What Maurice Sendak Taught Me About Art & Influence

As I researched Maurice Sendak, I realized how many times I've looked into an artist, illustrator, or author and discovered interesting details and similarities that reflect my own style and understanding. I don't mean to toot my own horn. That's not what I mean at all. It's something deeper than that.

For this piece, I created something inspired by Where the Wild Things Are. As always, when I sit down to draw, I'm not only drawing one thing. I'm drawing a memory. I'm drawing from influences and inspiration. I'm drawing from all the books, poems, images, and textures that seem to gather around a work until they become part of it.

Sometimes I'm so moved by what I'm creating that I feel compelled to write about it. This is one of those moments. I wanted to share some of those thoughts with you. It's also one of the reasons I created this YouTube channel: to share my love of art, literature, and stories, and to leave something behind for others to discover and pick up along the way.

In this case, one of the threads winding through the web is William Blake. I'm not going deeply into Blake here. I mention him because he mattered to Sendak, and he matters to me. I do believe God shows you signs when you're moving in the right direction, and this felt like one of them. The piece became a conversation between those influences and my own childhood.

This art journey was inspired primarily by Maurice Sendak and his book Where the Wild Things Are, with William Blake woven into the mix. Did you know Sendak owned vintage prints of Blake's Songs of Innocence? That connection was part of the reason I chose a brown sepia pen, using a color reminiscent of Blake's work.

Maurice Sendak and the Emotional World of Childhood

Maurice Sendak understood that childhood isn't always the simple, carefree place adults might imagine. Childhood is strange, beautiful, and bewildering. Even when it comes to something as basic as personal boundaries, children don't always get much say.

Most parents understand that part of their responsibility is to shield their children from harm. Still, when you're little, your world is full of feelings long before you have the language to explain them. Sendak understood that, and he illustrated it beautifully in Where the Wild Things Are.

Maurice Sendak once said that, as a child, he felt books were holy objects, to be caressed, rapturously sniffed, and devotedly cared for. I love that. I really do.

There's something in that description that feels so true to anyone who has genuinely loved books. The smell of paper. The feel of a page. The weight of a book in your hands. The way your hand drags across the page and the sound of the paper as you turn it.

You can escape into another world through a book, just as you can escape reality by creating art. Add a visual imagination to the mix, and poof, there's me.

Books are containers of information and physical experiences. They belong to the senses. They belong to memory.

I'm not going deeply into Blake here because I want him to have his own full debut later. I do want to mention him because he mattered to Sendak, and my grandmother loved his work.

My grandma used to recite a poem from William Blake's Songs of Experience called "The Tyger." She knew I loved big cats and listened when I talked about my dreams for the future. She would buy me books to support those wishes, and she recited the poem to me often.

Literature was a big part of my life because my grandmother shared books with me. Books built a solid foundation for my life. They're in the background of many photographs from the past. They sustained me. They felt like companionship during a lonely childhood, a tradition, and something sacred shared with someone I loved.

That's one of the reasons I created this YouTube channel. I believe everything connects, much like a web, bringing us back and forth through time. Pieces from the past connect with the present and then lead us back again. I was taught the power of a book and the knowledge it can contain. Sendak understood that power too.

The Man Behind the Wild Things

Maurice Sendak is often called one of the greatest children's book artists in history, and his honors certainly reflect his influence. He received the Caldecott Medal, one of the most important awards for children's picture books in the United States. It's awarded annually to the artist of the most distinguished American picture book for children. Sendak also received the Hans Christian Andersen Award, among many other honors.

Of course, I don't think all those awards would have mattered much to him. Ha! I've listened to his interviews, and he seems like he was a lovable curmudgeon.

He illustrated classics by Mother Goose, the Brothers Grimm (I have a copy!), Herman Melville, and Leo Tolstoy. He also collaborated with Else Holmelund Minarik on the beloved Little Bear books, which continue to be a children's favorite through the PBS series.

I mention the awards because they tell only part of the story. The real reason people remember Sendak is his honesty. He was honest about children's fear, mischief, rage, loneliness, fantasy, and transformation.

He didn't make books that lied to children by wrapping everything in sunshine and pretending that was the truth. Children already know what it feels like to be disturbed, frightened, overwhelmed, and vulnerable. Sendak believed fantasy gave them a way to confront those feelings.

That idea is one of the great keys to understanding Where the Wild Things Are. The wild things, the monsters in the forest, represent emotional presences and the shapes feelings can take. Max doesn't simply run away from them. He faces them. He becomes their king. Then he returns home.

Fun fact: the wild things were originally supposed to be horses, but Sendak couldn't draw horses! It was a concept he had worked on for nearly a decade before the book was published.

