Short & Sweet Treats discussion

Share what books you read that involve visual art (paintings, sculpture, and the like) that you enjoyed and would recommend.

One of the books I can't wait to get to is Priceless: How I Went Undercover to Rescue the World's Stolen Treasures. It was one of the last books my aunt read, she praised the read as a fellow art lover.

Love the altered book picture, Jen. My favorite artist in that field is Brian Dettmer, also known as "The Book Surgeon". http://briandettmer.com/



"Using knives, tweezers and surgical tools, Brian Dettmer carves one page at a time. Nothing inside the out-of-date encyclopedias, medical journals, illustration books, or dictionaries is relocated or implanted, only removed." 15 excellent close ups are here: http://www.mymodernmet.com/profiles/b...

Brilliant!

great thread, Jen. thank you!

My pleasure :)

I find the collage work of Nick Bantock to be fascinating. I first read The Griffin and Sabine Trilogy: Griffin and Sabine, The Golden Mean, Sabine's Notebook about 20 years ago. The books are made up of a series of postcards and letters between Griffin, an artist living in London, and Sabine, an illustrator of postage stamps living in the (fictional) Sicmon Islands in the South Pacific. The reader opens envelopes as the story unfolds. Then the Morning Star Trilogy continued the story:
1. The Gryphon: In Which the Extraordinary Correspondence of Griffin & Sabine Is Rediscovered
2. Alexandria: In Which the Extraordinary Correspondence of Griffin & Sabine Unfolds
3. The Morning Star: In Which the Extraordinary Correspondence of Griffin & Sabine is Illuminated



I really enjoy his autobiographical work: The Artful Dodger. The goodreads blurb says: "With sales of his Griffin & Sabine Trilogy surpassing three million copies, it's been said that Nick Bantock has created an original literary genre. Now he brings new meaning to the art of autobiography with The Artful Dodger: Images and Reflections, in which he infuses the tale of his professional and artistic life with warmth and wit. The Artful Dodger surveys the vast and varied territory that Bantock's work encompasses: from his English art-school days to paperback covers, pure abstract experimentation to pop-up books, Griffin & Sabine to his most recent work. Bantock's own words lend a highly personal, often revealing, always entertaining angle to more than 350 resplendent images. As rich in life as it is in art, The Artful Dodger reveals the creative range of a modern graphic master."



The short 2 minute video of Bantock working is a treat: http://www.nickbantock.com/videos.php

Have you guys ever seen the books were there's a painting on the very edge of the pages that you can only see when you slightly bend the pages?

They're called "edge paintings" for rather obvious reasons...

Very interesting, Melanti; I had never heard of this. I discovered this fore-edge artist's website: http://www.foredgefrost.co.uk/

"Fore-edge painter Martin Frost has been working from studios in West Sussex, England for 40 years. He has painted the edges of well over 3500 books including examples of the scarce all-edge, split and two-way doubles and now binds many of his books too. He has written a workshop manual, published articles and lectured to many major organizations interested in the art and craft of the book throughout the UK and the US."
http://www.nyam.org/events/2012/fore-...

Those are amazing, Melanti!

This is another book I want to read regarding art: The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves, and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History

Altered book artists usually use books that would be recycled; my local artist folded a copy of Moby-Dick; or, The Whale for me, since it's my favorite novel. It looks something like this:



My favorite altered book picture was part of a promotion for Anagram Bookshop, in Prague, which is an English-language bookshop with a vast assortment of fiction and nonfiction. Anagram came out with many ads like the one below, beautifully illustrating their slogan “Words Create Worlds.”



I just purchased Art Made from Books: Altered, Sculpted, Carved, Transformed by Laura Heyenga, which has a preface by Brian Dettmer. Simply incredible to see what can be done, rather than discarding them!

I've always liked books with carved out hide aways.