A captivating examination of a creative mind in constant motion.
A daughter preserves her father’s artistic contributions in this coffee-table book that intersperses sculptures, drawings, and paintings with essays.
In 1960, Charles H. Forrester asserted that the duty of an artist was “to seek meaning in chaos.” Born in 1928 near New York City, he learned to understand disorder growing up in the shadow of the Depression and World War II. He married the politically engaged Dorothy Reese and moved to Seattle. There, he changed his focus from engineering to fine arts and began his influential career, working in a wide variety of materials, from plywood and welded wire to bronze. The brief biographical essay that forms the warm heart of this volume was written by the artist’s son, John, and daughter, Winifred, the book’s editor. They are perhaps best positioned to describe how Forrester’s art emerged from and was expressed by his life. (He died in 2010.) The other writings in these pages explore specific aspects of Forrester’s oeuvre. The keynote essay by Guy Jordan, an associate professor of art history, describes Forrester’s abstract works as “art forms which do not speak in words.” Jordan points out the humor evident in such pieces as Running Abreast, a sculpture that combines the muscular leg of a runner with a woman’s pendulous breast. Most of the volume is comprised of reproductions of Forrester’s wide body of work, with elucidating commentary by Joe Nolan, a musician, writer, and artist. Nolan points out the “voluptuous forms and stylized lines” that are present even in Forrester’s representational pieces, such as his expressive portrait busts. Works like The Voyage, an abstract sculpture of two linked figures that evokes the uncertainty of travel, and The Equestrian, a concrete monolith commissioned for the Oregon centennial, are commanding on the page, inspiring a desire to experience them in person. Overall, this illuminating book provides a substantial and comprehensive overview of Forrester’s philosophy and the place of his works in the pantheon of modern art.
A captivating examination of a creative mind in constant motion.Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-578-67826-9
Page Count: 138
Publisher: Folly Industries
Review Posted Online: Dec. 7, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PERSPECTIVES
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
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.
In which the veteran humorist enters middle age with fine snark but some trepidation as well.
Mortality is weighing on Sedaris (Theft by Finding: Diaries 1977-2002, 2017, etc.), much of it his own, professional narcissist that he is. Watching an elderly man have a bowel accident on a plane, he dreaded the day when he would be the target of teenagers’ jokes “as they raise their phones to take my picture from behind.” A skin tumor troubled him, but so did the doctor who told him he couldn’t keep it once it was removed. “But it’s my tumor,” he insisted. “I made it.” (Eventually, he found a semitrained doctor to remove and give him the lipoma, which he proceeded to feed to a turtle.) The deaths of others are much on the author’s mind as well: He contemplates the suicide of his sister Tiffany, his alcoholic mother’s death, and his cantankerous father’s erratic behavior. His contemplation of his mother’s drinking—and his family’s denial of it—makes for some of the most poignant writing in the book: The sound of her putting ice in a rocks glass increasingly sounded “like a trigger being cocked.” Despite the gloom, however, frivolity still abides in the Sedaris clan. His summer home on the Carolina coast, which he dubbed the Sea Section, overspills with irreverent bantering between him and his siblings as his long-suffering partner, Hugh, looks on. Sedaris hasn’t lost his capacity for bemused observations of the people he encounters. For example, cashiers who say “have a blessed day” make him feel “like you’ve been sprayed against your will with God cologne.” But bad news has sharpened the author’s humor, and this book is defined by a persistent, engaging bafflement over how seriously or unseriously to take life when it’s increasingly filled with Trump and funerals.
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.Pub Date: May 29, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-39238-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
PROFILES
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