Ink, Blood, and Linseed Oil

Ink, Blood, and Linseed Oil
Author: Robert Williams
Publisher: Last Gasp
Total Pages: 160
Release: 2022-03-15
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9780867198874

A collection of essays and observations about the art world by artist Robert Williams. With a masterful career spanning decades, Williams has been a part of one of the most influential art movements of the past 60 years. This is a collection of Robert Williams' writings - 66 essays, a prologue, quantitative remarks, manifestos, an introduction by Juxtapoz publisher Gwynned Vitello and a postscript by Dr. Darius A. Spieth of Louisiana State University. The writing in Ink, Blood, and Linseed Oil details and expounds Williams' observations of the art world, and its nuances and contradictions. He reflects on the nature of art and being an artist, and the politics, sociology and anthropology surrounding it all. In the early 1990s, Robert Williams persuaded the publisher of skateboard magazine Thrasher to start an art magazine. Juxtapoz magazine launched in 1994 and shook the art world establishment by presenting the popular underground - out with museum shows and in with street art, comix, tattooing, erotic photography, figurative painting, illustration, and more. These art forms were celebrated, and the magazine found a wide and hungry audience. With each issue came an insightful editorial, penned by the godfather of lowbrow, Mr. Bitchin himself, Robert Williams. These essays, 22 years' worth and a few more, are collected in "Ink, Blood, and Linseed Oil." They are presented for your enjoyment, bewilderment, and for furtherance of the discussion of the philosophy of art.

Robert Williams

Robert Williams
Author: Joseph R. Givens
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
Total Pages: 149
Release: 2023-09-11
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 149685098X

A legendary figure of underground comix, Robert Williams (b. 1943) is an important social chronicler of American popular culture. The interviews assembled in Robert Williams: Conversations attest to his rhetorical powers, which match the high level of energy evident in his underground comix and action-filled canvases. The public perception of Williams was largely defined by two events. In 1987, Guns N’ Roses licensed a Williams painting for the cover of their best-selling album Appetite for Destruction. However, Williams’s cover art stirred controversies and was moved to the inside of the album. The second defining event was Williams’s participation in the Helter Skelter exhibition at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art in 1992. Protests ensued when a room was set aside to feature his work. Uncovering long-forgotten and hard-to-find interviews, this collection serves as a social chronicle of counterculture from the 1960s through the early 2000s. One of the founders of the original ZAP Comix collective in the 1960s, Williams drew inspiration from pulp fiction, hot rod culture, pin-up girls, and traditional academic art. He invented the comics character Cootchy Cooty and worked for the studios of Ed “Big Daddy” Roth. He rubbed shoulders with outlaw motorcycle gangs and tested the legal limits of what was permissible comic book art during his day. He has often been described as a figure courting scandal and controversy, a reputation he discusses repeatedly in some of the interviews here. Since the 1980s, Williams has emerged as a force in the fine art world, raising interesting questions about how painting and comic art interrelate.

The Lowbrow Art of Robert Williams

The Lowbrow Art of Robert Williams
Author: Robert Williams
Publisher: Last Gasp
Total Pages: 102
Release: 1994
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9780867194180

This book, the first one featuring the amazing artwork of Robert Williams, has been unavailable for many years. The book contains an overview of Williams's early work until 1979. It features images from t-shirt designs, comics, posters and oil paintings.

The Social Life of Ink

The Social Life of Ink
Author: Ted Bishop
Publisher: Penguin Canada
Total Pages: 422
Release: 2014-10-28
Genre: History
ISBN: 014319318X

A rich and imaginative discovery of how ink has shaped culture and why it is here to stay Ink is so much a part of daily life that we take it for granted, yet its invention was as significant as the wheel. Ink not only recorded culture, it bought political power, divided peoples, and led to murderous rivalries. Ancient letters on a page were revered as divine light, and precious ink recipes were held secret for centuries. And, when it first hit markets not so long ago, the excitement over the disposable ballpoint pen equalled that for a new smartphone—with similar complaints to the manufacturers. Curious about its impact on culture, literature, and the course of history, Ted Bishop sets out to explore the story of ink. From Budapest to Buenos Aires, he traces the lives of the innovators who created the ballpoint pen—revolutionary technology that still requires exact engineering today. Bishop visits a ranch in Utah to meet a master ink-maker who relishes igniting linseed oil to make traditional printers’ ink. In China, he learns that ink can be an exquisite object, the subject of poetry, and a means of strengthening (or straining) family bonds. And in the Middle East, he sees the world’s oldest Qur’an, stained with the blood of the caliph who was assassinated while reading it. An inquisitive and personal tour around the world, The Social Life of Ink asks us to look more closely at something we see so often that we don’t see it at all.