A luminous, haunting panorama of an austere yet rich environment.
Lonesome people inhabit a forlorn landscape in this poetic and photographic meditation on Texas.
Smith, an Austin-based singer/songwriter, arranges poems, song lyrics, brief essays, and photos into “a love song to the mythology of Texas.” The book’s soul resides in its dozens of images of the West Texas plains, which show scrubby, arid prairies with tufts of grass, weedy tendrils, clumps of trees—often bare and wintry—and the occasional yucca; the land dimly stretches away under threatening clouds until it meets hills that either sparkle with promise under a shaft of sunlight or form a black, imprisoning wall. The human presence is seen in artifacts: highways and railroad tracks converging toward the horizon; rust-stained Quonset huts and oil tanks; tires abandoned against a sagging fence. Photographed with an old Polaroid in black and white with a hint of sepia, these hazy, cunningly artless snapshots capture terrain that feels nearly vacant but suffused with meaning. Smith’s writings are similarly shaped by Texan vistas, whether in an essay on the geology of the plains, which were the bottoms of ancient seas before they became highways for herds and people, or in a plaintive love song that gives the book its name: “And the stars they are falling from your eyes / And my love, my love was on the rise / And I am in between you and some horizon line / Underneath the western skies.” Smith’s pen is as good as his camera at evoking the gritty physicality of the Lone Star State and opening it up to human energy and emotion, as in his entrancing poem “Necklace”: “Just after the first gas station coming into town, / I see abandoned oil rigs, houses with dirt and cactus front yards, / …. / A dual cab Ford truck screams / Up behind me and passes. / Two teenage white kids in the front smoke / And nod their heads to the bass crunch / Of some guy singing about life in Newark or L.A.” The result is a feast for the eyes and the imagination.
A luminous, haunting panorama of an austere yet rich environment.Pub Date: March 9, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-947297-42-5
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Dexterity
Review Posted Online: May 25, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 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
A beautifully produced, engaging homage.
Celebrating a beloved artist.
Published to coincide with a major exhibition of works by British-born artist David Hockney (b. 1937) at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, this lushly illustrated volume offers a detailed overview of the artist’s life and work, along with chapters focused on his various styles and subject matter, a chronology, and a glossary of the many techniques he employed in his art, including camera lucida, computer, and video. Contributors of essays include noted art historians and curators, such as Norman Rosenthal, who edited the volume; Simon Schama; Anne Lyles; James Cahill; and François Michaud. Growing up in the north of England, Hockney was drawn to the light and sparkle that he found in Hollywood movies. When he finally arrived in Los Angeles, the sunlit landscapes inspired him, and his new sense of artistic freedom concurred with sexual freedom: As a gay man, he felt liberated from the constraints that had weighed on him in Britain, even in the “relative Bohemia” of the Royal College of Art. Essayists reflect on his artistic interests, such as landscapes, portraiture, flowers, and the opera—for which he created boldly exuberant sets—as well as on his influences and experimentation. Michaud examines the impact on Hockney of a visit to Paris in the 1970s, where he became familiar with Henri Matisse and his contemporaries from museum exhibitions. In the 1990s, visiting his mother and friends in Yorkshire, Hockney painted both outdoors and in the studio, experimenting with various media—including the photocopier and fax machine—as he worked to render the woodsy landscape. As a companion to the exhibition, the volume offers stunning reproductions of Hockney’s prolific works. Enormously popular with museumgoers, Hockney, Rosenthal exults, “transforms the ordinary and the everyday into the remarkable.”
A beautifully produced, engaging homage.Pub Date: June 3, 2025
ISBN: 9780500029527
Page Count: 328
Publisher: Thames & Hudson
Review Posted Online: April 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
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