Customer Reviews

Artobiography

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We all have photographic clips and memories of our lives; this book is a brave, raw exposition of one man's life in pictures. Don, besides the fact that he is my father, is a man who understands the ever-changing landscape of life, accepts the challenges and molds the opportunities he is given into gifts for others. I am grateful for the chance to see through his eyes exactly what life has meant to him, and continues to mean. Being drawn by him was an honor... and I recommend the book to anyone who has had the courage to express their inner self through art, or has had Don's caring, encouraging influence in their lives.

Artists, art educator, and art therapy trailblazer Don Seiden presents his own biography in a most unusual format in Artobiography. Artobiography is neither a typical written book nor a typical graphic novel; each page is divided into three or four sections, and each section features a black-and-white sketch of a scene from Seiden's life, with a brief yet appropriate caption written in cursive longhand. "Rush Hospital had a reputation as an elitist institution surrounded by a poor black community. The Department of Psychiatry asked me to design an art program for disadvantaged children using our facilities. I worked with 'Hats' Adams, a gang worker and we opened an exciting new program called 'Mile Square' art experience." An extraordinary life story, highly recommended.

Have you read many graphic novels? Here's one that reawakened a very long dormant interest in the whole serial image, comic, storyboard genre. Artobiography, by Don Seiden.

Seiden described the process of writing this book as first drawing the cartoon-like pictures, the memory images of his life, in these little boxes. Once he had his life illustrated graphically, he went back and added the text, looking at each image carefully and creating a condensed text block to go under the image box. For Seiden, the value of the book was in the way it documents his pursuit of meaning through art making. He described art as a constantly available friend to "talk to" about his experiences, a kind of vehicle for containing and understanding feelings and thoughts, and a way to recognize and resolve problems. It seemed that creating art, maybe even creating this book, helped Seiden appreciate and even love his life, the people in it, and himself a little more clearly, deeply, and intensely.

As I read Seiden's book, thought about what was included, and imagined what was excluded, I began to wonder about this format, how well it might work in the art room as an organizing and grounding tool. I wondered about the idea of gentle interventions, how easily a narrative might be expanded on, altered, or have parts emphasized or de-emphasized when told with storyboards or little cartoon boxes.

The only limitation of this book relates to its format, in that the images are black and white, hand drawn, and small. With the artwork Seiden describes, the reader will likely want to see more, and that is not necessarily a bad thing. Fortunately Seiden's website has excellent photographs of his art work.