Artist Pieter Lefferts Paints A Magical World With Words

In the deep pine-scented quiet of the north woods, known here as the mythical land of Borea, a story unfolds: Its heroine, Rana Kek Kek, an “intrepid amphibian,” is about to embark on a journey of self-discovery in which she is transformed from a child into a Person of the World. Meanwhile, Aramook the Raccoon decides to take a risky trip to the town where the People of Man live so he can persuade them to slow down their ways of consuming everything. Then there’s Koli Bear and the owl Oti Semper, who join forces to rescue Aramook and stop a possible disaster.

In “What the Kek Kek Saw,” described as an animist fable, these story lines are braided together like sweetgrass, says author Pieter Lefferts, a Sharon, Conn., artist whose lifetime of visiting a family cabin on Upper Ausable Lake in the high Adirondacks inspired this charming, imaginative new book about the importance of understanding the other sentient beings with whom we share a fragile planet.

“It’s basically a creation story,” he explained. “People who have read it say it’s a book about hope, and it is. There are so many movies and books that rely on dystopian visions of the world. I wanted to create a more hopeful, optimistic side of the future.”

While the novel’s title character was drawn from his childhood at the lake listening to wood frogs calling “kekkekkek,” this is not a children’s book, he noted. His animals “don’t wear clothes or live in little houses.” In the best tradition of animal fables (think “The Jungle Book” and “Watership Down”) they “live in a predator and prey world, and they understand that about each other.”

Published by UnCollected Press and available from Oblong Books in Millerton, N.Y. (as well as Amazon and Barnes and Noble online), this is a first book for Lefferts, an artist long admired for his evocative landscapes and elegant portraits; to his delight, he was one of 30 authors invited to the prestigious Summer Book Signing of the Hotchkiss Library of Sharon this year (“a dream come true,” he said, happily).

His paintings are widely collected and have been shown at galleries throughout the Hudson Valley, the Adirondacks and New England.

Fond of taking students on plein-air field trips into local wilderness, he’s a much beloved art teacher — or as he prefers, an artist who teaches: His Northlight Art Center in Amenia, N.Y., has offered classes in oil and acrylic painting, pastels and traditional drawing techniques since 2010, with participants urged to become “more themselves” as they discover their individual creative voices.

Writing was always a sideline, albeit one he greatly enjoyed, until a comment 10 years ago by the late Richard Grossman, distinguished publisher, writer, psychotherapist and Salisbury, Conn., resident, got him started in a serious way. “I showed Dick this little three-page ditty I’d written and he said, ‘I think you have a diamond in the rough here,’” Lefferts remembers.

Encouraged, he began a decade of working on what became “What the Kek Kek Saw,” sometimes spending months in a row on it, sometimes putting it aside while he painted or taught, or both. Ultimately, he enrolled in a free writing class at Salisbury’s Scoville Memorial Library, where his wife, Claudia Cayne, was director (recently retired, she still leads the library’s book club), and met a writing coach and editor named Virginia Watkins, whom he credits with helping him finish.

“A first effort can easily get away from a novice writer,” he admitted with a laugh. “She was fantastic in challenging me to go deeper and avoid certain writing traps. And I think my experiences as a painter, as a naturalist, as an observer, and as someone who’s just eternally curious, allowed me to describe the landscape, the world of Borea, in a painterly way.”

The cast of anthropomorphic characters he created for “What the Kek Kek Saw” are haunted by tales of “The Clearing,” a mythical catastrophe that mirrors what actually happened to the Adirondacks in the 19th and early 20th centuries, when vast tracts of trees were cut down and some wildlife was hunted to extinction.

Lefferts found that — similar to the freedom of painting outdoors — his words flowed easily in nature, and solo writing stays at the family camp became about “listening and feeling into” the animals that survive in the forest today.

“I wanted to tell their story about coexistence,” he said, “since coexistence is very much what the book is about.”