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'Caterpillar' Scribe Warms To Keys

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By FRED A. BERNSTEIN, New York Times News Service

Published: December 16, 2007

Like the butterfly-to-be in his most famous book, "The Very Hungry Caterpillar," Eric Carle is changing.

After 33 winters in Massachusetts, Carle, who is 78, was tired of "the bundling up, the slipping on the ice." During a visit to friends in the Florida Keys in 2003, Carle, an illustrator and writer of children's books, many of them classics, and his wife, Bobbie, a former special education teacher, decided to move south. The place they found, overlooking the ocean about halfway between Miami and Key West, had pelicans, iguanas and dolphins for neighbors.

The property was stunning, but the couple didn't love the house, which looked a bit like a Swiss chalet on stilts. That presented an opportunity for Carle, who calls himself a frustrated architect. He was intimately involved in the design of the 40,000-square-foot Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art in Amherst, Mass., which opened in 2002.

Flipping through a design magazine, he noticed a house in Miami Beach that the designer Luis Pons had turned into a modernist tropical villa, with starkly geometric forms encircled by lush vegetation. Determined that the house would be true to its place - "I didn't want any of the things you have up north," he said - Carle picked up the phone and called Pons, who was born in Venezuela and moved to Miami in 2002.

The designer said he had no idea who Carle was. "He still doesn't," joked the cherubic author, who has sold more than 70 million books.

A Leap Of Faith
In fact, Pons is an expert on Carle - and vice versa - as a result of a close three-year collaboration. "The harmony between these two men was lovely to watch," said Bobbie Carle, who is 10 years younger than her husband.

Together, Eric Carle and Pons turned an ordinary building into a sleek collage of Brazilian ipe wood, concrete and steel. Carle said of Pons, "I had deliberately sought out someone different, even exotic, and sometimes it was a leap of faith to go along." But he considers Pons an artist and said he believes in letting artists have their way. "If you hire me, it's because you want an Eric Carle," he said. "You're not going to get a Maurice Sendak."

The process took three years, in part because of the difficulty of getting contractors in the Keys to build the house as Pons envisioned it. That was a little long for Bobbie Carle, so she has taken over the renovation of a house she and her husband recently bought on a mountain in North Carolina, where they plan to spend summers. They recently sold their house in Northampton, Mass., so their move to the South is complete.

Both Carles are thrilled with the Florida house, which is finished except for a few items, including a rug based on the endpaper of Eric Carle's latest book, "Baby Bear, Baby Bear, What Do You See?" Indeed, Carle finds the new house so comfortable, he said, that he's feeling the urge to start working again, perhaps on another book.

A Reaction To Childhood

In his studio, the previous master bedroom, file drawers overflow with sheets of tissue paper to which he has applied acrylic paint in jaunty patterns. When he's ready to create an illustration, he cuts the paper into strips and begins fitting them together.

Carle's creativity, he said, may be a reaction to his own childhood, which started out in bright colors, then faded to gray.

Carle was born in Syracuse, N.Y., to German immigrant parents. When he was 6, in the mid-1930s, his mother, who was homesick, decided to take the family back to Stuttgart.

The decision was disastrous. Carle's father was drafted by the Nazis and ended up a Russian prisoner of war. Carle says his books were inspired by the father he knew before the war - a man who, he said, "took me for long walks through fields and woods and explained to me the wonders of nature - bees and ants, frogs and birds, tiny bugs living under the bark of dead trees."

His father returned from the war weighing 85 pounds, "a broken man."

In 1952, Carle, carrying his portfolio of graphic design work, moved to New York and began working in advertising.

One of his illustrations caught the attention of a writer, Bill Martin Jr., who enlisted Carle to illustrate a book called "Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?" Since then, Carle has written the words for nearly all of his books.

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