Anita Paegle: Latvia ★ Illustrator

“I have a quiet, reserved character; drawing was a hideaway, a private very interesting world.”

Anita Paegle

Anita Paegle was born in the capital of Latvia, Riga, in 1956. She completed her formal education in graphic art at the Art Academy of Latvia, and began producing illustrations for children’s books in her mid-twenties. At that time, there was only one publishing house for children’s books in Latvia, and so Paegle worked as an art teacher creating books and exhibitions with her students for six years before she was able to work fulltime as an illustrator. To date, she has produced some 40 children’s books and has established a strong following in her home country.

Today, Paegle works exclusively in watercolor, which she layers gradually four to six times to create an intensity of color overlain with very fine filigree. Using only the three finest sizes of paint brushes, and painting in small dots rather than broad sweeps to create texture, each of Paegle’s paintings can take up to two months to complete. The intricate details of the pictures are designed to encourage readers to pause and reflect, rather than rushing ahead with the plot. And for this reason, some of the pages will contain purely decorative details: a branch of pussy willow or small item from the text may be illustrated simply for adornment. Her alphabet-counting book—Divas pastaigas [Two Strolls] with two poems by Mära Cielëna—is designed for slow reading and careful observation. Paegle does not offer her preschool readers coarsely recognizable objects; instead, for example, her detailed illustrations of insects subtly combine botanic realism with mischievous anthropomorphism.

Many of Paegle’s works are illustrations of classic Latvian tales that were originally illustrated using etching and other forms of graphic art. Her first publication, her diploma work, followed in this tradition and was a set of etched illustrations to accompany Andrejs Upīts’s Vilnïša brauciens uz austrumiem [Vilnitis Goes to the East]. Most of her works are, however, the result of Paegle’s collaboration with living Latvian authors, most notably Mära Cielëna and Juris Zvirgzdiš. Kad karaliene bij Rïgä [When the Queen Went to Riga] is a collaboration with Cielëna that is set in the artist’s home town. Having wandered the streets looking at the details of the buildings with a new eye.

In addition to illustrating books, Paegle also provides illustrations for two children’s magazines. Her work is regularly exhibited, which is enjoyable for those familiar with her work partly because printing techniques cannot capture some of the finer details of her use of color. She has had several tours throughout the Baltic region.