I can't express how much Paul Madonna's lines and words have given me. I've long been a fan of his All Over Coffee series in the Sunday San Francisco Chronicle. I found his new book "Everything is it's own reward" at the SFMOMA last week and have been devouring it slowly just to make it last. His approach to combining words and images is systematic, but a few have that quality of magic, when the words and images magically arrive together and inform each other is subtle ways to make the entire piece stronger.
For a long time I included text into my artwork, it came naturally, and my process was a mixture of poetry and visual coming together to inform the imagination.
I turned my shoulder to it in the last few years because in a certain light it kind of felt like it was almost too trite, too saccharine, too sentimental, like the words were almost too forced or too directing. It takes a perfect amount of balance to have text that doesn't overpower the subtlety of images, it's as if the inference of the words has to be as graceful as a rose petal. Paul's book has brought text back to the table.
Here is Paul talking about the book and the process.
A man died in our neighboring apartment complex this week. He was an alcoholic with hermit tendencies who collected plants and climbed through his windows onto the rooftop of the business next door, like someone living in a high rise in NY. He had large aquariums with fresh water fish in his studio apartment and called himself a photographer. He pointed out stars and constellations to me one evening while I was trimming the cactus and he laughed at how crazy/brave I was for even handling the overgrown mess. He sat on the stoop with me and my Louise Bourgeois book and talked about art and traveling. He was a masseuse and drove a silver VW beetle, a new one.
The neighbor shouted, through tears and hands to her face, it's Donald, it's Donald,
and the emergency crew stomped through the hallways.
Today his furniture is stacked up by the dumpster.
And large black plastic trash bags lean against the cinderblock wall.
I turned my shoulder to it in the last few years because in a certain light it kind of felt like it was almost too trite, too saccharine, too sentimental, like the words were almost too forced or too directing. It takes a perfect amount of balance to have text that doesn't overpower the subtlety of images, it's as if the inference of the words has to be as graceful as a rose petal. Paul's book has brought text back to the table.