Palookaville: Seth and the Art of Graphic Autobiography - Softcover

Smart, Tom

Softcover

ISBN 10: 088984397X ISBN 13: 9780889843974

Publisher: Porcupine's Quill, 2016

Synopsis

Tom Smart's Palookaville: Seth and the Art of Graphic Autobiography examines the construction self-identity and the wafer-thin distinction between fiction and autobiography in Canadian cartoonist Seth's Palookaville series of graphic novels.

About this title

About the Author:

Art curator and author, Tom Smart has written many award-winning books and organized numerous exhibitions about Canadian and international art. He has worked in art galleries across Canada and the United States, including the Frick in Pittsburgh, the Beaverbrook Art Gallery, and the McMichael Canadian Art Collection, where he was its executive director.

His monographic exhibitions on east coast Canadian Realists-Alex Colville, Mary and Christopher Pratt, and Tom Forrestall, among others-opened new avenues for understanding this important art movement. While at the McMichael, Tom broadened its exhibition mandate to embrace First Nations art and artists, was instrumental in developing its acclaimed Ivan Eyre Sculpture Garden, and commissioned renowned author Ross King to write a historical portrait of the Group of Seven that was published in 2010 as Defiant Spirits.

Currently, as art curator and supervisor of education at the Peel Art Gallery, Museum and Archives, Tom is working closely with many First Nations artists from Manitoulin Island, among them James Simon Mishibinijima, Ann Beam and Anong Beam, and also with Sikh artists, among them the England-based Singh Twins.

Tom's many publications with the Porcupine's Quill treat the relationship between poetry, printmaking and the book arts (Fabulous Peculiarities, a consideration of Tony Calzetta and Leon Rooke's Fabulous Fictions and Peculiar Practices, which was ada

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Drawing and performance art

Seth, who lives in Guelph, Ontario, is an artist, author and cultural commentator, and one of the foremost graphic novelists working today. His unparalleled technical skills as a draughtsman and his unique ability to evoke an entire imaginative world based on a mythical mid-twentieth-century small Ontario town rank him as a gifted storyteller and part of a distinguished line of Canadian graphic designers.

But Seth can also be described as a sophisticated performance artist who cloaks his artistic practice in the garment of a cartoonist and illustrator. He is intent on examining the malleability of the comic book format to probe the nature and shape of time, and the many different ways that loss and longing can cloud one's memories of the past. His is an artistic practice that is entirely holistic. In his life he has immersed himself in the fashions, trappings, design motifs and manners of a mid-twentieth-century man. Just as the world he lives in echoes the past, so the world he describes in his art resonates with the same voice; this world has a fundamental integrity. Every detail is set down deliberately and with the intention of crafting an artistic reality that is true to what he sees as a period in Canada that existed perhaps a generation before he was born. His parents' time holds an uncanny allure for him, and he takes great pains to evoke it in the panels of his comic books, on the surfaces of his illustration boards and in the miniature buildings and streets that comprise his fictional southwestern Ontario town called Dominion.

(... Continued in Palookaville: Seth and the Art of Graphic Autobiography)

About this edition

• Publisher: Porcupine's Quill
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 088984397X
• ISBN 13: 9780889843974
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 96