A catalog of plants, animals, and spaces that’s a feast for the eyes.
Flowers, small dogs, and gorgeous interiors are the obsessions of this illustrated coffee-table book.
Roehm, a designer, painter, and photographer, opens her meditation with a photo essay on the “Feminine Touch” in decorating, by which she means “thoughtful, intentional, well-placed details of color and décor and lovely added nuances…accomplished with care and grace.” She illustrates the topic with many photos of indoor room and table treatments in a mansion of darkly glowing wood furniture, parquet floors, and panels with complicated trim. The design elements she spotlights include classical motifs of fluted Grecian columns and busts of women in togas; 17th-century portraits and lushly upholstered chairs; wall sconces; and breakfast, lunch, and dinner settings staged as still lifes with cheese, grapes, and wine. Most of all, there are flowers: atop pianos, as centerpieces for meals, strewn on vestibule side tables. The flowers take the lead in the author’s bimodal color palette; her red-spectrum treatments feature red, russet, and gold, with the flowers contributing throbbing pinks and purples. They contrast with her blue-spectrum tableaux—cool blue-and-white or pale green furnishings and tableware complemented by white flowers. The book’s second photo essay, “Flowers and Gardens,” studies a semiformal garden centered on a giant eagle statue; the blooms include daffodils, tulips, snapdragons, chrysanthemums, and red and pink roses. Roehm’s concluding section, “Furry Friends,” showcases a jumble of dogs, mainly terriers with the odd Labrador and dachshund joining the pack. The canine models are all fluffy hair, button eyes, and steady, grave countenances. The author sprinkles inspirational quotations in the tome that aren’t always correctly attributed. (The line “simplicity is the ultimate sophistication” comes from mid-20th-century writers, not Leonardo da Vinci.) Roehm’s own sparse but pithy commentary features design aphorisms—“Style is often created by bold displays”—and winsome girlhood memories (“Nurtured by my grandmother’s love of nature, I was enthralled with her rustic garden and often made mud pies decorated with flowers that became my ‘fancy cakes,’ for sale, of course!”). The photography is stunning, with deep, saturated hues and cunning compositions that bring out exquisite details as well as the larger balance of color and form in a scene. If you love blossoms, dogs, and deluxe digs, this is your book.
A catalog of plants, animals, and spaces that’s a feast for the eyes.Pub Date: Dec. 7, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-578-94046-5
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Feb. 11, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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