I’ve been known to say that the novel is my favorite art form, because a novel is art you can rub your face in. While most visual artwork captures one feeling, or a moment in time, a novel encompasses an entire narrative, which you can see from the point of view of any character. Every important word, thought, scene, sound, taste, is included in a novel. I eat this up, and one of my greatest aspirations is to create a work of art like that.

The rub with writing an art blog is that it is hard to convey my particular art form in a palatable snippet. The nature of the novel, it’s breadth, interwoven structure, subtle and towering plot arch, resist being reduced to a blurb. Which is why you won’t find novel excerpts on this site, even though I love the novel above all other art.

Today I found an artist who loves words and stories the way I do, but whose work expresses wordy art into a visual form. I give you Cheryl Sorg. Don’t be fooled by the magazine cover on the homepage, the website is written in English.

Cheryl Sorg physically deconstructs books and makes them into visual art, both 2D and 3D. If you check out her website you’ll find not only wall hangings, but sculptures and furniture made from the actual printed words of great books. I’ve seen some word art out there, but this is the first kind of word art that I feel is so faithful to the original art form (literature) without sacrificing any of the beauty or simplicity of visual art.

Another fun fact about Cheryl Sorg, is that these thumbnail portraits are custom made for each buyer. So you can order a portrait like the one above that utilized the pattern of your actual thumbprint, as well as tailoring the words and titles to your particular interests. I just love that, the infinitude of a project like that, and the idea of having a piece of artwork that is not only beautiful, but deeply a part of who I am. I am super excited about today’s artwork by the great David Chidgey. It is both a mosaic, and a mandala, both of which are awesome forms, and this one is just so amazingly beautiful. Check it out. David Chidgey does amazing work with stained glass mosaic. I’m really impressed at how his work is consistently lovely in a way that just gets me in the chest, and that he has a great range of forms and mediums incorporated into his mosaic work. This is his Flickr page, which is worth looking at because it has some photos of the work being created which I really enjoy, and you might too.
[null, {"document_url": "http://www.laurencatlin.com/category/mosaic/", "unformatted_src": "http://s3.otherpeoplespixels.com/sites/40998/assets/6q3wvLW405Zxfd5w.jpg", "src": "http://s3.otherpeoplespixels.com/sites/40998/assets/6q3wvLW405Zxfd5w.jpg", "formatted_filename": "q wvLW Zxfd w", "rendered_width": 440, "rendered_height": 280}, null, null]