Vanitas and Other Tales of Art and Obsession
By Jake Kendall
Art, it can be beautiful, provocative and for some, an obsession, this is an intriguing book, covering all of that in a series of stories. Find out in the blurb below about the book and my thoughts in my review.
Blurb
Spanning 300 years of art history and weaving art styles including Cubism, Surrealism, and the Baroque into his prose, Jake Kendall’s collection tells the stories of those with an obsession for creation – artists who sacrifice friendships, careers, romance, and even their own happiness in pursuit of a vision.
Review
Take a paint brush and create a few strokes, pick up a keyboard and type some words. Weave art and words, bound together, add in imagery and raw emotion and that’s what is brought together in Vanitas.
Art comes in many styles and has done as fashions and times change over millennia. It takes, almost a life of its own and for some artists, became an obsession. Loves lost, life or bits of it like sanity, lost. You get a feeling of how important for the pursuit of perfection, the next picture it is for the artists. It can be quite an intense read at times, which fits it all perfectly.
The characters in the book are well-drawn. There are real artists, such as Michelangelo, Monet, Van Gogh that appear in the stories. The romance, obsession and imagery seduces you to read further.
There’s the artiness of the prose, but not to be mistaken for floweriness with no substance. You learn things behind what brings the artists to a certain point in their lives. You can almost feel the artistic style of the artists as you read the prose as it imitates their time, their paintings, their brushstrokes.
This is a clever story of prose imitating artwork and what goes on inside an artistic mind.
Bookmarks and Stages by Lou 