In-depth Written Interview

Shane Evans, interviewed in his home in Kansas City, Missouri on February 5, 2014.

TEACHINGBOOKS: You are a painter, photographer, designer, and illustrator whose work has received many accolades including the Coretta Scott King Book Award. Did you gravitate toward art at an early age?

SHANE EVANS: I always remember drawing, but I didn't think drawing was a big deal until fifth grade, which is when I went to a school for the visual and performing arts. That was when I suddenly realized that this thing that came to me very naturally, this thing that was at my core and what I was most interested in doing, could take structure and be part of my education inside of school.

TEACHINGBOOKS: What was the environment like in the visual and performing arts school you attended?

SHANE EVANS: In school it was almost commonplace for me to be inspired by my peers, because I was surrounded by students who had the same passion for the arts that I did. The school went from fifth grade to twelfth grade, so as time passed, we would see other students' art change as it moved from a fifth-grader's perspective to a senior's perspective. And the twelfth graders, even though they seemed like adults and they were creating some incredible work, were still figuring out what it meant to be an artist. They were going on to get scholarships to colleges so they could continue learning. So as early as fifth grade, I understood two things: college is important, and so is community. You can be insulated, and most artists have to be every now and then, but it's important to be connected to a community.

TEACHINGBOOKS: Was there anything you especially liked to draw or create as a child?

SHANE EVANS: I was really into drawing dogs when I was younger. I did a lot of dog portraits, which my mother has since sent me. I also did comics. I specifically remember one comic book in particular that I'd pass back and forth with a friend of mine. We'd each take it home for a couple of days and work on our section, and then bring it back. This was prior to Xerox machines being as accessible as they are today, so it was really a huge deal for us when we somehow made a couple of copies of it.

TEACHINGBOOKS: What kept you busy as a kid, aside from art?

SHANE EVANS: I was always pretty good at sports. I could pick up anything, like football. I was also a tall child, so I always had a coach or someone getting on me to play basketball. Even though I was a capable athlete, I wasn't really competitive in that regard. I looked at sports as an art form, in a way, and it was more of a creative adventure for me to be on a field than [it was] a competition.

I also spent some amazing summers with my grandparents, who were always really encouraging of me and what I did in my life. They lived in a small town outside of Buffalo and I spent all my time there climbing trees and going out to different ponds and farms, just living this country kind of life.

TEACHINGBOOKS: What led you to the illustration program at Syracuse University?

SHANE EVANS: I actually moved from Buffalo to Rochester, New York, before ninth grade, and fortunately there was a school for the visual and performing arts there too. So from one school to the other, I had the same flow and received the same level of encouragement to work on my art and make college a priority. With both schools the message was, this is what you do: you stay on the education track.

I ended up applying to a bunch of colleges and decided to attend Syracuse. It was a good decision on many levels. In retrospect, I think one reason it was a good choice for me is that the university environment gave me a broader perspective about what else is going on in the world, beyond my focus on art and the art community. I saw there was a bigger world out there.

TEACHINGBOOKS: How did you get your start as a professional artist once you graduated from college?

SHANE EVANS: Getting started was an adventure. Right around the final semester of my senior year, there was a lot of buzz going on with people thinking about jobs and the future. Until that point, I really wasn't thinking about it. I'd been living more in the moment, finishing projects.

Then one day, while I was working at the [copy shop] at school, a friend of mine came up with an application for an internship at Rolling Stone in her hand. I made a copy for myself, and I distinctly remember her saying to me that I'd better not get that internship, or she'd be mad. But I did—I got the internship. And at almost the same time, I got a job offer from Hallmark, which had recently sent representatives to campus to interview seniors. They scheduled a whole day for appointments, but when I went to sign up, the list was completely filled. So I just drew a line at the bottom of the list, and signed my name on that line.

That was a big moment for me, deciding not to turn away from an opportunity just because it seemed to be closed to me. People will often say, "I can't draw a straight line," and when I drew that line and signed my name on it, I was thinking I might just be changing my entire life's course. It was a moment in time when I listened to what I call the first voice, which you might call instinct, over the second voice, which is the voice of self-doubt.

I ended up taking the Rolling Stone internship for the summer, and then I went to Hallmark in Kansas City. Looking back, my stint in New York was my introduction to the publishing world, because I made some good connections during my internship and I was able to touch base with people face-to-face. All those experiences contributed to where I am today.

