Tamaki and Wyeth: New Books

 
A new graphic novel by the cousin team Jillian Tamaki and Marika Tamaki, This One Summer follows the friendship of two girls, Rosie and Windy during a summer they spend together at a lake house.

Against the backdrop of family dramas and neighborhood crises, they go swimming, watch movies, dance, eat, and talk, trying to make sense the adult world from their perspective of preadolescence.

Both the writing and the drawing are natural and well-observed, and the close pairing of word and pictures leads to moments of real poetry.


Between 1964 and 2007, Life magazine editor Richard Meryman visited Andrew Wyeth and let him talk —with the tape recorder running. The resulting 400 hours of material were boiled down to a 126 page book called Andrew Wyeth: A Spoken Self-Portrait

Wyeth's musings, together with a peppering of quotes from family, friends, and critics, gives a powerful insight into Wyeth's unconventional thinking. There are quite a few photos, paintings, and sketches included in the book, and the back of the book has a portfolio of photos of Wyeth's spare studio.

By way of example, here's what Wyeth says about painting in watercolor: "You've got to be a perfect ass to paint the way I do. My best watercolors are when I lose all control—gobs of paint and scratches and spit and maybe mud spattered against the sky. You start to clean it up and there's no life — just smooth things maybe done in the studio with a hairdryer to blow your washes."

"I'd rather miss sometimes and hit strong other times than be an in-between person. If I lose this wildness, I'd be just a perfectionist. I certainly don't want to die without trying every means possible to get what I want. It doesn't matter if you stand on your head and use your feet if you get what you want. I did as many as six watercolors a day and might get one or two that came off."

At Amazon:

This One Summer - Jillian Tamaki and Mariko Tamaki

Andrew Wyeth: A Spoken Self-Portrait - Richard Meryman