Peter Milton is one of America's most important, distinctive, and successful printmakers. His specialty is black-and-white figurative etchings and engravings that combine touches of the surreal, the antic, and the erotic with an unmatched technical agility and almost Victorian complexity. Even more extraordinary, if little known until now, are the drawings that Milton creates both as studies for his prints and as independent works. This volume presents all of Milton's drawings in rich duotone reproductions, including two extensive series that illustrate the Henry James masterworks The Jolly Corner and The Aspern Papers (Rosellen Brown refers to these as "an extraordinary coming together. . . . It is as if James had merely anticipated Milton's preoccupations by a few years."). The drawings, many accompanied by details enlarged to life size, are illuminated by Milton's own witty and moving commentary on his work. Milton writes of the evolution of his work, in terms not only of materials and technique but also of subject matter, which progressed from abstraction to landscape, to landscape with figures, to figures in urban settings, to subjects of adolescence, and most recently to work that "is now synchronized with my own life, and it can contain and reflect my present personal and aesthetic preoccupations." The book begins with "The Magic Theater of Peter Milton, " an appreciation by best-selling author Rosellen Brown, who writes: "What Peter Milton constructs . . . are novels, narrative constructions in which character, mood, and setting interact with extraordinary dramatic complexity in time. . . . Yet the most remarkable accomplishment of these rich novel/poems is that they are beforeall else faithful to the need to move and satisfy us visually." Welcome to the world of Peter Milton's drawings. Prepare to be dazzled by its visual inventiveness, provoked by its narrative enchantments!
- ISBN10 1555950752
- ISBN13 9781555950750
- Publish Date 18 November 1993
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 30 October 2013
- Publish Country US
- Imprint Hudson Hills Press Inc.,U.S.
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 131
- Language English