Children will squeal with delight (5/5)

This is the second 'ology' book from illustrator Camilla Pintonato (the first was 'Chickenology' also published Princeton Architectural Press) and like the first, her pictures are a delight to look at. The five chapters will reveal to children and probably some adults, the fascinating life and times of porkers around the world. The chapter 'Pigs inside and out' starts with loveable piglets, looks at their anatomy and follows their activities on a farm until they are ready for market. An interesting fact is that pigs only have one stomach, unlike sheep, goats and cows who have four to handle a grass diet, pigs, like humans, have a much more varied diet, basically, they'll eat anything that's edible.

Other spreads cover Sausages around the world, Wit and wisdom: pigs might fly, Fame: Miss Piggy; Peppa pig; Pigling Bland, Create your perfect pigsty: they need lots of play and rooting space. 'A rainbow of breeds' spread pictures of twelve assorted different colored pigs from some of the five hundred breeds worldwide. The last eight pages have a big picture a page and lots of interesting facts about various breeds.

Like her chicken book, Pintonato's pictures and design is a lovely look at these friendly animals. Another 'ology' book please Camilla.

 

Every day life long before we arrived

A fascinating look at the latest scientific analysis that peels away the popular myths about dinosaurs. Though there is a lot of science involved the author (Professor of Vertebrate Palaeontolgy and head of Palaeobiology Research at the Uni of Bristol) writes in an easy conversational style that is a pleasure to read, apart from all those rather unpronounceable Latin names for these creatures.

 The discovery, in 1996, of a Sinosauropteryx fossil radically changed the perception of dinosaurs, there was evidence of feathers on a body instead of scales. Page thirty-nine has a photo of a perfect skeleton that reveals a fringe of feathers over the top of the animal's head. The first half of the book explores the physical appearance of small flesh-eating animals closely related to birds because they had feathers and some could fly. An oddity is Micropractor, a bird with four wings, which is also classed as a dinosaur 

The book gets to the conventional dinosaur world with Edmontosaurus, ten meters in length and had what we expect of such creatures: a scaly skin. A mummy was found in 1884 and years later confirmed that it was a vegetation eater and had hundreds and hundreds of teeth to get through tough plant matter. The Saltasaurus at around thirteen meters in length weighed seven tonnes but larger ones could weigh up to fifty tonnes and be so big making it safe from any potential attacker. In the age of the dinosaurs, there was plenty of water which allowed for marine reptiles like the  Stenopterygius to thrive. The photo on page 181 shows this ichthyosaur had a very long jaw filled with dozens of sharp teeth.

The reader might ask how do we know so much about life millions of years ago. The author draws on a huge amount of contemporary scientific knowledge in molecular biology, DNA, the use of electron microscopes, analysis of pigments and other sciences to generate a credible scenario of past life on earth. The book has plenty of images (150) to back up the text and especially the excellent illustrations by Bob Nicholls which open each chapter.

The art of watercolor

A new book on Rockman's work is always worthwhile. Here are 120, mostly watercolor paintings, from 1987 to 2020 and they clearly show his mastery of the watercoluor technique:  letting colours run into each other to create subtle shapes and shading. It's the natural world that fascinates him, especially when it collides with a man-made environment. Scattered through the pages various places crop up like the Golden Gate Bridge, Venice, Hong Kong, the Statue of Liberty, they all look the worse for wear with animals looking on, sort of waiting for their chance to take over. 

A chapter called Bioluminescece has some remarkable paintings of sea creatures, all on an inky black background. Here the merging of watercolour paint works beautifully to create very credibly sea life like jellyfish, squid, drape octopus and others. The Field Drawing chapter is quite intriguing. Rockman was on a trip to Guyana in 1994 and having run out of pencils he decided to experiment by painting with a mixture of earth and water. Predictable when the works dried the mud flaked off. A bit more experimentation with some matte acrylic mixed in with earth and water solved the problem. The paintings of animals, fish, birds, insects, plants and foliage really do look quite stunning. Very simple studies basically in shades of sepia floating on white paper.

The back pages have an interesting selection of twenty-one pictures in an Appendix of Graphic Influences. These include old masters to Beatrix Potter with long captions revealing how these works influenced Rockman's painting and composition style.

Works on paper is a celebration of the artist's work in a beautifully produced book. 

Brushed smooth

Above and below, you can have four covers on this book.

If you looked at print consumer culture in the Seventies and Eighties you must have seen some of the wonderful airbrush art on these pages. These guys (Dave Willardson, Charlie White III, Peter Lloyd and Peter Palombi) were everywhere back then. Dozens of LPs, greeting cards, movie posters, magazine covers and especially inside pages sort of saturated the market with airbrush art. As Mike Salisbury says in his essay (while he was Art Director of West magazine) the text of an article became secondary to the airbrush illustrations.

The book's seventy-two main images are most likely the best of what the four produced from the mid-sixties to the start of the eighties. My favorite was Charlie White III. I always liked the background textures he created in many of his works and his masterpiece was probably the poster he did for the Screaming Yellow Zonkers (I've got a copy somewhere, but it's still unframed) partly inspired by a Maxfield Parrish mural he saw in a New York hotel. Peter Palombi got inspiration from JC Leyendecker; other artists mentioned by the four include Bob Peak, Doug Johnson, Bernie Fuchs, Milton Glaser and Bob Grossman (who also did airbrush work).

Airbrush art requires exacting initial draftsmanship and I thought it was rather unfortunate that missing from the book are any examples of roughs that would show the preliminary work to these paintings though the front and back of the book cover does have part of a Palombi drawing for an Eddie Harris LP. Each color requires a mask to cover everything else and looking at these paintings you'll just have to wonder at the intricate shapes that were cut out and the patience involved.

The book is in an almost square format, printed on gloss paper with a 200 screen, with each artist's portfolio printed on black or nearly black pages (which will show up finger marks). The book is, though, rather overdesigned, I thought. The seventeen-page essay by Mike Salisbury is set in an italic script and printed in orange type, while the interviews with the four artists are printed in grey type making it difficult to read but perhaps the most annoying thing are the thumbnail pictures on these text pages. There is plenty of page space throughout and it wouldn't have spoilt the presentation to make these pictures a reasonable size; captions might have helped the reader, too. There are no page numbers on the left-hand pages and on the right the number is spelled out. All these visual elements are no more than designer whimsy to my mind and rather spoil the overall feel of the book.

Overspray is an interesting look at the LA commercial art market at a time when airbrush was king, though by focusing on just four key artists it leaves out plenty of others. A book I've always enjoyed is  Air Powered  which covers the history of the machine and has portfolios for ten main artists (including the Overspray four) and seventeen others plus chapters relating to other types of airbrush art. It's a 224-page coffee-table book which can be bought quite cheaply on the net if you look around.