One of the few books on this subject.

It's a unique book, and you'll either 'get' it right away, or you'll find that this book grows on you over time. It's a book quite unlike any other, and a treasure to own.

Let's face it, art illustration can be so laborious, filled with hours of concentration, attention to detail, and forever striving for the purity of line and shade in order to bring your vision to life. Often only to be left frustrated with your own results.
Don't you sometimes wish that you could just let go!

If you have ever yearned to be one of those 'hip' bohemian artists back in the 60s and 70s who made art feel uninhibited and fresh. To just throw paint at the canvas. Haven't you ever longed for the freedom of dropping objects covered in ink from a height to capture the random actions that they take; in short, to let fate take over from the burden of the creative process.
This is chaos theory in art form - as so well put by Gary Eyster.

Experimental art is wonderful if you are able to immerse yourself in it with plenty of time and resourses. The learning process is filled with so many dead-ends. So, wouldn't it be great to benefit from the work of someone else. Think of it as a recipe book for art. What you would call a source book of ideas. You can flick though the hundreds of black and white images, find the type of random effect you want to recreate, then follow the same basic method to how that effect was achieved; but remember that no two images will ever be the same. That is the whole point.

The contents read as follows:

Tree forms
Trunks and branches formed by the movement of pigments and liquid.
Cracks and crackle
Layers in tension.
Crawl
Rejection of paint by an incompatible surface.
Drip, dribble, drop
Pollock's discovery and random patterns.
Splash and run
Designs formed by vigorous impact and gravity.
Flow and swirl
Marble effect.
Wrinkles and folds
Folding and bending the surfaces.
Flowers
Patterns formed by drops of pigment on a coated surface.

From organic tree forms, where wet ink is free to run tiny rivers of pigment over a waterproof coating, to crackling effects as glue dries, or marbling with oil and water; to casting a mist of pigment against one side of crumpled newsprint, or the flower effects of dripping water onto powdered paint and allowing the petals to form in front of your eyes as the moisture is mechanically absorbed by the powder, similar to a fractal effect - not surprising since the shapes produced in this book are so much the result of natural forces and physical laws, with the artist playing only a minor role in preparing the right conditions and perhaps choosing the rough location on the page and what spectrum of colour.

The one thing they all share in common is that the methods are simple, but the effects are often intricate and would take too much effort to re-produce artificially.
Don't be put off by the black and white photography. The images are beautiful, but the whole process felt a little 'at arms reach', with not even one photograph of the artist practicing their methods in the studio, which would have grounded the whole book for me, and transported the reader body and soul into the moment. It is a great source book, but I would have liked to 'meet' the artist in their studio; and so the book left me feeling detatched.

Produced in 1968, the images are reminiscent of their time due to how popular this type of art was during that period; but because the methods are based on nature and the physical world, they could also just as well have been done at almost any moment in Earth's history, whether by human hands or otherwise. In this sense they are as futuristic as they are timeless. ( )