branta

Allen Spiegel Fine Arts

48 pages
Printed black and white on white satin paper
Hard cover printed black and white.
ISBN # 9781934298053
UPC Code 9781934298053

Most postcards typically capture a city’s most recognizable landmarks or distill a region’s identity into a single (usually garish) image. As a Canadian and a resident of the Maritimes I’ve seen my fill of beavers, lobsters and lighthouses.

In Dave McKean’s Postcards from Paris, however, you won’t see the Eifel Tower unless you really pour over the pen and ink drawings carefully (it shows up as a chess piece in a sketch of a game in progress). McKean is a British artist, probably best known for designing all the covers for Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman series in the early 90s, but with an impressive resume of design and fine art works that included a 2007 exhibition at the BD Artist(e) Gallery in Paris. His time in the City of Light generated much in the way of new work, including sketches that eventually formed the basis for this wonderful little book. It follows two other “postcard” collections from Barcelona and Vienna.

The black, white and gray images float across each other in layers of street scenes, architectural details and historical art figures. The effect is one of either dream or recollection… a vacation slideshow with the slides stacked three and four deep at times. Textual elements as well as postmarks and stamps lend unity to the pieces along with a reminder of an authorial hand at work. McKean has a keen ability to create liveliness in still images either by replication of figure through its range of motion, or strong horizontal elements such as figures leaning far forward and hands reaching for the edge of the page.

It might not serve as a substitute for a guided tour of approved sites, but as a portrait of a city that lives and breathes in present, future and past tense these postcards achieve more than another phallic image could hope to accomplish.