Video: Drawings on Books: Mike Stilka's Melancholic Animals
2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55
The American artist Mike Stilkey has been creating special library exhibitions for the past few years. True, it is no longer possible to read these publications - but you can admire the drawings on the books with admiration. It seems that melancholic characters: people and animals, not devoid of a sense of beauty, came out of old volumes and froze for a while on their covers and spines.
In contemporary art, it also happens that books turn into art objects. As they say, beauty requires sacrifice. And in this case, the victims are that the publications can no longer be read. The source of knowledge and inspiration that awakens the reader's imagination becomes just an illustration of someone else's imagination, a canvas for the artist. This is on the one hand.
On the other hand, Mike Stilkey uses books copied from library funds to create drawings on books that have not been borrowed or borrowed for a hundred years. Thanks to this project, the finest hour of the old volumes begins. Agree, such an art rebirth is much better than a direct path to waste paper.
The 36-year-old master of cover painting himself treats books with great respect. His home library contains about a thousand titles, ranging from classics and professional publications to contemporary novels. But the number of volumes that served as material for the Californian artist's work is several times larger than his personal library.
Among the works of Mike Stilka there are portraits of famous people (for example, the fiction writer Bukowski), but still he prefers to give free rein to fantasy and depict animals and fictional characters. The American artist is very fond of animals and often observes them. He claims that it is a great pleasure to portray emotions on the faces of animals. Some of the motives in his works have an autobiographical background. For example, Mike associates numerous images of horses with memories of his cowboy father.
Michael says that he began to paint in adolescence. The child grew up in a family where the parents loved to indulge in drugs. The boy dreamed of escaping from the world of "paths" and "joints" - and therefore plunged headlong into creativity. Since then, paints, inks and colored pencils have entered his life forever. Naturally, he created an imaginary world where he settled mostly lonely brooding animals.
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