Customer Reviews

Black Velvet Masterpieces: Highlights from the Collection of the Velveteria Museum

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The full color photographs - approx. 200 - are gorgeous and are almost tactile in the way they convey the lush texture and rich color of the velvet paintings. I also enjoyed the authors' writing style: chatty and interesting, covering everything from the history of velvet painting and painters to the authors' personal collecting stories. So...great photos, great writing, and a front cover artfully decorated with black velvet - makes the book itself a bit of a Black Velvet Masterpiece!

I was also lucky enough to visit the authors' Velveteria Museum in Portland and can attest it's well worth the trip.

BLACK VELVET MASTERPIECES is an incredible overview of the low-brow and high-art world of velvet painting. The book contains images from the entire history of velvet painting: from schlocky Elvises, insane clowns, frolicking unicorns, and sad-eyed children to delicately rendered South Sea island beauties and Old Master works - All of it intensely colorful and wildly inventive.

I have also visited VELVETERIA in Portland, Oregon and it is well worth the trip. Seeing some of my favorite paintings from the book was an amazing experience and the ever-rotating collection on display will have you laughing, crying and leave you with a new-found respect for the medium. Check out the Black-Light room when you are there!

Both the book and museum are highly recommended!

This book is on display in our home for all the right reasons. The pictures are indeed beautiful! But the stories behind the pursuit of these velvet masterpieces, are equally entertaining. The authors/collectors are authentic and passionate, and are hopefully inspiring others toward creating art on velvet. For me, reading the book and absorbing the works, inspire me to create...anything. Well done! The buzz is very real. This book is worth every penny!

Deserving of ongoing mention is this stunning gathering of black velvet paintings chronicling the history of the works and highlights from Portland's Velveteria Museum, home to over 1,200 crying Elvises, clowns, and more. Beautiful full-page images pack displays from the museum with insights into the art and creation of black velvet as a whole. Art libraries as well as many a general interest lending collection will find it an eye-catching, popular pick.

This is the most important book on art to appear since Aristotle's "Poetics"! Sure, the real-life noms de reality of the Velveteria's curators are Carl Baldwin and Caren Anderson, but the breadth and depth of their contribution to modern appreciation of art put them more in line spiritually with the Renaissance Medici family - for, like the Medicis, they know talent when they see (or in this case, feel) it. Like all true art patrons, they make art appreciation an art in and of itself, and have had the pizazz and wherewithal to pluck otherwise unheralded auteurs such as Richard Bustamante, Ce Ce Rodriguez, and "Juanita," from the slums of obscurity and put them in the sparkling art-world penthouse that is this book. This book has more entertaining photos in it than J. Edgar Hoover's secret files, circa 1968, but what will surprise the uninitiated is that it also is full of more wacky, wild, and woolly stories than the Warren Commission Report! Carl and Caren are true characters, and their passion for their art and each other comes through in spades here. They have a lust for life, a gift of gab, and a knack for picking the very best in Unicorns, 18-Wheeler Jesuses, nude Polynesians, Mexican Banditos, and Cigar-Smoking Filipina Hill Tribe Women. The Velveteria is the type of place the word "psychotronic" was invented for, and this book is the type of thing your credit card was issued to buy - that is, if you have a smidgen of coolness (and money) in you. Carl and Caren have done their part to make the world a weirder, cooler, freakier, more mind-expanding place - have you?

This wonderful book opened my eyes to the people and talent behind these mainly overlooked pieces of art.

My initial impressions of velvet painting was that there probably wasn't much past the standard clowns and snarling Elvis. While that's what I was familiar with, this title brought to life an entirely different group of artists who produced artwork that I found to be both surprising and stunning.

I truly enjoyed the writing style, the wonderful color photographs, the story behind building this collection and the way the book was broken into subjects make it a pleasure to thumb through. The actual velvet cover was simply the icing on the cake!

Well done!

While most people think of neon paint and goofy subject matter, the collection of the Velveteria runs the whole spectrum of black velvet painting from tropical nudes to quirky clowns, sad eyed children to black power homages, shimmering landscapes to dead rockstar tributes. This book collects them for your viewing pleasure along with a thorough intro & history of the art, as well as a how-to instructional. Even the cover has velvet on it. A fun book for your bookshelf or an even better gift. When in Portland, OR visit their museum.

Almost everyone has a story to share about black velvet. The stories that authors Caren Anderson and Carl Baldwin share in their book will both astonish and delight you. Black velvet isn't just for Elvis! Sure, this compendium delivers the standard kitcsh but there are also some wonderful surprises: lush landscapes, luminous figures, and truly skillful painting techniques. Anderson and Baldwin invite readers to appreciate how the works of artists such as Leeteg, McPhee, Tyree, and Rodriguez transcend the mosh pit of clowns, banditos, and poker dogs. The design by Reed Darmon is clever and the photographs pop from the pages. A wonderful addition to any home library or a terrific gift for your favorite art snob!

Although this book is supposed to be a sort of Art History book, it is not. It does not deal with traditional Art History at all and simply insists itslef upon the genre without following traditional academic formulas. It does not place the Black Velvet Painting phenomenon in an art historical context. Even though it purpots to be a catalog of sorts of the Velveteria Museum in Oregon, it does not even offer the address of the museum. But you can do an Internet search of the name and find a fascinating web page. The address of the museum and visiting hours and such are listed there.

The text offers a fair overview of the genre of Black Velvet Painting and some of the artists who have actually painted them. I say that as many BVPs are actually printed, although I cannot attest to how the pieces featured in this book were manufactured. The photographs are stunning in their reproduction. If BVPs are your thing, you will love browsing though this book. There is a bibliography, but no footnotes. You can decide for yourself as to the credibility of the text.

One thing that struck me was a photograph of one artist's display outside of a hotel in Hawaii. Somehow, this sort of display became the quintessential image in many people's minds of how a serious artist circumvents the stuffy artworld gallery scene and "just does it". Paintings are propped up across a lawn by a pool. It could just as easily be a street corner covered in BVPs, as they were often sold this way years ago.

I think that this book serves more as a fun coffee table book than a serious academic study. Stuffy as my review may seem, I can't stop flipping though the book. BVPs have that quality where they grab you in the way that passing a road accident does. I personally can't see them being a part of Art History per se, but they are fun-- and should stay fun. So, let's not try to turn them into high art just to get higher prices for them.

This book, beyond being for the coffee table, serves as excellent documentation of the BVP genre. Serious painters and historians can add this to their collection of Art History books as a convenient method of comparrison/contrast. The "How to Paint a Masterpiece" chapter both frames the BVP genre as a craft anyone can do and offers enough instruction to inspire those interested to get further instruction from, perhaps, those DIY television shows that allow people to make images with no formal study whatsoever. Happy painting!