A Surrealist Alphabet (2014)

To stand out and secure a place among the several other surrealist abecedaries and alphabet books out there — such as those by Jim Avignon & Anja Lutz, Roman Cieślewicz, Jason D’Aquino, Lisa Haines, Lynn Hatzius, Peter Hutchinson, Peter Malutzki, Clément Meriguet, Paul Noble, Judy Pelikan, Rose Sanderson, Zazie Sazonoff, Paul Thurlby and Ludwig Zeller — takes considerable talent and effort. Leonard Brett’s A Surrealist Alphabet displays just that.

Per the artist’s statement, an interest in the aesthetics of script as visual symbol led him to the Louvre and British Museum for studies of ancient scripts — Sumerian, Egyptian, and Chinese — and to Bali, Egypt and Istanbul for inspection of contemporary scripts and sources of inspiration. Juxtaposition of that with images and text alluding to baseball teams (the Blue Jays and Orioles ), celebrities (Elvis and Marilyn Monroe), Renaissance painters (Raphael and Pisanello among others), movies and TV shows (Casablanca and X-Men) and much more leads to one of the densest and most frenetic of alphabet artists’ books in the Books On Books Collection.

Each letter receives two double-page spreads. The first is a diptych, consisting of a black-and-white etching forming a composite letter across from a color image that may come from a watercolor or a host of other media; the second, a poem and another color image (again varying as to media) playing off the poem. The etchings and original color artwork were in an exhibition sponsored by the Sunshine Coast Arts Council in Sechelt BC, Canada,1-26 March 2017. According to the exhibition’s description, “The drawings in the book were used as a reference to produce the engravings shown in this exhibition. The engravings are done in the traditional manner using a burin to cut the plate, there is no acid used. They are inked and printed the same way as an etching on damp rag paper.”

The color treatments of A and Z suffice to show how the artworks in exhibition complemented and differed from the book. Just these letters’ two double-page spreads, however, come nowhere near the effect of unrelenting variety and creativity delivered by the volume as a whole.

Displayed in exhibition

Displayed in exhibition

From the cover to the last letter, Judy Pelikan’s book is an extended visual pun with more puns in between. Some of the resulting images (like that for the letter A) are deeply clever; others (like that for the letter Z) are surreal. Obviously A is for a box of apples, but the uppercase serif A on yellowed grid paper with drawn guidelines recalls the early designers of geometrically created letters such as Feliciano, Pacioli, Durer, Tory and others. Driving home the recollection, the artist has laid out the tools for such typographical design: compass, straightline and pen. Here, “all around the block” is all about the square.

Most of the visual puns are simple like B for books and blocks; others are straightforward but dense like C for crate, cloud, curl, cup, coffee and castle (that’s six for all sides of the block!); others are strange. For the letter Z, we have the surreality of a zebra and her foal grazing on top of the block on whose front panel a zebra moth or butterfly hovers by a ziggurat behind an old-fashioned console (Zenith?) with a third zebra peering from its screen.

All Around the Block warrants a closer look on each page as well as favorable comparison and contrast with any of the works noted below.

Books On Books

Curated by Robert Bolick

Judy Pelikan

Books On Books Collection – Leonard Brett

A Surrealist Alphabet (2014)

Further Reading

Books On Books Collection – Judy Pelikan

All Around the Block: An Alphabet (2008)

Further Reading