Customer Reviews

Evidence: The Art of Candy Jernigan

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How well do you remember your last vacation? Or a great meal? What do you do to record the beauty around you? Do you notice the horrors of everyday life to which so many people are oblivious? Ms. Jernigan was a consumate story teller. Her stories are not of the obvious, but of the things most of us overlook, ignore and wish we could remember. Absorb this book and you'll never take a trip again without thinking of her work. This book is a true delight. The visual content is wonderful, the text informative and reserved, and the book's design and construction is almost as unique as the subject matter. If you are an artist, traveller - if you are alive - this book should be in you library. More importantly, in you life.

This book is an absolute treasure! Evidence: The Art of Candy Jernigan, is an illustrated and collaged journal of her travels--around the world, as well as around the city. One feels almost like a voyeur--the book is that intimate.

The book is FILLED with pictures; photocopies of her travel journal, as well as assemblages and paintings from her daily travels around the city. It is beautifully put together--so much so that it evokes a great deal of emotion. I wish I'd had a chance to meet her!

This book came from Jernigan's wish to have "proof that I had been there." There is some irony in this statement, because she died in 1991 at the age of thirty-nine, and the book was published eight years after her death.

As much as I DON'T like to compare artists, Candy Jernigan probably isn't a familiar name to many people. Having said that, I'll add that her art is reminescent of Joseph Cornell, Robert Rauschenburg, and Jasper Johns--but from a woman's point of view.

This book has become one of my bedside companions, and certainly will make you reflect upon the world in a manner that is foriegn. It is nothing like you will have ever seen, and it is more wonderful than you can imagine.

In Candy's world, everything; the smears of sauces, the crusts of bread, the crack vials found in New York, a crushed saucepan, a dead rat and the bottletop nearby Jim Morrison's grave, become worthy of attention and transformed into art.

She will make you peer at the sidewalk, wondering about the origins of that dust, make you pocket that docket in the desire to transform into a collage of your day's events.

While much of this book is her collected items, there is life to be found in her minute drawings of bugs and sausages, her tiny print and evidence of her personality is found within her dream based art.

Contrary to the previous reviewer, I find this book marvellously and wonderfully beautiful. In the tiny collections and wry but subtle observations of Candy, her life is documented and her personality radiates to the reader.

This book, seemingly a collection of food scraps and other tidbits, is evidence of her life, yes, but evidence of the beauty we can find within the seemingly mundane, the tiny, if only we give that bread crust, the leaves in the Pere La-Chaise and that dust a chance to be noteworthy.

This weekend I read and looked through "Evidence: The Art of Candy Jernigan." It's a fast biography with lots of pictures from Candy Jernigan's journals. It's an amazing and inspiring book.

Jernigan's journals aren't pretty but they are witty and wry and artistic. Candy included smears of food from her meals, dust collected from the steps of the Parthenon, and crack vials collected from the streets of New York. Toward the end of her life, she chronicled lists of the medications and treatments she took to fight liver cancer. (She died in 1991 at the ripe old age of 39.)

Candy's journals show that she LIVED and lived big. It's a pity she's gone but we're lucky she was here and left her wonderful journals behind.

I waited years to get this book and it was not like the review. It was more like a travel journal then her art work. Would like to see more of her art work. Was not worth the wait.

This is a great book. Not only is it well-organized, it also shows a great deal of love and empathy for the artist. Candy's work grabs the viewer's attention like the work of few other artists.