Both paintings and books are vessels for ideas, experience and memory.
The books we read and the paintings we love and choose to live with,
define us. A book requires the reader to assemble images and ideas out
of its signs and symbols. Likewise, a painting asks that you translate its
strokes and drips into reason and emotion.
——Stanford Kay
In a painting, books serve a very different purpose from their intended function.
They are purely objects like any others, with histories and narratives of their own,
quite separate from the text inside them.
——Victoria Reichelt
Stanford Kay: My Back Pages (Zen Mind), 2009, Acrylic on canvas, 30" x 36"
Stanford Kay: Boxed In, 2011, Acrylic on canvas, 20" x 16"
Ken Krug: Hank Ketcham, The Complete Dennis the Menace, 1951-1952 and Glass of Water
Stanford Kay: My Back Pages (Grey), 2009, Acrylic on Canvas, 24" x 30"
Ken Krug: Haruki Murakami, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World and Coffee
It’s surely no coincidence that artists are choosing the book as a subject in this era of new reading technologies. But these paintings are too joyous and affectionate to be memento mori for the printed word. “I think books as objects are beginning to mean more to people,” says artist and designer Leanne Shapton. “Their covers and the way they look—not just their contents—are part of our collective histories, with references, moods, and personal implications all their own."
——Peter Terzian
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