For Thomas Jefferson, prolific reader that he was, imagination was the realm of the arts. And when today’s book artists break down the walls between literature and sculpture, they are fulfilling Jefferson’s belief by creating an altogether new form of expression that has an effect greater than the sum of its parts.
Book arts – or more accurately, artists’ books – are a relatively new craft form. And while the former date back to the illustrated manuscripts painstakingly prepared by monks in their cells, the latter has only been part of the American craft vocabulary for 50 or 60 years. Before then, book arts were typified by decorative front boards, and illustrations of classics by artists like Maxfield Parrish, and N. C. Wyeth, plus Rockwell Kent’s haunting pen and ink drawings that accompanied Moby Dick.
Tatana Kellner, Iron, 2008
Artists’ books are not to be confused with art books, having been characterized as books for their own sake, rather than for the information they contain. Simply put, they are not books that contain art, but are the art themselves.
Artists think differently in doing their books. Rather than creating (or taking) text and then composing a book around it, they think of content (text and image) and form (execution), as parallel tracks that are built together without a hierarchy that makes one more important than the other.
