A labor of love and a feast for the eye and imagination.
A coffee-table book featuring color photos of the artist’s work in natural materials.
Hohlweg’s oeuvre pays homage to a historical and geographical range of influences, with sections devoted to pieces inspired by Chinese, Japanese, Middle Eastern and Greek art, as well as individual works with hints of India and Native America. Some designs are taken from paintings (with attribution) while others imitate patterns of traditional tile and textile art, mainly from the East. Pieces in this collection are from her first six years as a gourd artist, 2001 to 2006, arranged according to similarity of style and cultural content rather than chronology. Many works bespeak a passion for things of the Earth. The golden-brown tones of the pieces are covered in natural stippling, fluting, bumps and blemishes. Other works feature curving woody stems and vines and lacy tendrils–all of which wrap around the sensuous, rounded bodies of the natural gourds. Certain pieces demonstrate unique ingenuity, as when Hohlweg treats the gourds’ surfaces so they resemble bronze, pewter and other man-made materials. Some works also take on stiffer, more artificial shapes. The artist shows considerable whimsy and a love for puns–one political piece is entitled “One Nation Under Gourd with a Bush Out of ‘is Gourd!” while another, “All o’ Gourd’s Children,” shows the faces of kids across the globe. Most pieces in the book are vessels, but there are also musical instruments, jewelry and sculptures. The photographs are rich and luminous and the selection shows an impressive spectrum of work, which is by and large allowed to speak for itself. A bit more in the way of text would be welcome. It might clarify how the artist achieved these remarkable effects and expound upon sources of the various motifs.
A labor of love and a feast for the eye and imagination.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-4243-3029-4
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
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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