Sunday, January 11, 2009

Strange linkages and altered art

Yesterday, I purchased a few songs and albums online. One of them was OK No by OK Go.

Last night, I was at an event in our church basement. We have a huge area where people can donate books. It's sort of a leave-one-take-one system. (I have donated a great deal to this collection.) A friend was perusing the piles and this book cover caught my eye:

The book is Three Came Home by Agnes Newton Keith. It is the story of her family's internment by the Japanese during World War II.

While the two images aren't exact duplicates (the book photo doesn't do justice to the color similarities), my exposure to two somewhat similar images in a short span of time struck me. So, I snagged the book and brought it home to add to my (increasingly insurmountable) reading pile.

In the long run, I may end up using the volume for an altered book project, simply because it has such an interesting cover. For many book lovers, such a concept would be considered horrifyingly sacrilegious. I beg pardon to those of you out there who would be offended by the desecration of a book. However, some consider book altering an homage to the book being altered. Often times, altered books are rescued from trash piles only to find new life as personal art.

I promise to attempt to read this book before converting the tome into my own personal art canvas. If the story itself impresses me enough, I may abstain from the act of transforming it. We'll see. With such a fabulous cover, it would have to really impress me not to play with the physical book. Considering that the OK Go album inspired me to pick the book up, I might have to include the song lyrics from the album in the transformed piece.

1 comment:

barbie2be said...

the cover of that ok go album is gorgeous!

speaking of gorgeous, come over and check out my post today...