It’s not too typically {that a} highschool artwork challenge morphs right into a through-line in an artist’s skilled apply, however for illustrator and printmaker Michael Ezzell, that’s precisely how his ongoing sequence The Junior Basic was born. Tearing pages from classic books, he experiments with a variety of media, compositional parts, and narratives that then encourage additional work and prints.
“When I was starting out, I would just paint over the text of the page and create something brand new from some mundane book I had,” Ezzell tells Colossal. “Eventually, it evolved into using the page’s illustration or ornate chapter headings as a jumping-off point for what I would create on the page.”
Amongst many others, Ezzell particularly graviates towards illustrations within the Alice in Wonderland sequence, initially drawn by Sir John Tenniel and reimagined throughout subsequent many years by greater than half a dozen different artists like Mabel Lucie Attwell, Gwynedd M. Hudson, Maria L. Kirk, and even Salvador Dalí.
“I’ve gotten my book-hunting more down to a science now,” the artist says. “I look for weird and obscure manuals or children’s books with lots of pictures or funky text formatting. Anything that could have strange connotations when taken out of context is what I’m drawn to.” He approaches every web page’s inherent qualities—a printed phrase or a small drawing—like a immediate or a call-and-response, which faucets right into a refreshingly totally different type of problem-solving than engaged on a big, clean canvas.
Ezzell is especially fascinated about world-building and immersive tales, and his motifs and characters take cues from tarot, Surrealism, enjoying playing cards, and early-Twentieth-century vogue. The title of the sequence nods to a set of 10 books titled The Junior Classics, first printed in 1912, which had been meant for younger readers as a counterpart to the Harvard Classics sequence.
The Junior Basic consists of greater than 400 items (and rising), and Ezzell is at present engaged on his personal tarot deck, which in flip is inspiring extra narrative prospects. See extra on the artist’s web site and Instagram.
