Can You Imagine?

Written and illustrated by Wallace Edwards

North Winds Press (Scholastic Canada)

978-1-4431-7043-7

32 pp.

Ages 3-8

October 2021

From the brilliant artistry and imagination of the author-illustrator of Governor General award-winning Alphabeasts (2002), Once Upon a Line (2015) and What is Peace? (2016) comes a new picture book of wild artwork and inventiveness about inspiration and creativity.

From Can You Imagine? by Wallace Edwards

Faced with a blank canvas, an artist goes in search of ideas, heading out on a journey in hopes of inspiration. The plainness of his house, bicycle and surroundings emulates the blankness of his creative spark. But, it doesn't take long before everything changes around him and ultimately inside him too.

From Can You Imagine? by Wallace Edwards

His home's natural surroundings may be filled with grassy meadows and only a few straggly trees but there is a single flower with hummingbird and caterpillar promising more growth and vitality. Soon the artist is travelling in his red and white sportster through the woods teeming with colour and complexity and life. There are mega-flowers, parrots and a lion. There is a jester and Humpty Dumpty on his wall and faces hidden in trees and greenery.

From Can You Imagine? by Wallace Edwards

As he travels further in, his red-and-white car becoming snazzier with each page, he notes a bunny behind a bush and other travellers. But the illustrations tell us more. The rabbit, wearing a red coat and drinking tea, is 4-5 times larger than the bush and he's watching a violin-playing mouse accompanying a singing carrot. The travellers are a rolling robot, a frog on a turtle, a fish on a penny-farthing and a tiny rabbit in a tailed carrot car. Similarly a stop at a pond to hear small fish jumping seems pleasant and innocuous but Wallace Edwards shows us there is far more behind the scenes: a crowned toad, a mermaid and a surprised squid. As the artist continues on, he enters a busy city, so bustling that he seeks quiet in a desert which leads him to a mountain and a return home by air and unicycle.

But, home is now transformed. The flower has opened, the caterpillar is a butterfly and the grass is lush with flowers. Colour abounds now as does real life and inspiration for the artist. Still what he paints after all his travels is a lot closer to home than he could have anticipated.

Wallace Edwards is certainly a wizard with his pencil, watercolour and gouache, transforming landscapes of flora and fauna into surreal scenes of vibrancy and movement. That same complexity which he has imbued much of his art is prevalent in the views the protagonist visits in his ever-evolving transport, of which there are at least twenty red-and-white versions. The imagination can take you everywhere and anywhere and Wallace Edwards demonstrates this with zeal. But the storytelling of Can You Imagine? is what really transforms the art from incredible to superlative. That story is not told so much in words–there are fewer than 100 words of text–as it is in the melding of those words with the art. Like Wallace Edwards's message about finding inspiration and gaining new perspectives on familiar circumstances, Can You Imagine? inspires us to look and really see, to experience more from less, and to be mindful of the moment. Like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz who found the best at home only after an incredible journey, the artist in Can You Imagine? gains his own inspiration and perspective by the pencil and paint travels from his own wizard, Wallace Edwards, and offers us encouragement to do much the same to bolster our own creativities.