CALMCATION.COM - ARTBOOKS OF FANTASY, ADVENTURE & NOSTALGIA !!

Shannon Stirnweis - 80 Years Behind The Brush
(2015 - Illustrated Press)

This volume seems to have had a different genesis than its sibling monographs, being born out of the composition & materials that the painter put together for a recent public exhibition of his art. The final result is one of the best glimpses I've seen into the somewhat typical life-story of the post-Golden-Age work-a-day illustrator who hustled for years to make a living & provide for a family before savvily transitioning to gallery work & the fine-art market. And all the better for having the artist himself still available to help formalize the package in his angst-free, it's no-big-deal voice. A side-note would be that I welcome that the book approaches right up to an ideal size *without* then tipping over it. While it is filled with the artist's own commentary and career & instructional anecdotes, it still feels like a gallery book, with 92% being pages with featured large reproductions. (Do know that about a sixth of those displays are his pre-professional developmental & training work). His career exhibits here span book covers, as well as magazine, promotional & industrial illustration, and thru that, his fine-art work then seems to settle into the American frontier milieu that he had an affinity for, with Western & Native-American themes (and also with all the dramatic wildlife & landscape vignettes they can entail).