So of course I picked a picture book for the first entry in the 2025 Winter Reading Challenge. As you know, gentle reader, I have accumulated a number of monographs as I used to flip through them whilst spending my Sundays watching football (that is, having football on so I could sit and browse art and poetry books). However, I haven’t had the expensive football package for a couple of years now, but I’ve still picked up inexpensive art books when I can. Like this book, which I bought in October at the Sparta branch of the Christian County Library, whose sales are pretty much all bag day sales–so this book was under a dollar and probably closer to twenty-five cents given how I can pack a bag.
This is a hardback with a dust jacket, and it kind of falls between an exhibition catalog and a monograph. It contains an intro essay by oceanographer Sylvia Earle and an outro by art writer Joan Seeman Robinson, both a couple hundred words of overly vivid prose designed to sell the work, but if you’re familiar with Chihuly and a fan, you don’t need the selling. And if not, prose ain’t going to do it. The book was published in Seattle, home of Chihuly’s workshop, and you can imagine the gift shop of his museum/workshop is its natural habitat.
This book covers one series/set of his work from the 1980s. Blown glass bowls, essentially, with floppy sides and inspired by/designed to represent, sort of, aquatic life. Aside from the two essays, the book is essentially photographs of the work against dark backdrops. And unlike, say, images of paintings in monographs and art books, the photos do not do the work much justice. For one, you lose a sense of scale. Some of the work takes up a cubic yard in volume, but you don’t get that even if the photo spans two pages and the photos are the same size as 10″ works.
But, again, if it’s something designed for the gift shop, it’s more to remind you of what you’ve seen. And, you know, I can see it. Actually, I wonder if I did see it, or at least some of it. I think the Milwaukee Art Museum has or had a lot of his work or an exhibition in the early 1990s when I was at the university up the road and went to the museum a couple of times a year. So I have seen a bunch of his work in person. And now I’m wondering why I haven’t really been to the art museums since. I hit the St. Louis Art Museum a couple of times in the middle 1990s, and I’ve only been to the Springfield Art Museum three or four times since I moved to Springfield. I wonder why that is–I’m no longer trying to impress girls with a relatively cheap date, or my beautiful wife does not particularly favor art museums (she prefers botannical gardens), or because I’ve become a homebody as I’ve gotten older. Ah, well–the Springfield Art Museum is closed for a number of years for expansion and renovation, so I’m not going to revitalize my official art appreciation anytime soon.
And the easiest book is knocked off of the category list. Easier, even, than Graphic novel or comic.
