Eden Summer Collages - Hardcover

David Coggins

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 097882251X ISBN 13: 9780978822514

Publisher: Cobalt Press, 2008

Synopsis

A limited edition book of 90 collages containing images of flowers and plants, diary entries, drawings and photographs that chart the course of a summer in the artist s life. Coggins finds beauty and solace in the Edenesque gardens and woods of the longtime family country home. A complement to The Nostalgic Heart, his award-winning travel book about cities, Eden is about connection to place and nature, the camaraderie of family and friends, and the solitude of the studio.

About this title

About the Author

David Coggins is an artist, writer, and set designer. His work has been seen widely in the U.S. as well as in Europe and South America. He is the author of The Nostalgic Heart(recipient of an independent publisher book award) and Eden Summer Collages.

Review

A slim book of summer days, "Eden" is a collection of visual poems by Minneapolis artist David Coggins, whose subject is nature seen through a sultry haze of sentiment and sensibility. Each page reproduces a collage of dried things - leaves, blossoms, grasses - artfully arranged with bits of Oriental paper, antique engravings, postcards, photos and other ephemera. Haiku-like notes (apparently recorded on an old typewriter bereft of capital letters) recall date, place, mood. It's a sweet book whose appearance is celebrated with a party co-hosted by Birchbark Books and Bockley Gallery where the original collages are on view." --Mary Abbe,Minneapolis Star Tribune

"The word 'Walden' evokes an almost hallowed sense of place. The idea of removing oneself from the crowd, living in harmony with nature, hearing the quiet, is universally appealing. For Minneapolis artist and writer David Coggins, Pine Lake, Wisconsin is, like Walden Pond, just such a refuge; and Pine Lake's idyllic environs are the inspiration for his recently published book, Eden: Summer Collages. While Eden is very different from Henry David Thoreau s Walden, it springs from the same deep desire of an artist to record the comings and goings of nature in a personal, direct way. Just as Thoreau s Walden chronicles his two years and two months of living, observing and writing in a wild but understated spot, Walden Pond, Coggins Eden charts the artist's musings and the transitions of nature, family and friends for the five months spent at the sylvan Pine Lake, largely removed from the urban garden setting of his Minneapolis home. From May to September 2004, Coggins chronicled his time through collected plant material, found images and bits of ephemera that would construct a narrative of his summer existence, a tale which relies more on image than word, yet reveals a textured story nonetheless....

Pine Lake and its rustic surrounds, the summer escape of his wife s family for nearly a century, have inspired much of Coggins' artistic practice - drawings, prints and writing - over the last decade. Unlike Thoreau s Walden, which constitutes a written act of meditation on nature, Coggins Eden, with its 90 collages, is more a visual rumination, interspersed with only brief bites of text. The book itself a hardbound, slender tome with a robin s egg blue cover backgrounding an image of a languid water lily confirms Thoreau s statement How much virtue there is in simply seeing....

Coggins marks moments of his own life: his journey as an artist, as revealed in the scanned image of his Pine Lake studio placed onto one collage, or in an allusion to Winslow Homer s woodland studio at Prout's Neck, Maine which is found in another. He pays homage to other artists: Matisse is quoted on the 16 September collage, and on 17 September the artist/writer scanned a yellow daisy onto a reproduction of a print by Albrecht Dürer. Coggins entries also make note of writers such as Jim Harrison and Lawrence Osborne, or other notables like Cole Porter and Thomas Jefferson....

Eden is also a poetic look at the passage of time, sometimes bright, sometimes melancholy. Perhaps most provocative is the suggestion that we, the viewers, can never understand the entire story of an experience even scrutinized closely, it is a mystery. The text is brief, supplemented by image and material, giving us just enough information to make up the rest for ourselves.... Eden is a quiet, private associative book that makes the reader a bit of a voyeur. It is beautiful, even seductive, from its birch bark endpapers to the visually compelling collages and the snippets of often-provocative words. As any good art or book should do, Eden causes the reader to think about one s self, one s journey in the larger scheme of things, to assess what has been missed and what yet may be discovered." --Mason Riddle, "An Eden of One's Own," mnartists.org

"David Coggins's stunning collages catch and hold a season. These evocative images remind us that the substance of memory is itself fleeting, yet all around us wherever we look. And in looking with care, as Coggins has in this splendid book, he helps us to begin to see." --William Souder, author of Under a Wild Sky

Edition details

• Publisher: Cobalt Press
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 097882251X
• ISBN 13: 9780978822514
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 90
• Illustrator: David Coggins