Through my research, I came across the idea that the wild things could have represented the elders in Sendak's family. I like to think about the story in terms of what it would be like if a child could assert their own boundaries and create a space that belonged entirely to them, somewhere no one could enter, especially adults.

When you're little, you don't always get to have boundaries. Adults can assert themselves in ways that make you uncomfortable. I'm not insinuating anything sinister here, but think about the aunt you barely know who wants to hug or kiss you when you'd rather not. Sometimes a child simply needs space of their own, somewhere they can feel safe. 

Now that I've made that connection, whether it's true or not, I can't unsee it. I've read that adults in Sendak's life sometimes made him uncomfortable. Perhaps his imagination gave that small child the ability to say, "Stop!" in the same way Max does in Where the Wild Things Are.

My interpretation is that the story could also be about boundaries. Sendak understood that children need the ability to say "stop" just as much as adults do. He spoke about how fear and anxiety are part of everyday life for children, and how fantasy can help them tame their wild things. Such a powerful thought. Escapism can be a form of action, a way of doing some deep inner work.

Sendak's own life also shaped the emotional force of his work. He was born in 1928 to Polish-Jewish immigrant parents in Brooklyn, and the shadow of the Holocaust touched his family. Many relatives were lost. Historical grief doesn't simply disappear. It can become part of the emotional fabric of a life, even when it isn't spoken about directly.

One detail I noticed in the illustrations is the yellowing of the wild things' eyes. It made me think about alcoholism and the darker aspects of family life. That's my own visual association, but it's interesting how certain details can lead you down another path of interpretation.

What makes Sendak so compelling is that his books carry both darkness and vitality. They're full of life, humor, movement, appetite, surprise, and visual delight. Compared with many children's books available in 1963, the wild things were ugly and genuinely frightening.

What Children's Books Looked Like Before Sendak

To understand why Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are stood out so sharply when it was published in 1963, it helps to look at the literary landscape of children's books at the time.

What was on the shelves in 1963?

For decades, mainstream children's literature, especially picture books for young children, had been dominated by a safe, reassuring, and often didactic tone. The shelves were filled with:

The "See Jane Run" Era: Early readers and picture books emphasized simple, controlled vocabulary and moral lessons. Think of the wholesome, predictable worlds of the Dick and Jane readers.

Cozy, Domestic Animal Stories: Books like Make Way for Ducklings (1941), the Curious George series, and Margaret Wise Brown's classic Goodnight Moon (1947). These stories generally kept children in safe, warm, and orderly environments, often leading gently toward bedtime.

Mid-Century Optimism: Books designed to reassure children, teach polite manners, and reinforce a neat, orderly picture of childhood without much psychological tension or darkness.

Sendak was self-taught in many ways. He was inspired by Disney's Fantasia, Mickey Mouse, comics, literature, and the visual world around him. Before becoming famous, he worked at FAO Schwarz creating window displays.

I love that detail because it reminds me that I'm not alone in my travels. Artists often arrive where they're going through paths that seem indirect.

He built an entire world within those pages. It's interesting how he created boundaries inside and outside the tight, enclosed borders of his illustrations. The moon, with its passing of time, seems to place Max in another time and place, allowing the world around him to evolve.

Studying Sendak Through My Own Artwork

I began appreciating Sendak more deeply once I attempted to create my own piece influenced by his book. There's a difference between admiring a finished work and trying to understand how it was built.

After creating my own piece inspired by Where the Wild Things Are, I have to give him mad props for all that cross-hatching! My friends, this really started testing my patience. I was relieved I hadn't decided to create an entire spread.

While Sendak spent years thinking about and developing the concept, the intensive illustration and painting of the final book took approximately six months of focused work once he finally sat down to create the artwork. He labored over the details, especially the texture of the monsters' fur and the shifting emotional expressions on Max's face.

When you're the artist creating something yourself, you begin to see how much intention is hidden underneath what initially seems effortless.

At first glance, you might simply call it cross-hatching. The more I looked, however, the more I realized it wasn't loose or casual. It almost has the appearance of a screen, with tiny little boxed areas. Everything feels controlled and methodical, as though a small textural unit is being repeated again and again.

There's patience, discipline, and visual persistence in those tiny cross-hatched squares.

I realized there were some things I might have done differently in my own piece. I would have been even more meticulous in that area. Sendak's cross-hatching is so small, and I finally began to see the pattern more clearly. It's one of those things I noticed more fully after the video was made.

From what I've gathered, Sendak worked through many sketches, often on tracing paper, refining his characters and environments until they felt right. He would then create a dummy book, allowing him to study the pacing, composition, and sequence before moving on to the final artwork.

It also makes me think about the moon as a symbol of passing time. I'm not sure whether Sendak intended it that way, but it's an interesting possibility.

