tr@cy cox

now THIS is cool... my friend Christine gave me this book for xmas last year, and it rocks. a pretty great roundup of the pop surrealism scene(as far as i can tell), any artist will get tons of inspiration from this book. check out this artist lineup: Anthony Ausgang, Glenn Barr, Tim Biskup, Kalynn Campbell, The Clayton Brothers, Joe Coleman, Camille Rose Garcia, Alex Gross, Charles Krafft, Liz McGrath, Scott Musgrove, Niagara, The Pizz, Lisa Petrucci, Mark Ryden, Isabel Samaras, Todd Schorr, Shag, Robert Williams, and Eric White.
totally killer. go out, and get it now. stop reading. NOW!

this is a great book on todd schorr's amazing, crazy, totally insane art. the first time i saw his work was years ago in a magazine. it was the first time i made the connection that "art" could be this esoteric idea that eventually turned into the lowbrow(pop surrealism) movement. at the time, i didn't know about all that... i just knew i liked it and that i could relate to it. you can look at images in this book for hours and never get tired.

I really like this book of mark ryden paintings. it's small for an art book, but the printing is amazing, and it shows a lot of his incredible work. It even has sweet rounded corners on the pages. amazing. i should mention, though, that all the text is in Japanese.

jeff soto is my favorite artist to look at right now, crazy talented, and i dig how his work recreates this bizarro world that's totally in his head. if you like like his work at all, you need to hustle around and find this book, it's great! i meet the publisher(mark murphy) at the San Diego Comic-con last year and he's a super-nice guy, so give them both your $$$. you won't regret it. Best book I bought last year.

romare bearden is one of the most inventive and surprising artists
i can think of. you can look at his works for days and always see something new. if you want to learn about color, this is the guy to study. this book is pretty big, and tells about bearden as a person and as an artist. very cool. When I was in high school in Detroit, the Detroit Art Institute was selling an original Bearden for $500. It might as well have been eleventy zillion dollars, since i didn't have anywhere near that much cheddar. but to this day, i wish i could've figured out a way to get it.

first off, this book is hilarious. great art and posters from the late 60s and 70s from exploitation movies of all kinds. it's like getting in a time machine with platforms and polyester. great stuff.

this is the best poster book i own. the design and creativity on display in this book is just off the charts. the slipcover even folds out into a giant poster! nice.

this is one of the most amazing graphic novels i have ever read(and i have read a LOT of them). dave mckean is best known for his work on Neil Gaiman's Sandman books, creating strange and haunting images for the covers. In this book, he writes and draws an intertwining tale of creativity and censorship in art, music and writing. His ingenuity is just freaky. In one chapter, the characters are sitting in a club, listening to music, and the drawing becomes more and more abstract, mimicking the feeling of getting lost in the moment. In another, a writer looks back at books he's written, and through images, we experience his memories. I don't know why i'm trying to explain it, you really have to see it. It's art.

as a kid, i wanted to be an astronaut(who didn't?). and i never lost the love for science, specifically astronomy and physics. cosmos is an incredible ride through the orgins of the universe, life on earth, the possibility of life elsewhere, and on and on. it's written for the everyperson, so complex topics come across rather simply... that was just one of the late carl sagan's many gifts. every time an episode of the accompanying TV show comes on the science channel, i watch it. and i already have the dvd box set.

you may know albert watson's photos from rolling stone. or his utterly stunning portraits from vibe when it first launched (that's where I saw them first). this book, cyclops, collects a bunch of his black and white portraits and assignments from that era. I think there is a smaller volume which i have (6" x 7 1/4"), and also an identical larger volume– both hardcover. the lighting, compositions and textures he achieves are just amazing. If you like the work of richard avedon or irving penn, this one may be a winner for you. It was designed by david carson, for you graphical types.

I mentioned Henrik Drescher's very cool and wacked out site on a post earlier, and this is the book that introduced me to his art. It's a really great art item, with pages that are die-cut, pages that are vellum rather than paper... it's like a superultradeluxe sketchbook. it has a theme loosely based around travel, but to me it really is a little window into this incredibly creative dude's noggin.

When i was back in school, my all-time favorite illustrator was hands-down, Mark English. He had incredible technique, amazing design sense, and from what i could tell, liked a lot of the same fine artists i did. I haven't seen this book yet, but I'm ordering it sight unseen. It's going to be freaking amazing. The Amazon page only seems to have a used copy, which is odd, since it's a new book. But you can get it direct here.