TEACHINGBOOKS: International travel became an important part of your life shortly after you moved to Kansas City.

SHANE EVANS: After a year or two there, I made a commitment to myself to travel outside the country every year. So the first place I visited was Japan, and then Venezuela, and then Burkina Faso in West Africa. It just grew from there. What I was doing by traveling was teaching myself more and more about breaking barriers of fear. For me, traveling was also a search to understand myself, because there's nothing more humbling than being in a place where you can't communicate the way you do on a daily basis when you speak the same verbal language. Knowing I'm going to come away from a trip with a different perspective is what commits me to the journey.

TEACHINGBOOKS: Many children's book illustrators worked at Hallmark. Can you please talk about your experience working there?

SHANE EVANS: I sort of looked at Hallmark as graduate school. I was learning from all these talented artists who were coming in from all over the world, and we were all working at a company that made a lot of money creating art. It was hard for me, at that age, to grasp the scope of it. But throughout my experience there, I was very eager and willing to learn, which meant meeting everyone from business people to art people, and learning as much as possible from everyone.

After seven years at Hallmark I decided to move on. I'd been illustrating children's books for a couple of years at that point, and other projects kind of took hold of me. I was ready for whatever work would come next.

TEACHINGBOOKS: Among the many picture books you've illustrated, several are biographies. What is the process like for you when you work on a biographical picture book?

SHANE EVANS: Well, I think the question with any book is, where am I going with this? What do I know? For example, Black Jack by Charles Smith began with several years of dialogue between Charles and me. Even so, when I got started researching, I realized I didn't actually know that much about Jack Johnson. The more I read, though, the more I started thinking, man, this cat was a rebellious individual on a whole other level. I hadn't understood how intense it must have been for him, breaking barriers at a time when the media coverage and the amount of scrutiny he received were so strong.

For me, the process and progression of a book usually builds in an organic way, depending on what information is available. As an illustrator, I have a structure to work with that is word-based, but those words are often open to interpretation. Someone recently asked me if the events in When Harriet Met Sojourner actually happened. My answer was yes . . . I guess. Somebody witnessed them being in the same place, but there isn't any recorded dialogue about it. Nobody was hovering over their shoulder while they met. So I do as much as I can to enhance the words through imagery, to strengthen the dynamics of the scenes that show these two important people occupying the same space.

TEACHINGBOOKS: Some of your biographies focus on living legends, like Magic Johnson and Shaquille O'Neal.

SHANE EVANS: Yes, and those biographies were fun to work on because I actually met the people at the heart of the books. I met Magic Johnson one night with Taye Diggs, who wrote Chocolate Me. Taye was working on a movie called Brown Sugar, and I think Magic was one of the producers. There were some other actors there, and we all just sat there with Magic Johnson as he told us stories of his rivalries with Bird and Jordan, and all kinds of things. The conversation didn't directly connect to the book, but it helped to inform me about the man.

Same thing with Shaq. At the time I met him, he was 26 and at the prime of his basketball career, and I thought it was great that he took this moment to stop to do a children's book.

TEACHINGBOOKS: How do you go about research?

SHANE EVANS: Everyone's research style is different. I watch films and old documentaries, and I'll dig into books. I really like the research process, although I also try to allow the art to come naturally as much as I can—and allowing that to happen requires me to do some research into myself and my own experience, too.

TEACHINGBOOKS: Many of your books concentrate on African American culture and history.

SHANE EVANS: They do. I remember one time I was out in Kansas speaking to kids, and one child asked me something to the effect of, "Why are there only black or brown people in your books?" It was one of those Q and A moments that had me stumped. I ultimately felt the only answer was the most honest answer: there are many stories out there, and some are tragedies and others are triumphs. People from all backgrounds love these stories. The color of the people in the stories does not dictate the value of the stories, and the people in my books are the humans who happen to play a part in the particular stories in those books.

Now, I will also say that my books tend to concentrate on African American culture and history because, in part, I'm pursuing my own interests. It's also partly due to the types of projects that come my way. Sometimes when a publisher sees possibility in a genre, they'll want to continue that vein. I came into the publishing world at a time when there was a high demand for African American stories to be written down. A lot of them had been told orally for years, but right around the time I started illustrating, there was a big push for them to be transcribed and published with imagery.

