FINDLAY, OH.- The Mazza Museum of International Art from Children’s Books, located on the campus of The University of Findlay (Ohio), is the first and largest teaching museum in the world specializing in the art from children’s books. The biennial award it presents, the Mazza Medallion, is quite a unique award given in the field of Children’s Books. This award looks at the full body of work of an artist, and evaluates his/her strengths in the area of diversity of art style and technique according to the book for which the art is intended.

The Mazza Medalion was first given in 1996 to Marcia Brown and has been awarded every other year since, with 2014 being the 10th award given to an artist for this special quality of children’s picture books. On November 7th, Peter Sis was awarded this Mazza Medallion for the incredible diversity of art in his picture book art.

Prior to this award Peter Sis’ dozens of children’s books have won the New York Times Best Illustrated Book of the Year Award eight times, while three of his books, Starry Messenger, Tibet Through the Red Box and The Wall have received the Caldecott Honor Medal. In 2003 he was named a MacArthur Fellow, and in 2012 Peter was the recipient of the international Hans Christian Andersen Award for Illustration. In addition to his prolific career as an author and illustrator of children’s books, Peter has contributed more than a thousand drawings to The New York Times Book Review and has illustrated for both Time magazine and The Atlantic Monthly.

Now let’s take a look at the diversity of Peter’s art, both in media and style, to know why this artistic genius received the Mazza Medallion. He used a rather unusual technique in his first few books for children…pointillism. Bean Boy by David Shannon is a perfect example of Peter’s use of this technique. Pointillism involves making many thousands of dots in order to create the image. He explained, “I like the idea of creating shades and spaces using this technique. The only problem with pointillism is how time-consuming it is.”

Peter soon began to wean himself from this laborious technique and in his next several books showed far less pointillism with more reliance on watercolor. You can see this process in his books Three Yellow Dogs and Going Up. But sandwiched in between these books came City Night. His gouache paintings give excitement to a city street carnival at night. The clever addition of the escape of the family bird from her cage and into the carnival night gives extra intrigue to the book.

In 1991 Peter took a giant leap in his concept of picture books. Inspired by his own discovery of a new world, when he came to the United States, he took on his version of Christopher Columbus discovering America in Follow the Dream. This book was his third book to receive the New York Times One of the Year’s Best Illustrated Children’s Books. Several of his oil and oil pastel illustrations demonstrate his genius in creating this book. For example, his use of panels to show the complete sequence of the Queen convincing the King of Columbus’ proposal, through to Columbus receiving the good news.

Peter used colored inks, watercolor, acrylic gold and even rubber stamps to illustrate the images for A Small Tall Tale from the Far Far North, which received a Boston Globe-Horn Book Honor Award for Picture Books. Combining these media he tells the real life story of Jan Welzl who traveled from Moravia to the Arctic and stayed for thirty years. The same year Peter changed his media, once again, using oil, gouache and gesso for Dragons are Singing, a book of poems by Jack Prelutsky.

Sis was honored, once again, when the New York Times listed his book, The Three Golden Keys, as One of the Year’s Best Illustrated Children’s Books in 1994.

In this story about a young man going back to his childhood country of Czechoslovacia, in order to search for three keys that will allow him back into his darkened family home. Peter created the art in this book by using oil pastel, pen & ink and, a new media for him in book art, scratchboard.

In 1996, Peter received his first Caldecott Honor for his watercolor and pen & ink Starry Messenger … a story of the life of Galileo. What is so notable about this book is the critical and accurate details about Galileo’s work. Only two years after receiving his first Caldecott Honor he received his second one for his highly personal story, Tibet Through the Red Box.

The prolific genius Peter Sis than had four books published in 1999, two of which were watercolor and pen & ink board books using a cartoon style in Trucks, Trucks, Trucks and Ships Ahoy! The latter is a wordless picture book that expands the cartoon style into an almost impressionistic-like style.

Over the next five years, from 2000 through 2005, Peter created 16 books! What is so unbelievable is that he continued to maintain the highest of standards in quality and variety. Among these is the incredible Madlenka. His perspective of the city block on which Madlenka lives is astonishing. One must study the art and move the page to take in all of the wonderful dimensions.

In 2004, Peter celebrated his twenty-two years in the United States by writing and illustrating The Train of States…a true celebration of our 50 states. Each train car is decorated with appropriate information concerning that particular state.

The very next year saw a completely different media and style in Peter’s oil pastel and gesso paintings for The Happy Troll by Max Bolliger. The same year he designed a watercolor and pen & ink book using stylized cartoon images for Dinosaur!

Then came Peter’s third Caldecott Honor for his 2007 The Wall: Growing Up Behind the Iron Curtain. In remarkable drawings and diaries, Peter has brought memory and history together to take us on an extraordinary journey behind the Iron Curtain.

Peter explained why he uses so many different forms of media: “In Central Europe artists develop a certain style and stick to it throughout their entire careers. But in the United States, artists are given more freedom to vary their style using an assortment of illustration techniques. I am grateful that I can sort of play around and try new things.” He loves to approach each project differently, and surely you now understand why this genius has been chosen to receive the tenth biennial Mazza Medallion of Excellence in Artistic Diversity.