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I Want to Paint My Bathroom Blue by Ruth Krauss and Maurice Sendak (Illustrator)
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I Want to Paint My Bathroom Blue: 04/06/25

I Want to Paint My Bathroom Blue

I Want to Paint My Bathroom Blue by Ruth Krauss and Maurice Sendak (Illustrator) (1956) is a picture book about a child planning their ideal home. More broadly it's a statement on inclusion and agency.

The book opens with a statement: "I want to paint by bathroom blue." But the narrator is denied the option by their papa. The narrator supports their wish with the observation that the rocking chair they painted blue is pretty.

From that opening page with straightforward ideas: a blue bathroom and a yellow kitchen, the book spirals into more and more abstract territory. First it's a sitting room that's white but with a turtle pattern or mural and a green ceiling.

Then it goes on to the placement of windows. Where and how many are left unstated. Just lots of windows here and there.

The outside again hints at a mural. And then we move away from the house and speak of sprinkling "seeds all over the land." Is this the house's yard or a larger abstraction of the world?

Back to the house and we have thoughts on doorknobs, their sizes, colors and what song to sing with them. After that we get mixtures of architecture and other things. The house becomes the one he dreams about. It's a like a rainbow and all his friends are there.

Ultimately the book ends with the narrator having created an island for their house and an ocean for his island. Has the home gone from their actual home, the one their papa has forbidden them from painting to an abstraction of home, family, and the world at large? Or is this narrator more in control of their world than first seems apparent?

I am inclined to see this book as moving from the tangible to the abstract, from the scale of a single child in a single family to a broader world view on the human condition and humanity's influence on the world at large. Philip Nel in How to Draw the World (2024) argues that it's both a single child's abstraction of the world from their own home experience to a child's ability to control their world, a la Harold and the Purple Crayon by Crockett Johnson (1955).

Ruth Krauss, the author, was married to Johnson and this book did come out a year after Harold. It's entire possible / likely that the two books influenced each other. Taken together they are an interesting glimpse at the world through children's eyes and a treatise on how the younger generations can change the world.

Maurice Sendak did the illustrations. As colors are such an integral way to how this child describes their world, the illustrator uses those color to both to illustrate the page at hand but also to segue from the previous spread to the next one. I also find it interesting that Krauss's protagonist is dressed in a similar shade blue to what later editions the Harold books Harold is wearing on the covers.

Like the Harold books, this one sits on the Road Narrative Spectrum. The narrator, being denied the chance to paint the walls is a marginalized traveler (66). Their destination is home (66) as represented by the home they want to decorate / rebuild. Their route is the labyrinth (99) as represented by the spiraling aspects of Sendak's illustrations.

Four stars

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