A career crafter shares the unfettered joys of Chewbacca Sock Puppets and Jabba the Hutt body pillows.
Burton, creative editor and blogger for Lucasfilm’s immensely popular Star Wars website, applies imagination and accessibility to creations that are “fun, not frustrating.” The author makes good use of commonly available supplies found in the kitchen (dry pasta, wooden spoons), the closet (old T-shirts and socks) and the recycling bin (newspapers, bottles). She gives new life to broken toys and Halloween masks, transforming them into adorable and often practical Star Wars artwork. The book is artfully arranged into sections of varying skill levels. Some best suited for interactive role-play, such as the Yoda Felt Doll, while others incorporate holiday themes, or make for creative pet toys and home decor. Burton’s simple ideas have the potential to become functional masterworks like tote bags, pillows and blankets fashioned out of new or used Star Wars T-shirts, a Space Slug Draft Blocker made from tube socks, even an Ewok Flower Vase. Those with a flair for handiwork will delight in a section on nature-inspired projects using pebbles and moss to create “Dagobath Carnivorous” plant habitats or a milk-carton Wookiee Bird House. Burton saves the most challenging mission for the final pages where, in 19 quick steps, readers can create a gruesomely monstrous Mounted Acklay Head. Easy-to-follow directions, patterns and an inclusive index of basic materials all contribute to the appeal of these unique crafts, including photographs of Star Wars fans alongside their own imaginative constructions. Whimsical, straightforward fun for die-hard buffs of any age.
Pub Date: March 29, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-345-51116-4
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Del Rey/LucasBooks
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
This frank but flawed dual biography of Alfred Stieglitz, photographer, art dealer, impresario, and Georgia O'Keeffe, painter, from their meeting in 1916 to their deaths (he in 1946, she in 1986) reveals along the way the development of photography as an art form, the experience of a woman artist, and much about the studios, galleries, life style, and politics of the artistic communities in N.Y.C. and Taos in the early decades of the 20th century. Mostly, however, Eisler (Private Lives, 1986) explores the psychopathology of two intense, talented, ambitious, creative, and sexually liberated people. More a mutual exploitation—a ``collusion,'' as Eisler concedes in the last chapter—than a ``romance,'' this was an unlikely pairing. Stieglitz, short, spoiled, argumentative, a married Jewish intellectual 23 years O'Keeffe's senior, possibly a pedophile, sexually confused at the least, consecrated their relationship with a series of pornographic photos described here in considerable detail and interpreted variously as ``cunt worship'' and ``a canticle...to sexual mystery.'' Often sickly and depressed, eventually O'Keeffe found her own idiom—the giant flowers and fruits, the landscapes of Lake George where she and Stieglitz summered, even the skulls and bones she did in Taos, where she took refuge in her later years,—all interpreted sexually by reviewers however much she objected. Friends such as Sherwood Anderson, Jean Toomer, and Mabel Dodge, as well as wealthy patrons, were attracted by the couple's charm, talent, and the illusion of power, but many were alienated by their volatile nature and often scandalous sexual experimentation. For a book about visual arts, this is curiously out of focus. Eisler summarizes primary sources and major events, but also quotes minor reviews, introduces minor figures with full bios but little function in the major lives, and—in spite of the coda quoted from O'Keeffe, ``Art is a wicked thing. It is what we are''—shows only occasional relationship between the ``wicked'' art and the lives.
Pub Date: May 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-385-26122-5
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1991
As a painter, abstract expressionist Schueler fought to translate his vision to canvas; as a writer, he struggled just as hard to describe the difficulty of leading a creative life. A newcomer who quickly found his way into the center of the prevailing art scene in the 1950s, Schueler began his career in the shadow of such artists as Clyfford Still, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Mark Rothko. Years younger than those first-generation abstract expressionists, however, he had to fight to assert his place in the pantheon. It was a fight that drained him, and as much as he longed to be in the midst of “the glory,” he also longed to escape it. This volume, a collection of the artist’s letters and journal entries, begins with his decision to leave New York in search of a landscape that would inform his work; under the quick-changing skies of Mallaig, Scotland, he found it. The wild, stormy weather of Scotland’s West Coast mirrored his own emotional struggle: insecure and ambitious, driven and desiring, Schueler ricocheted between countries, dealers, and women. Judging by this book, the greatest constant in his life was his devotion to his art, and his book reflects his dedication to it with a loose, engaging fluency. He was a fearless documentarian, and The Sound of Sleat fascinates—not only for its studio-eye view of the epochal New York art scene of the ’50s and ’60s, but also for its archetypal quality. Schueler was nothing if not self-aware, and in spite of occasional self-aggrandizing, he had a very clear understanding of the cost of leading a creative life. Although he suffered greatly for his art—and put the women who loved him though hell—his story remains oddly uplifting; he chose to live as close to his dream as possible. An insider’s outsider, Schueler had a unique perspective on the raging art world of the ’50s and ’60s; his book is both a personal testament and a riveting account of American painting at that time. (16 pages color, 32 b&w photos)
Pub Date: March 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-312-20015-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Picador
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1999
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