Maurice also used crowquill nibs and ink for those delicate, intricate lines, which I definitely plan to experiment with if I revisit his work. He often used watercolor washes layered over the ink. The colors were frequently subdued, earthy, and muted rather than loud. That palette matters. It allows the mood to gather and leaves room for atmosphere.

When choosing the mediums for my own piece, I did consider using watercolor. However, I'm not an expert with watercolor, and today wasn't the day for me to investigate and work with a medium I don't feel completely comfortable using. So I went with markers.

I chose brown ink with a Copic fine liner marker. Part of me wished for an even darker brown, something closer to a black-brown, almost like mascara. The sepia quality pleased me, though, because it reminded me of William Blake's illuminated pages, something aged, poetic, and inward.

The color I chose has more red or orange in it than I originally intended, which I actually don't mind. It gave the piece a really nice look. Since I have a tiger in the foreground, it turned out to be a happy accident, I suppose. I sketched her in using a colored orange lead mechanical pencil.

William Blake, My Grandmother, and the Tiger

Blake is a whole world in himself, and I don't want to rush into that here. Still, I can't speak honestly about this piece without acknowledging how much Blake has lived in me.

I grew up with those poems. My grandmother recited poetry often, and "The Tyger" was one of the poems that stayed with me so strongly that I can still feel it in my heart all these years later, and still recite from memory the first stanza.

That matters. Childhood encounters with language matter. The rhythms you hear when you're young don't simply leave you. They become part of the pulse of how you think and imagine.

Blake, being both poet and artist, has always fascinated me for that reason, too. He didn't separate word from image. He embodied both. Sendak admired that about him. He once spoke about not fully understanding Blake in a straightforward intellectual way, yet loving him deeply and believing in his passion.

In this piece, I wasn't trying to copy Sendak, and I wasn't trying to become Blake. I was allowing those influences to pass through my own memory, my own hand, and my own movement to create something that belongs to me. Influence isn't imitation. It's a long creative conversation between artists, books, memory, and spirit.

In Maurice's book, Max wears his wolf suit. In mine, I become a girl in a tiger suit, laughing, while the bedroom grows into a forest. That choice wasn't random. The tiger has deep meaning for me, and I'll probably talk more fully about Blake's poem "The Tyger" in another video. It mattered here because Sendak's love for William Blake connects so naturally with my own.

That connection felt like one of those signs that I'm exactly where I need to be. That's why I'm laughing about it.

Also, "The Tyger" appears in Songs of Experience, the counterpart to "The Lamb," which appears in Songs of Innocence.

Here's the video:

https://youtu.be/-_X97hMHU9Q

This piece also connects to other parts of my creative life. In my Velveteen Rabbit video, I talk about having posters of big cats in my bedroom as a child. I also have a video in the making about T.S. Eliot and Practical Cats, with all that playful pen-and-ink energy.

These images, books, and ideas keep circling back to one another. They aren't separate at all. They continue to reaffirm why I'm doing this work.

Growing Into Your Own Artistic Voice

I think Sendak understood the importance of influence. He spoke openly about learning from great artists, painters, and illustrators, and about the importance of returning to the masters for inspiration and refreshment.

He also spoke about how, over time, an artist grows into oneself.

You grow into yourself. Not instantly or all at once. You absorb, practice, love, fail, try again, and slowly discover the blend of influences that becomes your own voice.

He even said that style shouldn't trap an artist. The more styles you have, the better, because otherwise you risk making the same book over and over. I personally have had a fear of inconsistency, as if every work must look exactly the same to count. True artistic life is more flexible than that. It has range. It has different textures and different temperatures.

I'm so relieved to know that another artist I admire reaffirms my unwillingness to be put in a box. My art rarely looks the same, and I rarely use the same medium. At least, that's how it feels to me!

Even with that flexibility, there comes a point when things begin to gel. Sendak felt that Where the Wild Things Are brought him closer to himself than much of his earlier work had. He could still see his influences in it, but they had blended together.

That's such a beautiful way to think about artistic maturity, allowing your influences to become part of your own visual language. Every piece I make feels connected to a larger web. Hence the name Web of Pen.

The creative cycle keeps feeding itself. I don't mean that in a tired or repetitive way. I mean it in a nourishing way. The kind of returning that deepens rather than diminishes. The kind that reminds you that your inner world isn't random. It has patterns and roots.

In this case, the tiger became a central theme and taking point again. Partly because of Blake, of course. "The Tyger" is such a powerful poem, and it has lived with me for so long. But it's also because I loved cats and big cats as a child, and that fascination still lingers.

When elements like the tiger suit appear, or even a tiger calendar on the wall, those things aren't accidents. They're small signals. They're pieces of my own mythology showing up.

Why Where the Wild Things Are Changed Children's Literature

Maurice Sendak had courage. He made unusual work and refused to dilute it. His book challenged many of the unwritten rules of children's publishing in 1963. It stood out for several distinct reasons.

