Books by WSU alumni and friends

Art and Design

1. 

   Baby Bird Portraits: Watercolors in the Field Museum

   By George Miksch Sutton and Paul A. Johnsgard '55

    

   From the publisher: George Miksch Sutton is one of the best known and most beloved bird artists of the 20th century. This book presents 35 paintings of downy chicks, nestlings, and fledglings painted from life by Sutton. The exquisite water-colors, housed in the Field Museum of Natural History, span three decades and depict 19 species of North American birds. Many of the paintings are reproduced here for the first time. In his introduction to the collection, ornithologist Paul Johnsgard discusses Sutton's contributions to bird art and to ornithology. And in essays accompanying the paintings, Johnsgard describes his and Sutton's personal encounters with the birds.

   

   

    

2. 

   Color + Modulation

   a DVD by Rob Tyler '96

    

   Color + Modulation is an alluring collection of eight 16mm films that have been painstakingly hand painted frame-by-frame and digitally manipulated on a desktop computer - creating an optically smooth ambient experience.
   
   Working with acrylic and metallic paints as well as with a pallete of permanent ink pens and spray paint canisters this film project took seven years to complete.
   
   Described as both visually stunning and atmospherically beautiful, Color + Modulation transforms a television or video screen into an abstract canvas full of playful motion and smooth explosions of color and shape.

   Read a review from WSM

   

   

    

3. 

   Frank Okada: The Shape of Elegance

   By Kazuko Nakane

    

   From the publisher: Artist Frank Okada played a significant role in the modern art history of the Pacific Northwest. . . From his first painting award—received at the Washington State fair—until his death in 2000, he worked at the confluence of regional art, Asian culture, and national art movements. . . He began teaching painting at the University of Oregon in 1969, a tenure that lasted almost thirty years. His work from the seventies, eighties, and nineties balanced forms and colors in intensely worked surfaces. The color blocks gradually became more intellectually structured and his compositions more expressive as he made his colors more powerful. As Nakane notes, “without recognizable reference to nature or his own personality, he created a texture that brought light to a field of color. . . . In order to appreciate his paintings, one needs to spend time observing how the colors respond to the changes of light throughout the day.”

   

   

    

4. 

   Planet Ocean: A Story of Life, the Sea and Dancing to the Fossil Record

   By Bradford Matsen and Ray Troll '81

    

   An irreverent trip through four billion years of evolution, this freewheeling excursion combines swaths of paleontology, geology and natural history, travel notes and amateur fieldwork from Kansas to British Columbia, amplified by wacky cartoons and colorful, often fantastical mixed-media drawings. Matsen and Troll, who collaborated on Shocking Fish Tales, emphasize that we are descended from fish that came ashore some 375 million years ago, giving rise to land-dwelling vertebrates. Evolution emerges here as a series of mass extinctions, improbable survivals, false starts and unsolved enigmas. Matsen and Troll bring a sense of awe and excitement to an informative, magical tour that is a lot more fun to read than standard texts and responsibly covers current scientific controversies.

   

   

    

5. 

   Rapture of the Deep: The Art of Ray Troll

   By Ray Troll '81

    

   For more than two decades, Ray Troll has been luring, hooking, and landing fans around the world with his zany, irreverent, and often surreal art. Featured in museums, galleries, and books, as well as on immensely popular T-shirts, his work—part natural history adventure and part underground comic—depicts beautiful and accurately drawn fish of all kinds, Northwest Coast totems, Freud and Darwin, fossils, resurrections of extinct animals, and much more.

   Rapture of the Deep collects some of Troll's best-known art along with many images never before published. The book makes powerful connections between biological diversity, the evolution of life on earth, and the careless habits of people. Troll's running commentary reveals the thought and inspiration behind his art. Writer Brad Matsen, Troll's longtime coconspirator, adds a lively introduction to the art and life of his "sole" brother.

   

   

    

6. 

   Ray Troll's Shocking Fish Tales: Fish, Romance, and Death in Pictures

   By Ray Troll '81

    

   First published in 1991 by Alaska Northwest, this book introduced a new audience to the often edgy, always observant and colorful fish art made semi-famous by the T-shirts and cards hauled out of the Northwest by fans of this Ketchikan artist. The mysteries of the deep, the strange, the hideous and the wonderful all appear on the canvas and in the words of this highly original, wacky work. Full-color throughout.

   

   

    

7. 

   Sketchbook: A Memoir of the 1930s and the Northwest School

   By William Cumming

    

   From the publisher: William Cumming began as a self-taught artist who grew up in Tukwila, a small town outside Seattle. In 1937, at the age of 20, he met Morris Graves, who was at that time working in Seattle for the Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration. Through Graves he soon became part of the circle of friends who came to be known as the Northwest School of artists: Mark Tobey, then nearing 50, the patriarchal leader of the group; Kenneth Callahan and his wife Margaret, a writer and critic who became Cumming's particular mentor; Guy Anderson, Lubin Petric, and others. He has taught for many years at the Art Institute of Seattle and Cornish College of the Arts.

   

   

    

8. 

   William Cumming: The Image of Consequence

   By Matthew Kangas

    

   William Cumming (b. 1917) is one of the most complex and contradictory American artists of the past century. Painter, correspondent, art and music critic, educator, memoirist, and loquacious interview subject, Cumming is heard here in his own words and through art critic Matthew Kangas, who brings together 140 crucial works and situates Cumming in the cultural context of his times—artistic, social, and political, including his years in the Communist Party U.S.A.

   Unaffected by decades of rapid stylistic changes in the art world, Cumming remained committed to the image of consequence—socially relevant subject matter—through the Great Depression, the “lost years” of World War II, and the Cold War. He then embraced a renewed sense of life, hope, and a second “conversion” to modernist painting’s precepts of color, shadow, line, shape, and contour. With its solid cohesion of shapes, subject, and color, Cumming’s art now bears comparison to Bonnard and Vuillard rather than Tobey or Callahan.

   Self-taught and yet a brilliant instructor, Cumming was a slim young man who talked like Mark Twain and drew like a dream. This book takes advantage of exclusive access to letters the young artist wrote to his mentor, Margaret Bundy Callahan.