Emshwiller - Infinity X Two
(2009 - Nonstop Press)

[-BELOW THE LINE-] (by Luis Ortiz) This book details & celebrates the lives of two Emshwillers - the artist & experimental-filmmaker, Ed, and his acclaimed author wife, Carol. While she figures in a number of related photos and is clearly the model for many of his female figures, most illustrations throughout are his painted & drawn images and film-still-sequences. So, it looks as if producing an illustration artbook per se was not the intention here, and indeed, the book does not make it up onto our list because of the lack of emphasizing that art. For instance, while there are a number of black-&-white paintings displayed (along with an elaboaration of the printing process of early 1950s dust-cover color-faking), I then count nearly four handfuls of examples of clearly colored paintings or covers exhibited here as black-&-white images. Out of the 175 pages, only 23 large reproductions dominate the pages they are on and, most usually, they share the page with some of the biographical text. Then there are another 45 pages where two or more images are gathered together to crowd out other elements enough to be counted as art pages. The rest of the book is dominated by text & film elements. The captions are problematical as well. While they detail the first appearance of art pieces and what use they were put to, they seem to run on a different 'track' than the regular text and are sometimes even broken-up to carry-on amid the following page. I'll relate here that within this volume's layout, an art piece that is discussed in the text is seemingly never in the vicinity of the location of that text. Additionally, there are number of pages given over to notes & citations, a bibliography and an index. The story of this incredibly creative couple needed to be told, but now I'm hoping for more of a gallery book to showcase his illustrative art. Along the path to that, we'd recommend that you pick up DREAM DANCE: THE ART OF ED EMSHWILLER before this one.

Other Nonstop Press releases

Outermost - Art + Life of Jack Gaughan

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