Jake Makes a World
Author: Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts
For Juniors/KS2
Price 12.95 hardback
Book(s) at £ 12.95 hardback
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Jake Makes a World This lovely picture book pays homage to Jacob Lawrence, famous for his series of paintings of the Great Migration (the movement of black Americans from the rural south to the northern states during the last century). It gives a lyrical portrait of a crucial period in his childhood when as a 13 year old he moved to Harlem in the 1930's. Jake has a fascination for all the noise and colour of the neighbourhood, a developing visual attention to his surroundings and a feel for his community which the illustrator, Christopher Myers, renders in an exuberant manner with images that evoke his subject's characteristic style and those of other famous artists, most notably Matisse. The boy's interest in art is encouraged in an after-school club where he can experiment with making masks and colouring cut-paper shapes with which he constructs a street scene in miniature within a cardboard box. An end-piece gives a brief biography of the artist and reproduces some of his paintings.

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