books! art!

Mike Stilkey combines some of my favorite things in his work: books and art. Old, decrepit, books. Dark, whimsical, Tim Burton-esque drawings. Some even have cats and bikes; what's not to love?


I have been wanting to combine literature and painting for some time now and have sort of been struggling with the logistics. Tearing out pages of a book and painting over them is my thought, with patches of text showing through, but then do I need to worry about copyrights? Stilkey's solution to incorporating books is simple and the new canvas creates a wonderfully diverse starting point. He also does larger installation pieces, made up of hundreds or thousands of books. Here, he's coated a piano with book covers giving it a collage feel.