Illustrator brought creatures to life

Published 12:02 am Wednesday, May 10, 2017

Peter Spier, an award-winning children’s-book author and illustrator who depicted Noah’s biblical journey, told the story of the Erie Canal to the words of the song “Low Bridge, Everybody Down” and gave voice to the sounds of hundreds of animals like hippos (“RRUMMPF) and starlings (“FEE-YOU”), died April 27 in Port Jefferson, New York. He was 89.

The cause was congestive heart failure, his son, Thomas, said.

Spier’s dozens of books are filled with meticulously drawn and brilliantly colored images, such as the elephants, horses, seals acrobats, clowns and trapeze artists in “Circus!” (1992) and the myriad pairs of animals in “Noah’s Ark” (1977).

He imbued “Noah’s Ark” with the cinematic sensibility of a Cecil B. DeMille epic, filling it with a cast of creatures that seems animated on the page. He showed Noah’s toils, such as pulling a donkey onto the ark and trying to snatch two bees out of a swarm. He tossed in visual jokes — sheets flapping on a clothesline and rabbits who enter the ark as a couple and leave it as a herd.

“Since it has no text, you have to give the story in the drawings, mine showing the work, the mess,” he said in a video made in 2012 by his publisher, Doubleday. “Also, the animals were bored on board. Noah picked eggs from his chickens.”

“Noah’s Ark” brought Spier the Caldecott Medal, the highest honor for illustrators of picture books.

He said that he created children’s books “for the kids and the child within myself.”

One of his earliest books was inspired by a trip to Vermont with his wife, Kathryn. They were singing the old English folk song that begins, “The fox went out on a chilly night,” when Spier suddenly told her that the song — about a fox who steals a duck and a goose from a farmer to feed his and his wife’s 10 cubs — would be the ideal source for a children’s book.

“When we reached home a week later, I grabbed a few sketchbooks and drove back to New England,” he recalled. He filled the pages with notes about colors, weather and locations, and later added drawings of the covered bridges, cemeteries and farms of Newfane, Vermont.

“My editors at Doubleday took one look at them and said, ‘Great, go ahead,’ ” he wrote in 2012, the year “The Fox Went Out on a Chilly Night” (1961) was released as an e-book. For that reissue, he colored the pages that had originally been printed in black and white to save money.