Secret Wild Pig Sketches Revealed

March 19, 2010By PaulChildren's books, Paul's sketchbook

A Painting without a good drawing behind it is like a body without a skeleton, like a jellyfish of of water. Well, almost. We usually don’t look at each other’s bones, but they are there underneath, forming what we see about a person. They are the unseen essence that gives form to life. Same thing … Read More

Mr. Goethe and field sketching

February 13, 2010By PaulChildren's books, Paul's sketchbook

Outside us in space there spreads the immeasurable world. Inside us is our world of soul. We do not notice how what lives inside us flashes out and unites with what lives outside us. We are unaware of being the arena in which this union takes place. – Rudolph Steiner, from the lecture series, “The … Read More

From Mr. Goethe: Quote of the day

September 4, 2009By PaulChildren's books, Paul's sketchbook

Gate at Goethe’s Gartenhaus, watercolor by Paul Mirocha, Weimar, 2002 I was going over my travel journals recently and found the one from the trip I made to Weimar, Germany in August 2002. I was there with author, Diana Cohn, to research the art for her picture book, Mr. Goethe’s Garden. This book tells the … Read More

The Story of Hitam Manis: the Origins of the Bees

May 13, 2009By PaulChildren's books

A reading from The Bee Tree. Turn the lights down low…. AFTER sunset, all of the honey hunters gather around Grandfather while he tells the traditional story of the bees. LONG AGO, a beautiful servant girl named Hitam Manis worked in the Sultan’s palace. She and the Sultan’s son fell in love. He called her … Read More

A Black Mamo’s Story

May 5, 2009By PaulChildren's books

FOR MILLIONS OF YEARS, life was sweet for us black mamos. We lived like everyone else on Hawaii, taking it easy, hanging loose. We did what we had evolved to do: sip sweet nectar from curved, tubular and very abundant Lobelia flowers with our sickle-shaped bills. We weren’t pretty, but that was fine with us. … Read More

Mr. Goethe’s Garden

April 20, 2009By PaulChildren's books

“To know someone here and there who thinks and feels with us, and though distant, is close to us in spirit–this makes the earth for us an inhabited garden.” —Johann Wolfgang von Goethe By Diana Cohn illustrated by Paul Mirocha published by Bell Pond Books, a division of Steiner Books “Mr. Goethe, how did you … Read More

The Bee Tree

March 30, 2009By PaulChildren's books

For almost a decade, Tucson desert dwellers Paul Mirocha and Steve Buchmann, along with co-author, Diana Cohn from Sausalito, CA, have been traveling to the Malaysian rain forest, half a world away, to work on The Bee Tree, a new children’s picture book, featuring paintings by Paul Mirocha, published by Cinco Puntos Press in April … Read More