The universality of fears.

The universality of fears, whether adult or childhood, is attested to in this combination of 16 plates according to Jean-Michel Basquiat with Maya Angelou's metrical composition "Life Doesn't Frighten Me." Pairing Angelou's reassuring metrical composition with Basquiat's unsettling, childlike images was a pat of genius. In fact the correspondence between the pair artists is so close that this main division reads as if the 1978 topic were composed in direct answer to Basquiat's art. For a children's volume it is surprisingly acute in its manifestations of fear, and smooth though the poem always recurs to its matter-of-fact refrain, "Life doesn't frighten me at all," one of its word/image combinations are calculatedly harsh. A jagged 1981 drawing of three fenced-in animal figures, for example, is accompanied through the line "Mean old Mother Goose/Lions forward the loose," suggesting an adult world spun disclosed of control, while the pair of Basquiats picked to illustrate the lines "Panthers in the park/Strangers in the dark" reach toward more hidden, half-formed fears that booty on the imagination.

As a tool for teaching children to articulate their fears in order to stand in front of them, the value of in the same state [i]or[/i] condition a book to parents and teachers is no doubt immense. moreover its bonus value is as an art main division for adults, since it provides a poignant reminder of the same kinds of fears that Basquiat's paintings could not ever quite assuage in the heart of their creator, and in thus doing underscores the tragedy of his premature death.

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