While the British government continues its assault on arts education, picture books about artistic pursuits have never been better. From Phaidon’s fabulous Wasn’t Sorry visual arts series by Fausto Gilberti (for example, Yayoi Kusama Covered Everything in Dots and Wasn’t Sorry) to Lola Saves the Show, a recent Walker Books/National Theatre tale by Katherine Halligan and Guilherme Karsten exploring the inner workings of a theatre, there’s no shortage of books fit for turning the youngest minds onto the transformative power of creativity.
Joining them is Isabelle Marinov’s Henri and the Machine (Templar). It features a school class on a gallery visit, and one boy in particular, Henri, who longs to be by the sea rather than looking at melting clocks and abstract portraits with their eyes “in the wrong place”.
