PAINTINGS ON DISCARDED BOOKS

Mike Stilkey is an internationally recognized artist who has always been attracted to painting and drawing not only on vintage paper, record covers and book pages, but on the books themselves. He is best known for creating small and large-scale installations that use discarded books as their canvas. Using a mix of ink, colored pencil, paint and lacquer, Stilkey depicts a melancholic and at times a whimsical cast of characters inhabiting ambiguous spaces and narratives of fantasy and fairy tales. A lingering sense of loss and longing hints at emotional depth and draws the viewer into their introspective thrall with a mixture of capricious poetry, wit, and mystery. His work is reminiscent of Weimar-era German expressionism and his style has been described by some as capturing features of artists ranging from Edward Gorey to Egon Schiele.