Customer Reviews

Picture This: The Near-sighted Monkey Book

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Just thumbing through this book makes me feel like a kid again. The idea of painting and drawing on lowly 'binder paper' rocks my line art graphic mindset. There are a myriad of creative trails to follow and I've just begun the journey. There is such honesty in the pages, such a wonderful mix of spirit, technique, angst, and fun in a book about making art. Maybe "expressing ourselves" is a better term than "making art". Lynda Barry helps you open the door to expression.

My favorite quote from the book so far is "The worst thing I can do when I'm stuck is to start thinking and stop moving my hands."

I'm off to do a mood doodle and follow along with Marlys, Arna and the cephalopod.

This may not be for everyone, but if you know and love Lynda Barry's work, you'll love this book. I felt as if I was traveling into the inky recesses of my own mind while hitching a ride through Lynda's process to make art. What a gift. If you ever felt like something was stopping you from enjoying drawing, or painting or any kind of art, then this is a gentle reminder of what art can be, if you let it. You may find yourself wanting to skip around the pages, but I suggest letting the book's story unfold from beginning to end. It's worth it!

You may not experience it the way I did, but I feel like this book changed my life.

Thank you, Lynda Barry!

Endlessly entertaining and filled with inspiring images and examples. No wonder everyone loves Lynda Barry so much. If you are a writer, a photographer, a painter, an artist of ANY sort, you will find something to like in this.

If I were stranded on a desert island with only one book, I'd take Picture This (What It Is would be the closest contender). Each page is a whole world. Reading the book takes me back to when I read as a kid--totally absorbed, not wanting to leave, carrying the feel of it around with me for the rest of the day. Lynda Barry gets to the root of our urge to create and to enter into others' creations. It's part of our nature, according to her, something we're born with and for some reason lose as we get older. Radical! The book is fun, creepy, beautiful, and mind blowing. Lynda Barry rules, period.

This is a great book. It asks the question- why do people stop drawing? It encourages you to rediscover your inner doodler and is great fun to look at and read. I would buy one for all my friends and especially for myself!

This book is chock full of wonderful inspiration from Lynda Barry. It has lifted me out of my painting doldrums and put me back at ease in front of a blank sheet of paper. Actually, I've been painting on newspaper lately, a la Lynda. This book is rich in philosophy, inspiration, hope and wonder. I've bought multiple copies to hand out as gifts, and finally, one for myself. I had kept the library copy out past its due date and realized I needed to have my own copy to keep close at hand. Just had to buy it.

This one reminds me of Like a Dog which is also a series of vignettes and stories that don't exactly add up to a coherent story but ever since I read Karl Marx's article about the fetishism of the commodity in which we forget about the process of creation that goes into a particular sock or sweater or television as soon as it is there before us, I find myself enjoying these post modern exercises in the function of the artist more and more. There used to be a lot of stories in which the writer is writing about writing the story and one can roll one's eyes at Henry Miller's later works, but there is something fascinating about the artistic process that bypasses any fetish that we might have for the commodity - just look at any DVD and there is a commentary track talking about the process.

We might not necessarily always want to know abotu the process but if the process is interesting enough (I particularly like the Making Of doc for George A. Romero's Land of the Dead (Unrated Director's Cut)) I can love it and this is Lynda Barry's meditation on what it takes to go from a doodler to a full blown artist without losing the excitement of the doodling. The monkey keeps appearing throughout and the whole story becomes a story about her art and where she is with it. Sometimes it feels like a coffee table book full of drawings as she loses the plot, but then she starts all over again.

This is a book that you can read again and again and still get new things out of it.

I love children's books for their illustrations.... this book is beautiful in an artsy way... and made for adult enjoyment. Love it.