As an aspiring painter with a quirky style, Todd Parr got hit with rejection after rejection from art dealers. He dealt with the blows in a way perhaps not all psychologists would be quick to recommend: He went straight into denial. "I pretended they didn't happen. I'd be wrecked on the inside for a moment, but I wouldn't give up. I was naïve, blind, and in denial-but determined!"
Now the author of 26 books that have sold 1.5 million copies, Parr has earned accolades from everyone from the Anti-Defamation League to the National Parenting Association for his electric-colored, delightfully rudimentary paintings. They carry a simple message: tolerance.
His latest, The Peace Book, includes a page that reads, "Peace is wearing different clothes," illustrated by a little girl decked out in striped bellbottoms while her friend sports a hot-pink burka. And Parr's spunky spirit and bright aesthetic can be seen on TV; his animated children's show, ToddWorld, debuted on The Learning Channel and Discovery Kids Channel in December of 2004.
Parr grew up a misfit in small Wyoming town. One day in the fourth grade, he waltzed into class in a pair of size 12 denim Dingo boots. The kids' taunts didn't stop him from donning a clip-on bow tie the next year. As a high schooler, he kept on making stick figures while his artistic classmates mastered complex forms with pen and ink. In a heated moment, Parr's art teacher told him that if his dream was to become a painter, he had better switch dreams. "It wrecked me to the point where I stopped painting."
Academic challenges chipped away at what was left of Parr's self-confidence. "I could never focus, I probably had some sort of learning disability." His mother died when he was 16, and his father never quite understood his son's unconventional ways. "'Artist' was a word my father probably never even used. But he always supported and encouraged me nonetheless."
After barely graduating from high school, Parr became a flight attendant, even though he wasn't particularly interested in the work itself. "It was literally a ticket out of town. Whatever was going to happen to me was not going to happen in Rock Springs, Wyoming." He traveled the world for 15 years, until, in 1992, he decided to awaken his long-dormant dream of becoming a painter.
The old words of his art teacher rang in Parr's ears, but they only made him determined to stick to his style of expression no matter what. When the front-door approach of showing his work to gallery owners yielded nothing but turndowns, Parr opted for back-door strategies. "I thought, where else do you see paintings? In restaurants! So I color-copied photos of my art and wrote a desperate, pleading letter to restaurant owners."
One positive response from Wolfgang Puck's Postrio restaurant in San Francisco was all it took to catapult him into the art world. Shortly thereafter, a Macy's buyer approached him. He was soon self-manufacturing children's attire adorned with his sunny scenes and zany characters.
Parr's willingness to jump into the children's apparel business illustrates another key to his success: He may have turned away from rejection, but he embraced opportunities that came his way—even when they didn't match his original vision of being a pure painter. In 1997, while he was peddling his clothes at a licensing show, an editor with Little, Brown asked if he had ever thought about writing children's books.
"I thought that to write books, you had to do really well in English, and I got Ds; I thought you had to be a really good speller, which I'm not and I thought you had to be a good storyteller. I was not." But he gave it a try, and discovered that the child-like painting style that turned off his art teacher and the gallery owners (and that Picasso claimed takes a lifetime to learn) was precisely what endeared kids to his books.
Parr's simple, warm prose normalizes differences as it celebrates them, an instinct honed from his own experiences growing up as an outsider. One page of The Okay Book shows a child in a wheelchair, with the line, "It's okay to have wheels." The next page reads, "It's okay to eat macaroni and cheese in the bathtub." "If it's a serious lecture about how some kids are handicapped, then I would lose my audience," he explains. "I hope that the next time kids see someone in a wheelchair, they will associate it with the mantra, 'it's okay to have wheels,' in an off-hand way."
Parr is quick to point out how his collaborators have shared in both his struggles and successes. When he started developing the ToddWorld show (which has preschoolers as its target audience), he surrounded himself with talented people who believed in his vision. The lesson is replicated in an episode where the Todd character, a bright blue little boy with a lone front tooth, gets angry when his pals tamper with his plan for making a fort. A talking squirrel teaches Todd that his friends' suggestions made the fort even better. Parr laughs, "You'd be surprised how much the shows apply to my life."
