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of art, it gives you questions."
-Guillermo del Toro
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FIRST IMPRESSIONS
With art, as with literature, first impressions can be deceptive. Who hasn't chosen a book for its cover, and then been disappointed by its contents? Or, attending an art show, been struck by an artist's style and falsely assumed it representative of all his output? Labels are easy. That's why we use them. But, just as you can't judge a book by its cover, neither can you judge a piece of art (or its artist) on first impressions alone.


An Album of Jacques Drapeau's Paintings of Dragons and Other Fantasy Critters
by Jacques Drapeau
2019
$13.00, 22 pp

I first met Jacques Drapeau in 2019. He was wearing a hat and shoes he painted himself. I pegged him for an old hippie folk artist. Over the next couple of years, navigating COVID shutdowns, protocols and social distancing, I had the good fortune of running into him at various local shows and events in the Stilly and Skagit Valleys of western Washington. Gradually, I began to realize Drapeau was more than a folk artist. He creates, always with an eye out for whimsy. Whether he's painting witches, dragons or dinosaurs, or gluing plastic tulips on a hat in tribute to Tiny Tim, there's humor to his work.

Similar to Gary Larson's (The Far Side), Drapeau's humor is subtle and off the beaten track. A thinking man's artist, he fills his canvases with nuanced jokes he doesn't care if the public gets or not. Just as he doesn't care if we think him a hippie folk artist, though there's much more to him than that.


      A thinking man's artist, he fills his canvases with nuanced jokes he doesn't care if the public gets or not.

An Album of Jacques Drapeau's Paintings of Dragons and Other Fantasy Critters does for dragons what An Album of Jacques Drapeau's Paintings of Dinosaurs did for Mesozoic lizards. It casts them in a subtly entertaining light; taming them for our enjoyment. That, and the artist's bold use of color, is the quintessence of Drapeau. Contains twenty-one captioned full-color plates.


Chefs-d'Ceuvre de L'impressionnisme
edited by Diane Kelder
Abbeville Press, 1997
ISBN: 2-87946-131-6
268 pp

Abbeville Press' Chefs-d'Ceuvre L'impressionnisme is a collection of the world's renowned Impressionists. Over its 268 pages it catalogs the works of familiar names such as van Gogh, Monet and Renoir, among others. More than 220 full-color reproductions in all.

As not all painters are on equal footing, L'impressionnisme devotes entire sections to those that moved Impressionism forward in some distinct way (Edouard Manet; Claude Monet; Pierre-Auguste Renoir; Edgar Degas and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec), while ignoring those deemed less influential. Although, it does contain a history on Impressionism accompanied by reproductions which include many lesser known artists from the movement's halcyon days of the nineteenth century.

Visually stunning, L'impressionnisme is a keeper. Although the book only measures 4" x 4.5", it packs a punch for its size, which also makes it perfect for taking on the go. As a catalog of French Impressionism, L'impressionnisme is par excellence, with just one caveat: it's entirely written in French.

posted 10/19/23


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