In-depth Written Interview

James Dean, interviewed in his home in Savannah, Georgia, on February 28, 2014.

TEACHINGBOOKS: You are a talented artist and the creator of Pete the Cat, the famous subject of a beloved, bestselling, and multi-award-winning children's book series. What first got you interested in art?

JAMES DEAN: I owe a lot of what I do now to my father, who was a self-taught artist. One of my earliest memories is the assassination of John F. Kennedy, which happened when I was five years old. After the assassination, my father made a charcoal drawing of President Kennedy, and he sent it to the Kennedy Library. He got a letter back from Jacqueline Kennedy. I don't know if it actually had a real signature, but nonetheless, when you're a little kid and your father gets a letter from Jacqueline Kennedy, that's a pretty big deal. I think that affected me from an early age. I don't remember my father ever actually teaching me or talking to me about drawing, but he was still setting an example. He did a lot of paintings, and I would draw comic book characters.

TEACHINGBOOKS: What was your childhood like, growing up in Alabama?

JAMES DEAN: I lived around Huntsville from first through seventh grade. Then my father left my family. He didn't support us, so it was up to my mother to provide for three children. We moved to a little town called Fort Payne, where my mother's family is from, up in the mountains of north Alabama close to Tennessee. It's a very beautiful place. My mother worked hard in the textile mills trying to make enough money for us to get by, so it was kind of a hard time. But it was also a good time. There were a lot of really great things about being there. I especially loved running around in the mountains, and I was always drawing. I loved being in a little town, and I enjoyed high school.

TEACHINGBOOKS: Did you know as a young person that you would pursue a creative career?

JAMES DEAN: I actually had an idea that I wanted to be a musician. Before he left, my father had this dream that I was going to be a concert pianist. We were not very well off, but he managed to buy a piano for me and pay for lessons.

I kept at it through high school and I was in some little bands. But in the end, even though it was nice to think about being a musician, it didn't feel like a good choice. I had watched my dad, who was a really good artist and a very talented draftsman, and he never made any money doing that. As the oldest child, I felt like I had to be responsible and make responsible choices. I always worked hard in school, so I had good grades, and I was good at math. I was around a lot of engineers when we lived in Huntsville, because the Redstone Arsenal is out there, and I always thought engineers were cool. In the mid-seventies, the economy wasn't very good, but I knew they were looking for more engineers. So I decided study electrical engineering at Auburn University.

As soon as I started my classes, I realized a lot of the other students were picking up the material faster than I was. But I couldn't think of anything else to do that would ensure me a job when I graduated. So I stuck it out, and I got through engineering school and went to work for Georgia Power Company when I got out.

TEACHINGBOOKS: Please talk about your transition from electrical engineering to art.

JAMES DEAN: When I was in college, any time I saw the art students drawing buildings or trees in the park, I'd get very envious. The whole time I was in school I wanted to do something like that, but I was afraid I couldn't make a living doing it. Finally, though, in my last semester, I had some free hours and I took a basic drawing class. After a few weeks my instructor started coming around telling me that I was doing a good job, and by the end, he was trying to talk me into staying longer and studying art. That made a big impression on me.

When I graduated I started working as an electrical engineer, but I also had a drawing of the Auburn University mascot that I wanted to try to sell in local bookstores. When I went to have prints made, the printer talked me out of the idea. He said it wouldn't reproduce well and it was going to be expensive.

After that I got discouraged, and I quit drawing for ten years. I figured maybe I'd study art when I was sixty-five and retired. But over the next few years, I started realizing I wasn't really satisfied. Engineering was fine, but it didn't feel like what I was supposed to be doing. I started drawing again in my spare time, and I became obsessed with it. I joined an artists' co-op in Athens, Georgia, where I lived, and one Saturday a month, I'd work in the gallery, where they let me hang my art.

One day I drew a picture of a local blues club and made prints, and within two weeks, I'd sold three or four of them. I thought, wow, okay. Then I started drawing pictures of some other local hangouts and restaurants, and before long, it was like everybody in town knew about my artwork. That was when I started toying with the idea of doing art full time. And in 1997, when I was thirty-nine years old, I quit my job to spend a year seeing what I could do with it.

TEACHINGBOOKS: Have you always been drawn to painting cats?

JAMES DEAN: When I first started painting, I was mostly doing landscapes and pictures of old barns and houses in watercolor and pen and ink. But one day a friend of mine, the manager of a local frame shop, asked me to contribute a picture for a fundraiser at the animal shelter. The next time I saw her I realized I'd forgotten about her request, so I went right over to the art store and bought a paintbrush and three colors of paint. I had a picture of a cat with me that I'd cut out of a magazine, and I took the picture and the supplies over to a restaurant. Over the next half hour, while I was eating lunch, I painted a picture of a cat on a piece of paper. The shelter put it in the auction and it sold for $300. That was the first cat I ever painted.

TEACHINGBOOKS: What inspired the character of Pete the Cat?

