My shelf is no stranger to art books and Pen to Paper is possibly the best one it has ingested all year. The book is introduced with a note about the resurgence of “analogue skills,” and a rebellion against the glossy, digital art that permeates the commercial art world. Printed on fine, matte paper and filled with full-color drawings, paintings and collages, it’s like a huge exhibition in a compact, 7 x 9″ package.
Pen to Paper opens with work by Allyson Mellberg who I recently interviewed for the September 2010 issue of Juxtapoz. She makes her own ink, boiling walnuts to produce a dark brown color, and extracting pigment from pokeberries to make magenta. Like many of the imagined subjects rendered by the twenty-two artists featured in this book, Mellberg’s characters often suffer from some sort of malady or disfiguration. She pictures a world in which unseen toxins bubble up to the surface, making their adverse impact visible.
Oakland’s John Casey is another artist whose figures wrestle with creature-like features, and Allison Schulnik’s thickly painted, ghostly, clown apparitions add to this dialogue of rambunctious misfits.