"Bwana Spoons' art puts me in the mind of secure expansion, perfect days sculpting in seaweed and driftwood, forgetting about clocks, and unknowingly impressing your best friend." — J. Otto Seibold, illustrator of Olive, the Other Reindeer
Top Shelf presents Welcome to Forest Island, the flagship monograph by Bwana Spoons, a painter, designer, screenprinter, zine rocker, and toymaker whose work has been featured on a dizzying array of shoes, skateboards, apparel, baby strollers, art toys, and gallery walls throughout the Americas, Europe, and Asia.
All 144 full-color pages — including paintings, maps, sketches, comics, and more — are dedicated to Forest Island: the wild, hyperchromatic paradise Spoons has been constructing with his art for several years. The denizens of this mind-bending island include sweet whale-gators, boozy super-cicadas, arrow-slinging, basket-weaving bearded love tribes, an ex-hobo mushroom farmer, and one brutally intense bat who plays drums in a proto-metal band and would do just about anything to make a bagel relinquish its jelly filling!
Rendered in swaths of psychedelic fluorescents in a flurry of wild yet delicate brushwork, the explosive pages of Welcome to Forest Island establish Bwana Spoons as the cuddliest art-monster around, whose furious imagination is matched only by the intimacy of his handskills.
The thoughtful and provocative design, by Tokyo wunderkind Ian Lynam, elevates Spoons' opus beyond a "mere" collection of jaw-dropping artwork to a true coffee table gem. Cloth-spined and case-bound, this full-color compendium heralds not only the birth of a wild and woolly nation, but also the arrival of a major new force in the art world.
With an introduction by Tim Biskup.