JAMES DEAN: For many years I had a cat named Slim. One of my friends was always trying to get me to paint Slim, and I always told her I didn't want to be a cat artist. I'd seen a lot of cat art that I thought was really cheesy. I wanted to be an artist and I wanted to make a living, but I wanted to at least be painting something that I was honestly happy about painting.

Then one day, Slim passed away. I didn't think I could ever replace her, but I went to the shelter and happened to find this tiny black cat in a cage. I thought black cats were bad luck, but this little cat was sticking its paw out and it wanted to play, even though it was in bad shape. I ended up taking him home, and that was Pete the Cat.

Pete would sit on my lap or nearby while I painted my landscapes, and one day I noticed he had a particularly thoughtful look on his face. I went to get my camera to take a picture of him. When I came back, of course, Pete was gone, but I still wanted to capture that look. I normally worked from photographs, so this forced me to sit down and try to remember what I saw, to work out of my imagination and memory. As I sat, I drew a little picture of Pete. I drew him with a long tail, and made him blue, and left total white space behind him.

That was my first picture of Pete the Cat. I showed it to my friend at the frame shop and when she saw it, she just went crazy. Then I took it to an art festival, and a lady who saw it Saturday came back Sunday to buy it. She said she had to come back to get it because she couldn't get it off her mind. And that was something, to know I'd really touched someone with a painting.

TEACHINGBOOKS: You originally painted Pete the Cat with an adult audience in mind. What prompted you to consider Pete as a potential character for a children's book?

JAMES DEAN: Within a year or so after making that first picture of Pete, I decided I was going to stop making landscapes and sell Pete the Cat paintings at festivals, instead. At the very first show I did in 1999, I was approached by a guy who looked at my Pete the Cat paintings and said, this should be a children's book. That planted the seed in my head.

TEACHINGBOOKS: You connected with Eric Litwin, the eventual author of many Pete the Cat books, in a wonderful and unusual way. Would you share that story?

JAMES DEAN: As I started selling Pete the Cat paintings at shows, more and more people started approaching me about wanting to do a children's book. That included a guy named Eric Litwin. Eric knew about my artwork from festivals and galleries, but I didn't know him.

Eric entertained children for a living. He was out visiting schools, writing stories and songs for kids, and he'd written one particular story about a little girl called I Love My White Shoes. One day when he was telling the story, he plugged Pete the Cat into the role of the little girl. The response he got from kids was totally different.

Not long after I happened to be driving into Atlanta, which I seldom did. I was in my old 1965 Chevy with a big painting of Pete the Cat on the door. As I stopped at a traffic light, I noticed this guy standing on the corner. And he says to me, I just recorded a song for you that I want you to hear.

I looked at him and I thought, this guy must be losing his mind. But as the light changed, I told him to send it to me, and I drove off.

That guy was Eric Litwin. And when I got home, I had the music and story for I Love My White Shoes in my e-mail. I was immediately crazy about it. Eric later told me that he was doing recording at his friend's studio in downtown Atlanta that day. He normally never took walks, but he just happened to decide to take a walk the day we met.

TEACHINGBOOKS: You and Eric Litwin initially self-published Pete the Cat: I Love My White Shoes. How did that first book grow into a series with a publishing house?

JAMES DEAN: It was a little crazy when we started. We didn't have an editor. It took us two years to put the book together. But once we self-published we sold about 7,000 copies in under a year.

After the book came out, a bookstore owner from south Alabama happened to be in Atlanta, and she saw Pete the Cat on a poster I had done for a road race. She took a picture of it, and started showing the picture around her town. She said she wanted someone to draw a picture like that for a poster she needed. Someone who saw the photo told her, oh, that's Pete the Cat—maybe you can get in touch with James Dean.

She called me up and asked me to come down to see her. I told my wife I thought I should go, even though I didn't think we'd make any money from the project. When I went I brought a copy of I Love My White Shoes and showed it to the bookstore owner.

She flipped out over it and asked if I'd mind if she sent the book to one of her publishing reps in New York. I told her to go ahead. And on December 17^th, 2008, on my 51^st birthday, the phone rang, and it was my future publisher saying they wanted to publish Pete the Cat. And that's the crazy story of how we got the book to New York City.

TEACHINGBOOKS: Pete the Cat and His Magic Sunglasses was written by your wife, Kimberly Dean. What is that collaborative process like?

JAMES DEAN: When Kim and I first got married in 2004, we talked about making a book together. But when we actually sat down to do it, we got into a fuss because I'm very difficult to work with. I have an idea of what I want things to be—everybody does—but when you get more than one person involved, you have to be more patient. Kim and I had to figure out how to work together.

Now, the way we do it is Kim will approach me with an idea: Pete is going to do this—what do you think about it? Generally, I won't say anything right away. I'll spend some time thinking about it, and then I'll come back, and I'll add to the idea. We'll just keep bouncing ideas off of each other for weeks and months until it works. It's a very long process, but we've done really well. Kim gives me a lot of leeway, because Pete the Cat is my character. So she gives me a lot of ideas, a lot of options, and usually among those options there's something I'll like a lot. Sometimes I'll throw something out that she likes. The bottom line is that I also want her to be very happy with the end result.

