Lansing artist Julian Van Dyke keeps himself, and everyone else, busy

Some people feel they’re not artists. I get that. But when it comes to coloring — you won’t believe what people have sent me. Man!”

JULIAN VAN DYKE

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 8 — While sheltering at his home studio, Lansing artist Julian Van Dyke isn’t content to plunge into half a dozen long-put-off projects to keep himself busy. One of those projects is aimed at keeping everybody else busy as well.

To give school kids and “kids at heart” something to do while languishing in quarantine, Van Dyke is releasing pages of his whimsical and lyrical coloring book, “So You Think You Can Color?”

Van Dyke’s vivid, stained-glass-like images burst with birds, bees, buds and other signs of spring, but they can only be downloaded in not-yet-glorious black and white. (They can be found at the artist’s website, vandykeart.com.)

The vernal shoots, flowers and creatures fairly cry out for color, textbook accuracy be damned, and Van Dyke said early submissions are already blowing him away.

“Some people feel they’re not artists,” Van Dyke said. “I get that. But when it comes to coloring — you won’t believe what people have sent me. Man!”

The botanical themes of the illustrations reflect Van Dyke’s own experiences this spring, while starting his own garden.

It started when he lifted some long-neglected bags of yard waste to reveal masses of wriggling worms.

“You might think that is sick, but the earth produces so much stuff we don’t pay attention to,” he said. “I started looking at the grass, the ground and the trees, as you can tell from the coloring book.”

Van Dyke and Kathy Holcomb, owner of Old Town’s Absolute Gallery, are teaming up to collect the images, give out awards for the most inventive entries, and even mat and exhibit them when the gallery is back up and running.

“We’re going to hang them like a real art show, and give them monetary awards,” Van Dyke said. “People tell me it’s my art, but I tell them, ‘You colored it,’ and it’s amazing.”

Van Dyke’s ties with Absolute Gallery and friendship with Holcomb hark back to his beginnings as an artist, when he worked in an Old Town studio in the 1980s.

Since then, he’s kept active in as an author, illustrator, poster artist, muralist and even a theatre actor, all while spending 20 years as a UPS driver to help support a family of four.

His mural work is all over town, including a 32-foot panorama of city life in East Lansing’s Grove Street alley.

Van Dyke is sheltering contentedly at his southside home, finishing a series of long-delayed projects, with four books almost ready to sent to his publisher, XLibris Books.

He’s cleaning out his studio and garage and doing a lot of thinking. “There’s always good that comes out of something that’s bad,” he said.  “Whatever you’re going through, it brings us together at some point, even though we can’t get close to each other.”

Besides the coloring book, he’s publishing a hardcover version of “Juneteenth: Celebrating Freedom” and another teaching book, “Does This Make You a Bully?”

Over a year ago, he racked his brain to come up with a concept for an illustrated book about bullying, with a strong message for school kids, without offending anyone. He solved the problem by making all of the characters stuffed animals — “giraffes, teddy bears, that kind of stuff.”

As if all of that weren’t enough, he’s also finishing an illustrated story about two dogs who run amuck in their owner’s absence.

They put records on the turntable and dance, order takeout and have a blast until it’s time to clean up before their owner gets home. Unlike the Juneteenth and bullying books, there is no obvious lesson in this one.

“It’s just for fun,” he said. “I don’t even know what I’m going to call it yet.”

As the quarantine weeks roll on, Van Dyke stays up late most nights, watching movies. He ventures into the garage after breakfast to work on a few of his larger canvases. Music, especially jazz, and African-American history are frequent themes, but lately he has gravitated to the botanical and garden-inspired images seen in his coloring book pictures.

He recently erected a large storage unit for his canvases, out of metal shelves from Home Depot and a huge backdrop he designed for a local ballet company.

But he admits there really isn’t much of a boundary between his workspace and living space.

“This whole house is a studio, from the basement to the living room to upstairs to the garage,” he said.

Now and then, he gives neighboring children a peek into the colorful bursts of art taking shape of his garage, but for the most part, life under quarantine isn’t much different than usual.

“My neighbors hear me clanking and banging in the garage,” he said. “They’re like, ‘Put him on an island and he wouldn’t care one bit.’ I got my own stuff.”