It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.

- Pablo Picasso

To get to Sweet Briar School, meander roughly west and south of Mandan for miles along Lyons Road, where the riverbed, the railroad bed and the road bed play a game of tag with one another. Running in parallel for stretches, they suddenly will playfully turn crossways and intercept each other. Crossings and bridges irregularly knot the gravel road to track or creek like a loosely tied rope.

Along the looping road, black arrows on yellow signs squiggle and bend 90 degrees to tip savvy gravel travelers to slow down as they pass mixed bouquets of mailboxes staked on the outlets of even narrower gravel driveways. On a hot August day, grasshoppers, paper-light as origami, tap the windshield before sliding off into the dust fog behind.

Finally, just off County Road 83, a small building, adobe in color and shape, gives itself away as a schoolhouse by its long, deep-silled windows.

No matter how deeply you go into the quietness, where you find children, Picasso said, you find artists. On a hot and windy August day, the artists are playing at recess in sneakers and denim.

The children are now published artists because Penny Wolf, who lives nearby on the family farm with her husband, Joel, decided to create a children's book using the art created by the 2007-08 students of Morton County's Sweet Briar School, which last year had 11 students. This year, it has eight.

"A Cow Named Sue," Wolf's book, stars a Holstein who wears her "heart"on her forehead. Like all books, it has an organic history. "Sue" goes back 10 years to when the Wolfs' daughter, Tasha, (now Tasha Bohl) was a high school junior at New Salem, and was assigned a project: Create a poetry anthology.

"They were to collect already published ones and also add some originals that they, or someone else, wrote," Wolf said.

The conventional wisdom for writers is to write what you know. For Wolf and Tasha, it was cows.

"Tasha and I wrote a short poem about 'Sue.' The first stanza just came out. We then worked on the second stanza together," Wolf said.

The poem sat in the anthology, and in the back of Wolf's mind, for eight years. Finally, more than two years ago, when Wolf, a long-time custom quilter, couldn't quilt because of a neck problem, she decided to bring the book out again.

Wolf found that she covered up and tucked away her writing each time a family member would walk into the room. The beginnings of art can be a tender process; like a souffle, too much attention in the beginning can damage its expansion.

"I dug it out and spent about a month with it, extending it into 17 stanzas," she said. "But again, it got put away. Last year, I dug it out and really went over it, making it sound as good as I possibly could.

"While I was working on it, I kept thinking that it would be a great project for my neighbors at Sweet Briar School. I love kids' art and thought it would be something different to have children illustrate a whole book."

Tasha had attended Sweet Briar School, class of '96, so in the fall of 2007, Wolf approached the teachers, Toni Wheeler and Diane Kuether, and the school board about her idea. They were enthusiastic, she said.

Wolf made just a few suggestions to them: "I had taken some pictures for the kids to look at while drawing. I snapped a photo of a cow from our dairy farm that has a nice heart shape on her forehead. I also gave them photos of our barn, horse trailer and one of our cats, just in case they wanted to use them in their drawings, for continuity.

"I had also told them that should they draw a pickup, one like mine, a red crew cab," she said. "That is why the last picture has a pickup with four doors. I love that illustration.

"The rest is all their imagination," she said. Tasha drew the back cover and the Sweet Briar students worked on the illustrations over the winter and spring when they had time, she said.

"In May, I picked up the drawings and was thrilled," Wolf said.

The hardest part, she said, was choosing just 20 pictures from all the drawings.

Wolf had 2,000 copies of the book printed in July and already has copies available at several local businesses, including North Dakota Branded Beef, Dan's Supermarkets in Bismarck and at Thrifty White Drug in Mandan, wherever Saks News has outlets, she said. The book is planned to be available soon at Barnes & Noble in Bismarck.

Wolf also is planning to participate at the Pride of DakotaHoliday Showcase at the Bismarck Civic Center early this winter.

(Reach reporter Karen Herzog at 250-8267 or karen.herzog@;bismarcktribune.com.)