IF YOU WANT TO LET YOUR KIDS GROW UP TO BE ARTISTS, CHECK OUT CREATIVE DIRECTOR GREG FOLEY'S NEW ILLUSTRATED CHILDREN'S BOOK, THANK YOU BEAR

Art directors are kind of like children. Not so much because they both tend to throw tantrums when they don’t get their way, but rather because kid and A.D. alike have a way of waking to the world each day with brand-new eyes—to put it simply, they see things as the rest of us do not. As a white sheet hoisted between two beds so quickly becomes a fort, so too is an empty piece of paper (or a blank computer screen) a playground.

Temper tantrums aside, turns out that Greg Foley, the longtime creative director of Visionaire, as well as this magazine and its boyish sibling, VMAN, has more childlike spirit than any of those who have worked with him had ever imagined. This month, Viking will publish Thank You Bear, the first in what promises to be an ongoing series of children’s books conceived, written, and sweetly illustrated by Foley himself. The debut adventure of our adorable ursine protagonist, whom we are starting to suspect might in fact be our art director thinly disguised in a fur coat, can be read as the story of misunderstood genius. Bear has an idea, which he spends a dozen or so pages taking around to various animal individuals who all somehow fail to see or appreciate the simple beauty of what he is presenting to them. It’s not so great, it’s not terribly original, it’s not big enough... But Foley…er, Bear, convinced that he has something special, perseveres. Finally, he meets up with a likeminded creature—okay, a mouse—and, well, you will have to read it yourself to know what happens next. Of course, looked at another way, Thank You Bear can be read simply as a marvelous bedtime story. One with a moral that children and art directors will instantly recognize. Alix Browne

Photography Dan Forbes

Thank You Bear is out in March 2007 from Viking
For information: www.thankyoubear.com