Su Blackwell and Book Arts - Su Blackwell và nghệ thuật chạm trên sách

If you are anything like me, and I know that many of you are (May God have mercy on your souls), the merest willful damage to a book is tantamount to abuse. I have never quite gotten over my childhood habit of anthropomorphizing objects. While my talk of trees and books and the various Objet d’art that inhabit my world and the relationship I have with them is more poetic license than waking delusion, there is still a very small part of that young lad who assumes that books, like people, have feelings too. Thus today’s Book Week post features art that is something of an enigma for me: I admire the work and am inspired by the creativity and at the same time I feel pangs of guilt over my attachment to each piece.

Today rather than spending a tremendous amount of time discussing each image, I am going to briefly showcase the artist and then allow you to enjoy their work.

Though it may be incongruous with the images, to keep the mood light (after all, I don’t want my Book Week posts making anyone cry) I will include various inspiring/funny quotes about books or reading between photos.

Prepare yourselves.

And we’re off.

The 12 Dancing Princesses

The first artist in today’s post was a serendipitous discovery courtesy of the recent Friday Favorite darling Anne-Julie Aubry. A visit to her blog not only revealed a tantalizing new Snow White picture (go look), it also introduced me to a new artist that fit in with this already planned post: Su Blackwell.

The Wizard of Oz

Much of the work of Su Blackwell certainly fits in with the fairytale and fantasy themes of the Once Upon a Time II Challenge.

The artist herself describes her work:

“Paper has been used for communication since its invention; either between humans or in an attempt to communicate with the spirit world. I employ this delicate, accessible medium and use irreversible, destructive processes to reflect on the precariousness of the world we inhabit and the fragility of our life, dreams and ambitions.

It is the delicacy, the slight feeling of claustrophobia, as if these characters, the landscape have been trapped inside the book all this time and are now suddenly released. A number of the compositions have an urgency about them, the choices made for the cut-out people from the illustrations seem to lean towards people on their way somewhere, about to discover something, or perhaps escaping from something. And the landscapes speak of a bleak mystery, a rising, an awareness of the air.”

Enjoy!

The Castle

“Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about the things in my pocket. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past.”
~G. K. Chesterton

The Lake and the Boat

“You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.”
~C.S. Lewis

Magnolia Tree

“‘Tis the good reader that makes the good book; a good head cannot read amiss: in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakably meant for his ear.”
~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Alice–A Mad Tea Party

“A well-composed book is a magic carpet on which we are wafted to a world that we cannot enter in any other way.”
~Caroline Gordon

Alice: Through the Looking Glass

“Whenever you read a good book, it’s like the author is right there, in the room talking to you, which is why I don’t like to read good books.”
~Jack Handy

The Land of Far Beyond, notice the people walking the path?

“We read to know we are not alone.”
~C.S. Lewis

Wintry: The World of Ice

“A book should serve as the ax for the frozen sea within us.”
~Franz Kafka

The Secret Garden

“You know you’ve read a good book when you turn the last page and feel a little as if you have lost a friend.”
~Paul Sweeney

The Beginning of Something

Su Blackwell is an incredibly talented artist, to be sure. Like previous Friday Favorite Thomas Allen (who would fit in quite will with today’s post) her work is as much about the wonderful creations as the way that they are lit and photographed/presented. I am so impressed by her work. You should certainly not be satisfied with these mere morsels. Go and visit her site to see many more examples of her unique vision.

The Old House