk, and stop back and say hi to see how I’m getting along with the new illustration.”

-

“This is relish. I love the flavor of it,” Ashley says, as we sit down for lunch. He shows me a container given to him by the Islesford Dock Restaurant. Ashley invites us to make whatever we wish from the assortment of foods spread across the table, including Phillip’s off-island ham. Phillip explains that it’s hard to get things on the island that Ashley calls home year-round.

“In 1946, when Skowhegan [School of Art] opened its very first year, I was given a scholarship, and that’s what opened the whole thing of where I am today,” Ashley says between bites. “I knew nothing of myself, other than that I loved to draw and paint and I was always drawing and painting. I had no sense of direction...it saved my life.”

“There’s more bread, so eat it all up. Keep going. And there’s more meat, too.”

I ask Ashley if he misses city life. No, he says, because the city is in him — the museums, movies and theater. The island allows him to tap into an inner quiet, a quiet that nothing can spoil. He says he can carry this feeling anywhere in the world, and it is the reason he chooses to stay.

He asks me whether I like living in Maine and if intend on staying. My honest response is that the first year was hard. I didn’t know a lot of people. “And they don’t come to you,” Ashley says.

“No, they don’t,” I respond.