Madnesssssss

      So, I am applying to the Barrett’s Honors College as well as ASU’s regular university and you have to write an essay for the application. The prompt that I chose out of the three given was about how a piece of art, literature, or music influenced you and such. One book from my childhood stood out immediately: an art book gifted to me by someone that has now been donated along with the majority of my and my brother’s children’s books. I could remember the large, red font typical of many older DK books, how it was a hardcover, and the one picture I loved the most in the book— a vivid painting of a girl sitting to the viewer’s left wearing a blue dress with an animal in her grasp.

      With this in mind, I looked towards Google Images for help (there was no way in hell I was going to attempt to find the picture in one of my mom’s mammoth art history textbooks), searching every variation of “girl in a blue dress with [insert various animals here]”, “Children’s art book from the 1990s”, or “DK art books from the 1990s” I could possibly think of. After about an hour of this, I switched tactics and searched through old DK books (AbeBooks is an amazing website for finding things) for their publishing dates as the newer books shown on their website were a different style of cover art than the older ones, which I knew had to be printed sometime in the ’90s because it was new when I got my book. Finding another art book put out by them in 1992, I searched “DK art book from 1992” and searched through their images and finally found the one I was after: A Children’s Book of Art: Great Pictures—First Words. 

          From there, I looked at the sample pages given by Google Books and found the art credit pages, zoomed in, searched every picture under their heading “Pets” as the picture involved an animal, and found A Girl With A Kitten by Jean-Baptiste Perronneau. Now, I can finally start the essay! (But seriously, I feel like a goddamn detective up in here with all this searching for something without knowing anything other than a vague recollection of a cover and some of the art inside!)