Wallace Tripp


Wallace Whitney Tripp was an American illustrator, anthologist and author. He was known for creating anthropomorphic animal characters of emotional complexity and for his great visual and verbal humor. He was one of several illustrators of the Amelia Bedelia series of children's stories. He has illustrated over 40 books, including Marguerite, Go Wash Your Feet, Wallace Tripp's Wurst Seller, Casey at the Bat and A Great Big Ugly Man Came Up and Tied His Horse to Me. Tripp also drew many greeting cards for the Pawprints line.

Biography

Born in Boston, Massachusetts, Tripp grew up in rural New Hampshire and New York City. He attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston where he studied graphic arts. He received a bachelor's degree in education from Keene State College and studied English at the University of New Hampshire. He then taught English for three years until choosing to devote himself full-time to illustration.
Perhaps best known for his children's books, Tripp also illustrated over 600 greeting cards for family-run company Pawprints Greeting Cards, Inc. Marcy Tripp, then-wife and Tripp's agent, ran Pawprints and created the publishing house, Sparhawk Books, that published two of his books, Wallace Tripp's Wurst Seller and an illustrated edition of Hilaire Belloc's The Bad Child's Book of Beasts. During the 1980s, Tripp worked on animation projects with Richard Purdum's British studio. A lover of word-play, classical music, Tolkien, Shakespeare, and a pilot, Tripp frequently included references to these in his illustrations. in 1969 Tripp send J.R.R. Tolkien some of his illustrations for The Hobbit, and the letter Tolkien wrote in return was one of Tripp's prized possessions. For many years, Tripp built and flew radio-controlled model planes and sculpted pilot figures in his style.
A stickler for historic accuracy and using copious reference images, Tripp drew many drafts in pencil on tracing paper, transferring the images to stiff illustration board and then inked the illustrations in waterproof ink with a Gillette metal-tipped crow quill dip pen. Tripp would color the illustrations with watercolors. As his Parkinson's progressed, inking became impossible and he would draw in pencil, photocopy them onto flexible Bristol Board and color with watercolors or colored pencil, as seen in some of the illustrations in Rose's Are Red, his last book. Tripp was diagnosed with Parkinson's Disease in 1986 and taught himself to draw with his left hand, resulting in a looser but still recognisable style, and switching from mice to rabbits as his primary animal. By the late 1990's Tripp was forced to retire and Pawprints Greeting Cards, Inc was closed in 1999. He lived in Peterborough, New Hampshire and had three children, two sons and a daughter, all artists.
On September 9, 2018, the official Wallace Tripp Facebook page announced his death.

Awards