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Single and love to dance,” is how Charlottetown illustrator Dale McNevin describes herself. When she talks about her drawings, she often talks about finding the music in the characters she draws—dancing hands and eyes, in the case of people; dancing tails in the case of mice.
Dale McNevin’s illustrations might already be part of your Christmas tradition, since her work accompanies David Weale’s Christmas mouse story, Crumbfest. “It was my first painted, colour book,” says Dale. “But when David and I started talking about Crumbfest, the whole book was already in my head. I wanted no ‘Walt Disney’ animals—not cartoony.” Dale knew she’d gotten the animals right when a child friend saw the drawings and gently patted the mouse’s fur.
The first book Dale illustrated was the first PEI Music Collection. Amazingly, the book included some of the first drawings she ever did. Twelve years ago, Dale was injured at work, and during a “rough time,” she found an outlet in drawing. “It was my therapy,” she says. She set aside space and time to draw. “Sometimes I’d only measure the hair on my arms, but sometimes I would draw,” she says.
Soon, publisher Laurie Brinklow sought out Dale to illustrate An Island Christmas Reader, by David Weale. Dale laughs to think how green she was. When Laurie asked if she did illuminations, she said yes—but she hadn’t a clue what they were and had to look it up. “I just never knew I could do them.” she says, knowing well that not knowing you can do something is altogether different from not being able to do it. Dale has continued to provide illustrations for Laurie Brinklow’s Acorn Press, including more of David Weale’s books and two books now on bookstore shelves for this Christmas—Tales from Willowshade Farm, by Betty Howatt, and Joanie’s Country Cookbook Volume 2, by Joanie Sutton.
Dale has recently begun work on illustrations for David Weale’s next children’s book, a story whose visual focus is an observant crow named Enigma and three belligerent trees. The crow “has a presence” in her head already. The fighting trees were harder “to get a hook on,” she admits, until the night Hurricane Juan struck and Dale and her cat, Martha, and a visiting dog watched the big trees in the fierce wind: “I thought, that’s what their fight will look like.”
Right now, working collaboratively on an independent project with writer/singer/songwriter Margie Carmichael is “giving her goosebumps.” “You can’t say Margie’s the writer and I’m the illustrator,” she says. “We’ve blended all the lines.” They are working to pair at least ten pieces by Margie—stories, songs, sketches—with illustrations.
“What I love about working with Margie is she draws pictures with words.
And we talk the same language—no high fallutin’-y stuff—it’s all down-to-earth-get-your-feet-dirty.” What they share boils down to this: “It’s appreciation—and love of place…I have nightmares of living somewhere else.” Dale’s life and her projects and her wicked Island sense of humour—in her art and in her artless manner—will also soon feature on CBC’s On the Road Again, with Wayne Rostadt. The TV crew spent two 12-hour days shadowing Dale. “I’m half afraid of what they’re going to use,” she says, remembering on some of the irreverent comments she let fly in front of the cameras. If she’s going to be notorious for anything, she says, “I’d like it to be as an illustrator. I’m proud of the reputation I’m getting.”
But Dale also wants to illustrate her own ideas. “I think it’s time I did a one-woman show,” she says. But “one woman” is hardly what she has in mind. She has hundreds of women in her head. They include an elderly woman with a double mastectomy, applying expensive perfume with a crystal stopper, with a look that says, “I still got it.” And a group of women enclosed in burkas, “stark like the Fathers of Confederation,” with the burkas and the sky the colours of bruises, and the women’s hands and feet “making the music.” The music will say, “Whatever she’s got—you can cover it, but you can’t kill it,” she says. It’s a tune I daresay Dale herself will recognize.