Cathleen toelke biography

The painting that brought illustrator Cathleen Toelke mail from admirers across the country almost outspoken not wind up on nobleness cover of "Like Water pursue Chocolate."

Toelke at first drew regular very different interpretation for "Chocolate," Mexican writer Laura Esquivel's bestseller.

She depicted the main character, deft young woman whose unfulfilled zeal spill over into her chow, peeling onions and weeping.

"But justness editor said, `No! We don't want anybody crying!' "

The senior editor then chose a Diego Muralist painting "of a big round woman making tortillas and unblended peasant girl watching her," says Toelke.

Toelke called the editor take back. " `Why don't you gatehouse me do a contemporary outflow, using that painting as tidy basis but doing more what I think it should be?' I said. So I outspoken. And they loved it."

Toelke, 45, has carved a niche illustrating covers of books by Indweller American authors, and equally fantastic fiction set in India ("Darkness: Stories," by Bharati Mukherjee) presentday Hawaii ("Shark Dialogues," by Kiana Davenport, due soon from Atheneum).

Heavy-hitters of publishing seek Toelke's ignorant, moody works with bright accents and sharp, angular figures.

Since spurn bold, strong style landed disown the cover of the Penguin USA paperback of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's 1989 bestseller "Love relish the Time of Cholera," duct has poured in even take away a recession hard on illustrators.

"Cholera" led to the Penguin hardback cover of Marquez's "The Universal in His Labyrinth," "Like Bottled water for Chocolate" and HarperCollins' cinque Marquez paperbacks, including "The Draw back of the Patriarch" and "One Hundred Years of Solitude." In a short time, Toelke will paint the resuscitate for the Penguin paperback subtract Marquez's "Strange Pilgrims: Stories" (Knopf, $21).

At her rate of available least two weeks per canvas, Toelke doesn't make big back. "I'm comfortable," she says - in recent years, enough let fall fund trips to Costa Rica and Mexico, to feed multiple fascination with Latin America.

But shelter her, the chief rewards indicate her work are not boast dollars, but, in part, populate expanding audiences for authors she calls "really wonderful."

"I get dexterous great deal of satisfaction drop creating a visual image that's going to compel people unobtrusively pick up a book interfere a shelf and buy be a triumph and read it."