It dared to show childhood anger and rage. In 1963, a protagonist throwing a tantrum, talking back to his mother, and being sent to his room without dinner was shocking. Max wasn't a sweet, perfectly behaved storybook child. He was furious, impulsive, and acting out real frustration.

It explored the wild psychological inner life of a child. Instead of keeping children in a safe, sanitized bubble, Sendak respected their emotional complexity. He understood that children experience intense anger, powerlessness, and chaos, and that imagination and play can help them process those feelings.

The monsters were frightening, but cathartic. The Wild Things, with their terrible teeth, roars, and rolling eyes, looked genuinely menacing by the standards of many children's books at the time. Yet they weren't evil. They were clumsy, emotional, and misunderstood. Max tames them by staring into all their yellow eyes without blinking once. That moment gives children a sense of mastery over their own fears.

The artwork pushed boundaries. Sendak's cross-hatched, expressionistic illustrations broke away from many of the flatter, brighter visual styles common at the time. The layout itself was innovative. As Max's imagination took over, the pictures grew larger and larger until they swallowed the pages entirely, plunging the reader into the wild rumpus.

Initially, the book caused quite a stir. Some libraries and critics worried it would frighten children, and it faced resistance. Children, however, recognized the truth in it. That's part of why it turned the world of children's literature upside down and became a timeless classic.

Sendak trusted that children knew more than adults often gave them credit for. Children understand symbolic feeling, strangeness, and transformation. They may not always analyze those things, but they recognize them.

He also didn't write down to children. In fact, he resisted the whole premise of writing a children's book as a separate, artificial category. He wrote because he had to. He followed an idea and his excitement rather than trying to manufacture approval for some imaginary audience.

Because the moment art becomes condescending, it loses something. When it starts performing sweetness instead of telling the truth, something leaves it.

Sendak's work is alive because he never did that. He took his work seriously enough to risk something.

And that brings me to one of his most powerful ideas, one that I think applies to every artist, whether working in writing, drawing, music, or any other creative form.

You Have to Take the Dive

One of Maurice's favorite quotes was, "You have to take the dive." He borrowed that thought from Herman Melville. The artist dives without knowing whether the result will destroy them or transform them. That's dramatic, yes, but artistically, it's true.

You don't know when you begin whether the work will fail or lead you somewhere truer than where you started. You still have to take the dive.

In a way, every piece asks that of us. Every time we begin without certainty, attempting to make something we don't yet know how to make, we risk sincerity. Every time we stop hiding behind polish and allow the work to come from somewhere more vulnerable, we're taking that dive.

I respect Sendak even more now after working on this piece. Not because I think I've solved anything, but because studying his visual language has reminded me how much courage, precision, and emotional clarity live underneath great work.

You may not know it because I don't really talk about it, but it takes a lot of courage and gumption to begin a piece without knowing how it's going to turn out. I know I'm going to make mistakes. I know I don't have all the answers. I start creating without knowing what the final piece will look like, and I let the art happen.

I don't do preliminary sketches or anything before I hit record. That's part of the experience for me. It's a way of seeing through the act of creating art. I consider myself avant-garde in that respect.

For Sendak, his way of seeing was rooted in childhood memory, emotional truth, literature, music, art history, and the physical beauty of books themselves. To me, there's something almost uncanny about the feeling that this project was meant to happen.

This isn't the first author or artist who has left me shaking my head in wonder. The similarities I've discovered in the way we feel about books and creativity seem to reaffirm something inside me. They keep telling me, yes, this is it. This is what you're meant to do. Keep going. You can do it. Be brave. They did it, and you can, too.

It's like following a trail of breadcrumbs. I keep picking them up, and with each one, I feel a little braver about continuing.

Art Comes From Living

In one of his interviews, Sendak spoke about his early teens, when he spent hundreds of hours at a window sketching neighborhood children at play. He listened as much as he looked, and those notebooks became fertile ground for his later work.

It reminds me that art isn't produced only in dramatic moments. It's accumulated quietly, through watching, noticing, and storing (and hoarding, haha) images, tones, and gestures that eventually find their way back into our work.

You live your life, and the work comes from that life. Art comes from living. You live, observe, feel, remember, and the work grows from there.

Maurice Sendak made beautiful, honest books. He reminds us that art can hold the full complexity of being human, even in forms the world sometimes dismisses as awful, simple, or misunderstood.

And perhaps that's what I love most about this entire journey. A book, a poem, an illustration, a memory, or a conversation with an artist can stay with you for decades. You may not understand why it mattered so much at the time. Then one day, while sitting down to create something of your own, all those pieces begin to come together.

You realize they've been there all along, quietly waiting for their place in the web.

And that's what keeps me creating.