Painting Books

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"

                                 Ken Krug: Samuel R. Delany, Dhalgren and Cell Phone

                                            Victoria Reichelt Spectrum, 2009, Oil on Linen, 76 x 76cm

                                              
                                      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

                                                                                                                                                                     

The Painted Book

See Also:

Stanford Kay’s Change of View

 

Kafka's Odradek: three imaginings

<<In the Kafka story, Odradek is a small, mysterious creature whose name, of German or Slavic origin, refers to a wooden spool of thread, “flat and star-shaped.” It’s the sort of thing you might find in a drawer full of junk or the dusty crevices of a stairway — an insignificant but enigmatic remnant emblematic of nothing and everything in existence.>> [source]

art: Elena Villa Bray

'I can't draw a sharp distinction between the prosaic and the spectral, between the factual and the fantastic, and by extension between the documentary and the imaginary,' he has commented. art: Jeff Wall.

[source] 

art:  Leonardo Castaño

Jean-Claude Milner notes in, "Odradek, la bobine de scandale," that the odradek is also part of an anagram for the Greek word dodekaedron. This interpretation of the word is as well consistent with the fact that Odradek seems to be a broken-down remnant of something.