I recently (within the last year) discovered Kate Gardiner’s work through her book A Family Tree with author Staci Lola Drouillard.

Let me tell you what I like about her art. I’ll do this through a discussion of how I feel about her work in A Family Tree and Firefly Season. There are a lot of things I enjoy about A Family Tree; I think it is an exceptional example of picture book storytelling. Drouillard and Gardiner take the reader on a short trip through time as we watch young Ojibwe girl Francis grow up alongside her family member, the little white spruce Gaawandagoonce. This is a story of family ties, change, and growing up connected to land and to each other (“each other” also includes plant-beings). It’s a quiet story. It’s a reflective story. It’s an every day/slice-of-life kind of story that invites the reader into the intimate, quiet moments of an Ojibwe family.

Gardiner works in gouache and colored pencil and likes to play with white space, flora and fauna borders, and layered and flat perspectives. I bet, if she wanted to, she would excel at paper art illustration, as some of the spreads in A Family Tree mimic dioramas with how she meticulously layers front flora, humans/animals, middle flora/grass, background trees and faraway landscape. She loves a good side profile, which encourages the reader to focus in and pay attention. As much as she likes a wide shot, she also loves a zoom-in spread; the spread with little Francis’ chunky feet flat on the ground above a cross-section of Gaawaandagoonce’s strong roots in the soil is lovely. The colors Gardiner uses in this book are muted, cloudy, and rich, in tones of stone greys, seafoam greens, light blues, and earthen browns. It’s a beautiful story of family that you should check out if you haven’t already.

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