TEACHINGBOOKS: Underground: Finding the Light to Freedom is a significant story about the Underground Railroad for which you received the Coretta Scott King Award for illustration. How did this story come to you?

SHANE EVANS: Underground was a project that actually came to me while I was in Japan, sitting on a train. I just started to draw. The core of the book was basically completed in one sitting. It was one of the most honest things I'd ever done. And for it to receive the acclaim that it did, knowing that it came to me so naturally, said a lot and meant a lot to me. It was a pivotal point in my career, receiving the Coretta Scott King award and then realizing that that little symbol on the jacket meant something to do with excellence. As a person, it allowed me to really start trusting my heart on projects. Underground led to We March, and even though there are generations separating the stories, they are still connected through a related and unbroken chain of events.

TEACHINGBOOKS: There is a simplicity to Underground and We March, but they are both very deep, powerful books.

SHANE EVANS: What's interesting to me about the simplicity of Underground is that it's something that happened as a result of me both illustrating and writing the book. I established this back-and-forth process and rhythm in which I'd draw and then write, then write and then draw, over and over. Once I had that process in place, I realized it was the most effective way for me to work as both author and illustrator. When my editor and I committed to a second book in We March, I wasn't looking to repeat Underground so much as I was looking to repeat the simplicity and success of the structure and process, hoping to effectively tell another story in the same way.

TEACHINGBOOKS: You have worked with some incredible poets, including bell hooks and Hope Anita Smith. Is illustrating poetry different from illustrating prose?

SHANE EVANS: What's beautiful about poetry, to me, is that it usually allows the illustrator a lot of freedom to show emotions through pictures.

I think it's not uncommon for artists and authors to connect while working on a book, and I try to be vigilant about making that connection somehow. Working with bell on Homemade Love, I was able to spend a few moments with her in person, and we also had conversations over the phone. It was always so interesting to listen to her; she has this really beautiful voice. And her language, her writing in this book spoke to me in these big, giant colors. So Homemade Love was just full of color for me.

How a Door Closes was a beautiful piece too, in that each poem was seemingly disconnected to the one coming after it, but they all needed to be together to tell the story. Hope Anita Smith presented a challenge through her poetry in that sense, and I really appreciated it.

TEACHINGBOOKS: What types of media do you like to work with in your art?

SHANE EVANS: I've used all kinds. Book-wise, I mostly work in oils, but I will also use pencil and ink, and I'll incorporate the computer into the process. I look at all these things as tools. Right now I'm working on a collage.

It's interesting when I think about what media I've worked with over the years, and what techniques I've used. I have two shows coming up, one at a gallery in Kansas City, and the other out in Topeka for the sixtieth anniversary of Brown v. Board [of Education], and I've been pulling out all these old paintings and illustrations that I've had tucked away for a long time. It's unusual for me to look at these pieces closely again, because most of the time I'll finish a project and I'll immediately move on to the next thing. The book comes out, and the art is put away.

What happens to me when I finally go back and look at the art is, I take in all the pieces, and then I think, man, I don't even know how I painted that. I'll have to sit down and restudy my own hand. Because in some ways—and I think a lot of us are like this—I'm learning a new approach as I go, with each piece.

No matter what media I use, though, the sketching is my favorite part. I love to sketch. If it were up to me, I'd just sketch. I think it's the most honest image a person can create. Once it's done, then you refine it, and as you refine it, you also define the technique. For me, the refining and defining is a constant learning process.

TEACHINGBOOKS: You illustrated the Shanna Show series of books, which ultimately Disney made into a series of animated shorts.

SHANE EVANS: That was a cool process, watching Disney take the books and then interpret them for animation. The way they wanted the shorts done required more than my hand was capable of doing, so a company out in Burbank would do the lift, and I helped out with character design and things like that. The Shanna Show aired on the Disney Channel for a number of years, and then Shane's Kindergarten Countdown spun off from that. You can probably find them on YouTube.

TEACHINGBOOKS: Please talk about Chocolate Me, which is a successful collaboration with Taye Diggs that addresses skin color and teasing in a very direct way.

SHANE EVANS: Chocolate Me is the result of two old friends coming together for a project. Taye and I talk about skin color in a way that may be new to some ears. We wanted to reinforce the fact that sometimes we have to talk about difficult things, because children are going through it.

I've had conversations with editors about the point in history when they recall the word "black" starting to be used to describe people. When that happened, a lot of people said that black doesn't describe who those people really are. Chocolate, unlike black, is ambiguous. We liked that ambiguity.

