Photo by Deborah Sussex |
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Beckie Prange is a printmaker, naturalist and children's book illustrator.
Beckie was born in a suburban Chicago hospital, arriving backwards, and within 3 weeks was living a rural life in west-central Illinois with her professor father and artist mother. As she grew, the fields, forests and wetlands surrounding her farm home were compelling places to explore, solo or accompanied by her sisters and brother. Fascinated with nature, from the massive to the minute, she began drawing about it at an early age. It was a rut she never quite escaped, but what a great rut.
That doesn't mean Beckie never tried anything else. After studying the microbiology of foot-rot in sheep as an internationally award-winning high school science project (no kidding!); canoeing for a month-long Outward Bound program and studying biology in the field, where she fell madly in love with northern Minnesota's boreal forests and lakes; and completing her bachelor's degree in biology at Lake Forest College in northern Illinois; feeling cloistered by academia, she tried:
Flipping burgers,
Taking a stab at organic chemistry,
Perching in a tree for a month spying – otherwise known as collecting data – on nesting sandhill cranes (yes, the birds were on the ground and she was in the tree),
Manually laboring for the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources,
Screwing lawn chair leg parts together,
Spying again, this time from a hut, scribbling coded midwinter wolf mating-behavior notes,
Wiping little wolf bottoms with Puffs (which helps them go, you see),
Cooking wholesome, tasty family-style meals for ravenous, happy field biology students, professors and staff,
Riveting lawn chair leg parts together,
Typing and filing and typing and filing and typing and filing,
Cheeking halibut, gutting salmon and rubber-banding Dungeness crab legs,
Cooking swill for disappointed nursing home residents,
Processing photos for a small town weekly ...
OK. OK. That was enough.
While experimenting with life, she tried out Wisconsin, Indiana, Alaska, Iowa, California and Minnesota, with multiple residencies in most of those states.
She thought that she would be happy doing whatever, as long as she did whatever well, but no. Ten years after she finished college, it was time to go back to school. The Natural Science Illustration program at University of California in Santa Cruz offered art. And biology. Together! So, westward ho, once again.
After a superlative learning experience in Santa Cruz (she learned to surf, too, but readily admits she'd be happier with a boogie-board), and an internship in Santa Barbara, she was at loose ends. An appropriate time to move to Minnesota. For good, she thinks.
Beckie has lived in Ely, Minnesota, since 1991 (and in '86-'87). In 1993, as Beckie Nosbisch, her first attempt at making woodcut prints went pretty well, so she kept going.
Her son, Izaak, was born in 1998. After two years of attempting to simultaneously print and mother, she thought full-time motherhood might be a good thing for a while. Almost immediately, she received the perfect "would you like to illustrate this manuscript" inquiry from a somewhat local children's book editor who had seen her prints in a gallery. (She liked Beckie's Blue Darner.) Was it a sign? Of course it was, silly!
So she went to work and Izaak went to daycare – an excellent choice as it turns out. Then she proceeded to get divorced and became immersed in the manuscript, a collection of poems and science notes about pond life, as she proceeded with proceedings. Song of the Water Boatman, by Joyce Sidman, illustrated by Beckie Prange, edited by Ann Rider, and published by Houghton Mifflin Company, was released in the spring of 2005.
January of 2006 was a heady month. Beckie closed the deal on a new home with a separate studio and was offered another excellent children's manuscript to illustrate. As if that weren't enough, she got a wonderful surprise near the end of the month. Beckie was awarded a Caldecott Honor Medal for her illustrations in Song of the Water Boatman.
Beckie is finding her feet, settling into her new home with Izaak and their pup, Lola, and working on a second children's book to be published in the spring of 2010. When she's not making art, she likes to walk the dog, hike, bike, ski cross-country, canoe, camp, swim, snorkel, scrutinize mud puddles, read, hear music, sit quietly alone in the woods, knit, enjoy movies and explore any part of nature that she happens to happen upon.
Beckie is a member of the Guild of Natural Science Illustrators and Northern Printmakers' Alliance.
Her purpose is to connect kids and other people with nature through her art.
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