Speak For The Trees is a book to adorn the coffee tables of people who don’t read books. It’s excellent fluff to be picked up and paged through between cocktails and dinner.
A theme is not enough to tie a group of artists together, and the 76 featured in nice, full-color images do not belong together. Nor do they engage the quotes that hang beside them, pithy thoughts from the mostly dead and mostly famous. Observations from the artists tend to be the book’s high point, but there is little sense of shared engagement, of ideas played out in a variety of forms.
Still, in a doctor’s waiting room, it would be worth picking up, not that any doctor will share it with her customers. Too many would promptly steal it. I know a receptionist who spends her day surveying a holding tank of patients tearing articles out of magazines. Yesterday she observed a sickly soul use one as a handkerchief. When the culprit’s name was called, he returned the soiled publication to the rack.
Created by Andria Friesen of the Friesen
Gallery, proceeds from the book’s sale go to the Esalen
Institute in California and the Findhorn Foundation
in Scotland. What worthy causes! By all means let us help the wealthy be
here now. ($80 hardcover)
The Seattle version of the Friesen Gallery will host a selection of artworks from Speak For The Trees, April 1 to May 29. Missing from the lineup announced on the Web site are the books stars, such as Mark Ryden, Mike + Doug Starn and David Hockney.
(The phrase, between cocktails and dinner, comes from Grace Paley. As her sole contribution to art history, she observed that the paintings of Helen Frankenthaler look as if she tossed them off between cocktails and dinner. )
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