TEACHINGBOOKS: Pete the Cat and His Magic Sunglasses has such a beautiful, bright palette. How did the concept for this book evolve?

JAMES DEAN: I am so happy about Magic Sunglasses. Every time I look at it, I just love it. The back-story on Magic Sunglasses begins at an annual arts festival in Atlanta called Inman Park. There's a parade every year, and one year there was a guy in the parade dressed up like the wicked witch from The Wizard of Oz, and he was also wearing these really cool, blue-mirror sunglasses.

After the parade, he came by my tent and I got to talking to him. I said, man, where did you get those sunglasses? They are fantastic. He told me a friend had given them to him as a gift, so he didn't really know where they came from.

A year later, he headed back to the festival and came right over to me and handed me the sunglasses. We were all floored, because here it was, a full year later, and he remembered. It was such a nice thing that he did.

I took the sunglasses home and started wearing them. I told my wife that they were really cool, because they made everything brighter. They made the grass greener, and the sky bluer. And Kim wrote Magic Sunglasses from that concept.

TEACHINGBOOKS: You've been painting Pete the Cat for many years now. Has your artistic approach changed over time?

JAMES DEAN: In 1999, when I did the first picture of Pete the Cat, he was just black pen-and-ink lines and a blue body. He didn't have whiskers, and his eyes didn't have a color. They were just white. It wasn't a fun painting; it was kind of melancholy, as if he were thinking about something. So he started off very different than he is today. He's done in a similar way, but things like the shape of his eyes have changed a lot. I still use pen-and-ink lines, and I use acrylic paint that I build up pretty thickly to make him more opaque.

TEACHINGBOOKS: What was it like for you to illustrate so many different animals for Pete the Cat: Old MacDonald Had a Farm?

JAMES DEAN: For a while, I thought maybe my books were just going to be a world of cats, because for many years now, cats are all I've drawn. I love cats, so they're a pretty safe subject for me. I wasn't really even sure that I could create any other characters. But when it came time to illustrate Old MacDonald Had a Farm, I had to draw all sorts of different animals, and that actually helped me consider more possibilities. I found I liked the frogs in there, and the turtle, and the chicken. By the time I finished illustrating that book, I was happy with those animals, and I found myself wondering if some of them could be bigger characters. So now I'm kind of on a different path, because I'm creating all these friends for Pete the Cat.

TEACHINGBOOKS: What challenges do you face when you are illustrating?

JAMES DEAN: For me, it's knowing when to quit. You have to know when you're done. Sometimes that happens really quickly; some of my best paintings I probably painted in an hour or two. Sometimes the more I work on something, the more it means I'm struggling, and I do paint over things all the time.

But then there are moments, especially with the children's books, when all the colors in the painting will suddenly pop. When that happens, I know I'm done. Until then, I'll be repeating the process of working, stepping back and looking at it from across the room, then working some more, until it's finished.

TEACHINGBOOKS: When you meet with educators, what do you like to tell them?

JAMES DEAN: I am so thankful for what teachers do. When I talk to teachers, I often speak about the educators who influenced me. I remind them that what they do is incredible, and that the things they say to children can have a huge influence on a child's confidence.

I think that as a child, getting the right word here or the wrong word there from an adult can completely change your direction. One thing I realize now about my own father is that, while he didn't encourage me to pursue art, he always made me feel like I was intelligent and capable. He would quiz me on things. He gave me problems to solve. I always had the sense that he thought I was intelligent, and that was huge for me. I think feedback like that from teachers and parents can make such a big impression on children.

TEACHINGBOOKS: What do you talk about with kids?

JAMES DEAN: The first thing I usually do when I talk to kids is speak to them in cat language while singing songs like Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star. I'll do a little bit for you: meow, meow, meow, meow, meow, meow, meow, meow, meow, meow, meow, meow, meow, meow. Believe it or not, that's really one of the best ways for me to first connect with kids. Then, I like to talk to them about how important it is to never quit if they want something, especially when it comes to the arts. I tell them my story, about how I quit for ten years—and yet, I came back to art. I want them to keep going and believe that it's possible to succeed. I ask them to try not to let anything or anyone discourage them.

TEACHINGBOOKS: What is a typical day like for you?

JAMES DEAN: It's interesting; my wife, who is also a sculptor, is the type of artist who can only work in spurts. She'll work for a month or two at a time, and then she'll kind of run out of steam, and need to build it back up. I'm the type person who gets up every morning, gets a cup of coffee, and goes into the studio. For the most part, I can paint every day. I'm always working.

TEACHINGBOOKS: Do you have time to spend on creative pursuits outside Pete the Cat?

JAMES DEAN: I'm taking guitar lessons. My wife's dad has a collection of fourteen guitars, so I've spent a lot of time with him. I still love music.

I'm also doing landscapes a little bit. I keep thinking that maybe someday I'll have a little more spare time, and now that we live in Savannah, I'm surrounded by these incredibly beautiful trees with Spanish moss in the branches. I keep wanting to do some watercolors of those trees. Maybe I'll get to that.

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