TEACHINGBOOKS: In addition to painting and illustration, you are also a musician and a furniture designer.

SHANE EVANS: While I was at Hallmark, I picked up metal smithing and then forging. It was really interesting to me because I took to it very, very naturally, almost as if somewhere in my DNA, there is a blacksmith. From there, I started making furniture. The more I did it, the more I thought, this is amazing—I can build something for myself. Whatever I needed, I would build it.

I picked up music earlier; I was doing it my senior year in high school and I just kept going. I play guitar, but more recently I've started to believe that you can play any instrument that's in front of you if you can listen. I've picked up drums, djembe, bass, xylophone here and there; I look at them all as different media. When I pick up crayons or colored pencils or the computer for my art, it's the same deal. It's as if I've taken my artistic idea from one form and moved it to another.

It's all storytelling, and music has been amazing for me because people just connect to it. I'll play in front of children, and they immediately start digging it, because it's a way that everybody can communicate, through listening and singing and dancing. It's a big part of my life.

TEACHINGBOOKS: What is a typical day like for you?

SHANE EVANS: I try to have structure to my days. I start off as early as possible and I like to beat the sun if I can. I have three dogs, so I walk them in the morning. Then everybody's crazy, getting off to their day. My daughter is sixteen now so she's more independent about getting herself from place to place.

I live about ten blocks from my studio, and I head there while it's still early to get some reading done and take care of e-mails and things that come up. Then I try to latch on to a creative wave, and do as much work as I can.

My studio is kind of a visible place, so I have a lot of people coming in and out during the day. That's great because I get to listen to some amazing stories. It's always good to stop and listen. I like hearing what's happening inside my community and being a part of it.

TEACHINGBOOKS: You've purposely made your studio into a public space. What inspired you to do that?

SHANE EVANS: When I was around eleven or twelve, I was introduced to an artist who lived in Buffalo. He had this beautiful old loft space, and I was able to go there and see his art. He made huge drawings with graphite pencil, and I remember he kept a large coffee can full of sharpened pencils, because he would draw a face or portrait that might be 5' by 5', and he would draw every strand of hair on his subject's head. It was like Chuck Close reality-type work. This man allowed me into his studio as he was working and living in this space, and the thought came to me that I wanted to have a studio like that one day.

It took me some years to get to that point. It was a while before I was able and ready to buy a studio, and I spent a lot of years in the city looking at all these abandoned buildings and getting a sense of their potential. Anyone who's ever done any kind of rehab or remodeling work knows it takes a lot of energy.

But when I finally got into this space, I started thinking, what am I going to be doing in this 2,000 square-foot place, just sitting in the middle of it, not sharing it with others? So I started organizing these events where I'd open the doors for the community to come in, and it turned into a regular thing where musicians and artists would visit.

When that started happening I sort of took a step back, thinking, wow, I'm on the other side of the art. Suddenly I was in stepping into more of a managerial or directorial role. That gave me a lot of insight.

TEACHINGBOOKS: What do you do when you get stuck?

SHANE EVANS: If I can walk away, I'll walk away. I'll allow for some time to do something else that's creative. I'll do my best not to be idle during this time, because for me, creativity sparks creativity. I'm glad I play music because a lot of times, I'll sit down at the guitar for a while and lay down some tracks. That helps a lot. Or I'll take a walk. It's these small types of creative diversions that get me started again.

TEACHINGBOOKS: You get to speak to a lot of students. What do you like to tell them?

SHANE EVANS: I tell them to dream. And I tell them that if they don't know what their dream is, then they've got to work on listening to that first voice, the voice that is speaking from a place of instinct and not of doubt. It's something I work on, too, listening for the rhythm and beat of that first voice.

TEACHINGBOOKS: Is there anything else you'd like readers to know about you?

SHANE EVANS: I'd like readers to know that I'm excited. I'm always excited to create. There are times when everybody gets worn out, but I think if you're tired from something you're passionate about, you just have to keep going. I have this idea that when the going gets tough, things will always come around by the 101^st time you try to succeed. If you stop at 100, you may have missed out on an opportunity, or missed finding success at what you've been working so hard on. So I try to keep that fire under me lit, the one that keeps me pushing through and keeps me excited to create. I encourage everybody to keep going, because there is always going to be a beautiful story to tell in the end.

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