Sector 7
By David Wiesner
Clarion, $16
ISBN 0395746566

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Sector 7's title indicates "one sector out of many, and the number 7 just had a nice sound to it. I'd been waiting a long time to do something on a larger scale with clouds, which is obvious if you look at the jackets from my previous books. I'd also been want-ing to do something with New York. Sector 7 Cloud Dispatch Center is in fact an amalgam of all sorts of architecture from Grand Central Station, the old Penn station, this great old building where they used to store trolleys. But it started with this drawing of these guys working these big machines, and there's a lot of steam. It's a place where they make clouds, and I have this image of these huge, two-story-high, cast-iron stencils that sort of get pushed in and kind of puff the cloud on through and they come out in these great shapes.

"Of course, there was no story, and I kept thinking, 'What's going on here?' and I thought maybe I should introduce a kid, a kid who likes to draw. Maybe the clouds are uninspired, and they need the little boy. Eventually, I had to get this kid to this place. Magic ladders? Magic staircase? All these contrived things. So I put him really high to begin with -- the top of the Empire State Building. Now, how do I get him to the clouds? Wait, of course -- clouds could take him there. And that's when I began to see a very foggy day, and the more I thought about it, the cloud became a character, and the kid and cloud started to develop this relationship. Suddenly, this started to come together."

How does Wiesner know when his work is finished? "I think there was a time when I would have said, to paraphrase someone else, that no work of art is ever finished, it's only abandoned. I used to believe that. Now, I actually know when I'm finished. And for me the whole book is what I'm revealing. While each picture is approached with all the compositional skills -- light, shadow, and the elements that go into those -- it's ultimately part of a grander thing, which is the book itself."

As a child, Wiesner spent a great deal of time studying pictures in encyclopedias and natural history books. "I especially loved the paintings by Charles Knight, who was the first artist to really work with paleontologists to create what a dinosaur might have looked like over its skeleton. They had a very hazy, atmospheric quality to them, and when I was a kid, I used to think they were photographs of dinosaurs." Wiesner pored over Renaissance painters, renderings of insects, and (naturally) the surrealists.

He does not associate his storytelling in pictures with childhood reading habits, however. "Obviously, I've been a visual person since I was a kid, and there's that part of me that just looks at something and decides there's no need to have something on the side that says, 'and then the frogs flew up out of the swamp,' when it's obvious that is what they are doing. The story reveals itself -- and the way it needs to be told -- rather quickly."

Given the numerous accolades Wiesner has received, his work has made a wondrous impact on readers. But can he himself pinpoint exactly what makes his work stand out?

"Nobody has ever asked me that before," Wiesner laughs. After a bit of a pause, he looks up and says, "I know this. I've illustrated an awful lot of work by other authors, particularly when I was starting out. To me, there is a very clear difference in the work I do for others, and the work I do for myself. And I can't explain why it happens; I'm not trying to do lesser work, but to me it is missing some quality. When I'm just left to my own devices to come up with imagery, something happens. I don't know what."

When asked if there are any images ready to blossom, Wiesner explains that he is actually starting the finished paintings for a book. "In fact, the bulk of the book is done, up to where I start painting, which is often the longest part and the hardest part. The decision-making, storytelling, character creating, composing, all of that must be done before I start painting. When I begin to paint, that is all I focus on, which is a different mind-set altogether. This next book is a little different in that there is a lot of white space."