Bound To Stay Bound

Booklist - 11/01/2014 Mary Nohl, “a little girl with big ideas,” lives in Wisconsin, where she helps her father mix cement and build a cottage on Lake Michigan. In school, she takes shop class instead of cooking. She studies art in college and then travels the world, constantly drawing in her sketchbooks. As an adult living in the childhood house that she helped to build, Mary and her two dogs gather driftwood, stones, and scraps on the beach. She uses these oddments imaginatively, making large concrete creatures in her garden. Through simple words and satisfying illustrations, the husband-and-wife team expresses Mary’s creativity, determination, and practicality. The pictures, created with watercolor, collage, vintage papers, and digital elements, capture ideas as varied as the feel of a long, cold Wisconsin winter; Mary’s active engagement in making sculpture; and her dogs’ satisfaction in helping her. An appended biographical note offers details about Nohl, who died in 2001, and her locally controversial artwork, but the picture book itself is simple, immediate, and well attuned to children. This quiet, engaging offering celebrates the artist’s vision and her idiosyncratic work. - Copyright 2014 Booklist.

School Library Journal - 01/01/2015 PreS-Gr 2—Children are introduced to a lesser-known contemporary Midwestern American artist in this picture-book biography of Mary Nohl (1914–2001). A spare narrative allows the pictures to describe how, from childhood, Nohl's imagination soared as she explored the many interests that led her to combine found objects with cement to create fantastical creatures, eventually installed in the garden surrounding the Lake Michigan home she built with her father. World travels provided further inspiration for her non-traditional, sometimes primitive, art, ably represented here mostly in spreads that convey the scope and variety of Nohl's work. The illustrations combine watercolor with digital painting, collage, and vintage papers, resulting in a soft palette and an uncomplicated, accessible drawing style. Children will delight in the whimsy of the art pieces and their placement in the garden as well as the participation of Mary's dogs, Sassafras and Basil, in the discovery process. An author's note, accompanied by two photographs, gives more detail about Nohl's life and the challenge of preserving her home and garden for public enjoyment.—Marie Orlando, formerly at Suffolk Cooperative Library System, Bellport, NY - Copyright 2015 Publishers Weekly, Library Journal and/or School Library Journal used with permission.

Bulletin for the Center... - 06/01/2015 Even as a child, Mary Nohl likes making things with her hands; as she grows older, her love of art and art-making evolve as she transforms the grounds of her Lake Michigan home into an informal outdoor sculpture gallery, filling it with creations made from cement mixed with beach sand and studded with a variety of found objects. Her dogs offer loyalty and moral support as Nohl constructs her “creatures” from things washed ashore, and “Mary always had room for one more stone, one more shell, and one more friend.” This is an appealing and kid-friendly introduction to Nohl’s art, and creative kids (and collectors of natural objects) will respond to her impulse to make things out of the stuff she had at hand. Though this presentation of her life and her art is pared down and simplified for its young audience, an author’s note does provide more information about Nohl, including the controversy her art caused both during her life (she was derided and her art vandalized) and afterwards (some lakeside neighbors deplored the increased tourist traffic). More photos of her actual artwork (only two small ones are included in the end note) would have been appreciated, but the Küglers’ softly angular mixed media art (which includes traditional watercolor, digital painting, collage, and vintage papers) does a credible job of capturing the friendly and slightly abstracted sensibility of Mary’s folk art creations. This could be paired with Ashley Bryan’s Puppets (BCCB 10/14) for a closer look at making three-dimensional figures from beach detritus or Slaymaker’s Bottle Houses (BCCB 5/04) to expand the look at folk artists, or it could be used as a springboard to making smaller-scale creations out of found objects. JH - Copyright 2015 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois.