Mary GrandPré
| Mary GrandPré | |
|---|---|
GrandPré in 2011
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| Born |
February 13, 1954 South Dakota, USA |
| Nationality | American |
| Education | |
| Known for | Illustration |
| Notable work |
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| Website | marygrandpre |
Mary GrandPré (born February 13, 1954) is an American illustrator best known for her cover and chapter illustrations of the Harry Potter books in their U.S. editions published by Scholastic. She received a Caldecott Honor citation in 2015 for illustrating Barb Rosenstock's The Noisy Paint Box: The Colors and Sounds of Kandinsky's Abstract Art. GrandPré, who creates her artwork with paint and pastels, has illustrated more than twenty books and has appeared in gallery exhibitions and periodicals such as The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, and The Wall Street Journal.
Mary GrandPré was born in South Dakota, but spent most of her life in neighboring Minnesota. She began drawing when she was only five years old, beginning with a reproduction of Walt Disney's cartoon character "Mickey Mouse". By age ten, she was imitating Salvador Dalí, experimenting with stretched objects painted with oils, before graduating to copying black-and-white photos from the encyclopedia. She was a Fine Arts major at Pomona College and was in her mid-twenties before she considered art school, having supposed illustration to be "a boring, commercial thing". She graduated from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design in 1981.
After her graduation, GrandPré spent several years as a waitress while working to be noticed by ad agencies and attempting to find her own style. Her drawing evolved into what she calls "soft geometry", featuring pastels used in a "colorful, light-hearted, and whimsical" manner. Her work is created completely by hand, without using a computer.
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