The Paperback Art Of James Avati
                                             (2005 - Donald M. Grant)  

     (by Piet Schreuders & Kenneth Fulton)    This is the only book so far to collect together this artist's paintings.  Many of the originals have been lost, making the gallery section here a wonder.  With that said, I would still wish for more than what we have here.  So little about his life is known to the general public that I can't begrudge the 51 text pages of biography, but I felt too many pages got devoted to modeling photos, maps, rough layouts and the occasional design flourish.  For instance, there are six images that are reprinted over the book's central gutter - while they're are all 'o.k.' in presentation, I'm dismayed that four of them were put on slightly-distorted display like that unnecessarily, that those four could have been positioned on their own page with little or no size modification (do note that one of the two 'valid' ones displays Stanley Meltzoff's wonderful rendition of the miraculous artist in his busy, family-filled studio).  Several other featured pieces could have been presented larger and made better use of the empty space that shared their pages.  The captions are adequate, but their use & positioning, along with anecdotes and thumbnails of the resulting covers could have been otherwise placed spatially or collected differently, so as to allow the art itself to be celebrated better on their pages.  As it is, out of the book's 200 pages, the art dominated only 121 of them, but 81 are featured large reproductions.  In my opinion, I think there could be great value in presenting carefully-handled large reproductions of the paperback covers where the original painting has been destroyed, or not yet come to light.

Other Donald M. Grant releases

  George Barr:  Upon The Winds Of Yesterday

  Virgil Finlay  [BELOW THE LINE]

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