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| Frank Boyden: The Empathies | 
| Authors: David James Duncan, Kim Stafford
Publisher: Hallie Ford Museum of Art
Category: Book
List Price: $19.95
Buy New: $8.44
You Save: $11.51 (58%)
New (20) from $8.44
Avg. Customer Rating:  1 reviews
Sales Rank: 1472158
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 80
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 10.4 x 9.9 x 0.4
ISBN: 1930957572
Dewey Decimal Number: 709
EAN: 9781930957572
ASIN: 1930957572
Publication Date: February 15, 2007
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: Brand New Copy, Never Read in original shrink wrap
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| Customer Reviews:
Incongruence in Drypoint May 26, 2007
5 out of 5 found this review helpful
This is a startling book of art and prose. Why startling? Alot of artists can do beautiful. Alot of artists can do ugly. Not very many can do both at once. Frank Boyden can.
Perhaps what most struck me about his prints was the way he created this paradox: left and right sides of the faces were very commonly incongruent. Sometimes when they were congruent a shaft of light disturbed that congruence into stereotypical ugliness. He used other tools: skinny, knobby fingers hiding an unseen pool of eyes or deformities or overgrown, bumpy noses with a tongue scatologically flicking out to clean warts or a sunken skull sided with a white and bald dull-eyed destitue or lumpy skin flagging on the frame-up as if the poor portrayed gentlewoman hadn't a skull to hold her head up.
His use of incongruence remains my favorite. I kept covering up half the picture on several to try and make these faces stereotypically beautiful. I whispered to them that if they would only...they really could be quite beautiful, you know, if only they tried.
The prose is a duo of a song. Kim Stafford's essay "The Long Sleep of Asia" covers the voice of a single picture, giving the voice of silence and empathy and wait and love.
David James Duncan is at first a whirlwind of essay then a parade of quotes. His essay is a clear hit, excellent in every way and his quotes are profound. The problem? The layout of those quotes make it difficult to pinpoint which voice belongs to which mouth. I began to play a board to book game of memory, shuffling the voices and the mouths to ownership (a real problem when like in drypoint 22 armor shutters the mouth and in 48 when the presence of a mouth is questionable). I found it endearing, but I'm biased about David Duncan.
To me the gem came at the end with a new short story by Duncan, a fledgling of a piece: three fat pages that swell in layers of art.
All in all it was a great book. I felt the layout could have used some work. The material, however, was phenomenal.
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