The Artist and the Lava Beast

by Maria G. Mackavey

Overview

Children learn about colors as they follow an artist creating images on an empty canvas. Through the artist's imagination, the painting of fish, lava, houses, trees and mountains begins to take on a life of its own. The story follows a lava beast that forms from the lava flowing down the middle of the painting. As in the natural world, the lava beast, who starts out as hot molten erupting out of the mountains, begins to change and slow down. Children are invited to empathize with the lava beast's feelings of confusion and sadness, as he experiences himself turning into cooled lava. In a dream encounter, the lava beast comes to understand who he is and where he comes from. Through this story, children explore the connection between imagination, dreams, and art as the story moves from the artist creating his painting to the imagined life of the images and back to the dreaming artist.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781481720816
Publisher:	AuthorHouse
Publication date:	03/04/2013
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	24
File size:	6 MB
Age Range:	4 - 8 Years

About the Author

Maria Mackavey was born in Greece and spent her childhood in Zambia, Africa. She received her BA and MA Degrees in English from the State University of New York at Albany and her doctorate degree in from Boston University. She has written and presented widely and has coauthored a book on work and family entitled Shared Purpose: Working Together to Build Strong Families and High-Performance Companies. Maria lives in Massachusetts with her husband, dog and two cats.

Editorial Reviews

The story […] demonstrates the artistic process as the artist first transforms his canvas into a forest, then, after selecting an aqua oil stick, decides to add fish. His imagination later spins a story of an active volcano threatening a brave little house in the otherwise shuttered village. And as the artist continues to work, mountains rise from the earth to calm and comfort the “lava beast.” Finally, it cools, becoming part of the mountain itself.
While a lesson in the power of imagination, this book also aims to teach children about unusual colors. In the text, adjectives describing color are written in their respective shades. Standard words such as “pink” are represented alongside “mauve” and “lemon yellow.”

BlueInk Review

2013-10-18
A painting comes alive in this read-aloud picture book for children. The book starts with a large, white canvas; soon, an artist picks up oil sticks and begins to draw a mountain, a forest, a sea and a small school of fish. The artist, who has so far been in total control of his work--a benevolent creator bringing life to a new little world--eventually notices that the fish are acting strangely. All but one are swimming furiously away from something, and it soon becomes clear that an orange finger of lava threatens not only them, but a cozy town nestled on the mountainside--and the artist fears that the entire painting may be at risk. The tone of Mackavey's (Shared Purpose, 1997) gentle, lyrical prose effectively complements the pastels that illustrate each stage of the painting's creation. The transition from the expected to the unexpected is smooth and intriguing; she makes every color and element of the painting its own character and elicits just enough reader concern for the fates of the fish and the houses without being too frightening. She also avoids being too literal when depicting the lava beast, showing just the head of the lava flow in swirls of brownish red oil pastels. In the text, the beast becomes sympathetic--lonely, scared and unsure of himself. He longs for the houses' cozy, well-lit interiors and eventually comes to rest, cooling finally into rock against the edge of the village. This would have been a fine place to end this sweet story, but it continues instead with the lava beast's dream--a confusing, abstract depiction of a volcanic eruption, which segues into the artist's waking up from his own dream, a device that unfortunately doesn't serve the first half of the story well. Overall, this book falls between genres, as it may be too long to read to most toddlers but too slow and simple to grab older children's interest. An often engaging children's story that starts well but might have been stronger if it were shorter.

Kirkus Reviews