Building on the Ruins of Civilization

Okay, Will Ashford's work makes me wanna go raid my bookshelves and start altering right now.  Sifting through his on-line slideshow, I had a really hard time picking an image for this post. I like Ashford's work a lot, and not just because he uses a lot of spirals. His earlier pieces are very geometric and abstract; the later ones more organic and natural. It's strictly 2-D, the palette is mostly monochrome, and yet it's really compelling. The way he connects-the-dots with certain words on the page, his purposeful obliteration of others, the images he overlays on them are a metaphor for the way art builds on what's come before.

In his artist's statement, Ashford says this is exactly what he's doing:

The majority of this work comes from several different copies of The Essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson printed from 1887 to 1927. Something about working with these pages quietly reminds me that a part of our culture is about recycling ideas.

Unlike a lot of altered books I've seen, Ashford emphasizes the words on the page as much as the images he puts over them, maintaining the essence of the page as part of a literary or informational work, but still transforming it into something other than it was.

This is the kind of stuff that I'd really like to do in an altered book. Imagine page after page of something like this:

[Via Dear Ada]

Comments

[Amy Hanks]

Work like that makes me so sad that I have no ability with any artistic medium--other than paper. It's amazing!