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Paintings on books, not in them

2:22 PM Sat, Nov 14, 2009 |
By Sheila Lennon    Email this author |   Email this entry

stilkeyCatBook-thumb-465x310-20936.jpg
Paintings by Mike Stilkey; photos by by Dave Kinsey


stilkey15.jpgMike Stilkey's Library : The Book Bench : The New Yorker:

Books are sacred objects which we are all free to worship in different ways. The L.A.-based artist Mike Stilkey, for example, paints all over them. His work on stacked spines and covers reworks books into a beautiful, albeit unreadable, library.

A new and fragile art form.

More images at both links, the photos from a photoful interview, Mike Stilkey Studio Visit by Dave Kinsey at the unfortunately named (What is the point in choosing a degrading name like this for a site about art?).

Why did you choose to paint on books? It seems like it would have been a challenge to go from working on paper to painting on something so dimensional. What was that transition like?

It was sort of an accident. I was painting on book pages for forever, and actually published a book in 2005 titled "100 Portraits" in which I drew one hundred portraits on old book pages. At the time, I was drawing on books, records or anything else I could find at a thrift store. Eventually, I started drawing on the books themselves. I was going to do a project where I just drew on the covers of the books, and as I finished them I would stack them against the wall. It dawned on me that it might be a good idea to paint down the spines of the books instead of just on the covers

Charles Bukowski's head is painted on the back cover of J.B. Priestley's The Good Companions, (a tale of people changing their lives by joining a traveling theater troupe) which is probably meaningless. The "wallpaper" design of the discarded book's cover matters. Similarly, the bottom book's cover design comes with an interpretation of the 1885 painting of artist James McNeill Whistler by William Merritt Chase, which hangs in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Via Jorn Barger's Google Reader feed.

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