Editorial

Patrick Kyle's Recommended Reading

By Matthew James-Wilson

March 16, 2023

Irish-Canadian artist Patrick Kyle left his home in Toronto, ON last month to visit Los Angeles for the opening of his first west coast solo exhibition, A Sufficiently Grotesque Elfish Aspect, at Heavy Manners. Best known for his books published by Koyama Press Don't Come In Here and Roaming Foliage, as well as his illustrations for musicians and publications, Patrick is a resourceful image-maker and storyteller. The work that makes up his exhibit involves vibrant figurative paintings and collages, assembled through a matte-medium image transfer technique he has been perfecting since his time as a student at Ontario College of Art and Design. Patrick, who now teaches at OCAD, was inspired by the shapeshifting goblins of Celtic folklore and observations from his daily life. While he was in town for the opening of his exhibition we asked Patrick to pick a few of his favorite publications in our library to recommend to members and visitors. We also asked him to choose a new book for us to add to our library, which will appear on our shelves for the first time next week. Here are his selections.

This weekend is your last chance to see A Sufficiently Grotesque Elfish Aspect: New Works by Patrick Kyle, and the exhibition will be coming down after March 19th.

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Patrick Kyle, Grainstad 1, 2023

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Marc Bell - Shrimpy and Paul and Friends (Highwater Books, 2001)

Patrick Kyle: I had a bit of an awakening after reading this book for the first time as a student. I was still learning about the world of comics and had been reading a lot of non-fiction, auto-bio comics and the like. Attempting to emulate those, I tried to be serious/profound to a painful degree in my own work (I was a teenager, can you blame me?) Bell taught me to throw all of that seriousness away - to be looser and more adventurous with my drawing and most importantly to emphasize having fun.

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Mark Beyer - Agony (New York Review Comics, 2016)

PK: Beyer's characters Amy and Jordan move through a terrifying hell-scape at a breakneck pace, finding themselves in a new situation on almost every page. Their dialogue is often a description of what is happening to them in the moment or reminding the reader where they're at in the story. I kept this approach in mind constantly while working on Distance mover, a science fiction serial I worked on in 2012 and 2013. Beyer's singular cartooning and inventiveness with imagery and the comic page is endlessly inspiring to me.

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Ginette Lapalme - Confetti (Koyama Press, 2015)

PK: Ginette Lapalme is an incredible multi-disciplinary artist who happens to be my partner and best friend. This monograph from Koyama Press collects some of her multi-media works from the early 2000s up to 2015 - ranging from painted comics about winking asses, ceramic cats dunked in ooze, 700 layer screen prints and unforgettable sketchbook spreads. Ginette and I have worked together extensively with our friend Chris Kuzma as the now mostly defunct art collective/curatorial group Wowee Zonk. Her carefree but never careless approach to drawing, her ingenuity with materials and her incredible sense of humour was and is still a huge influence to both Chris and I.

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Lala Albert - Seasonal Shift (Breakdown Press, 2019)

PK: Lala is my close friend and contemporary whose work I truly adore. This volume from Breakdown Press collects Lala's difficult-to-find short comics from 2013 to 2019. Lala's drawings are some of the best out there - beautifully gestural, organic, playful and fun. The worlds that she depicts are mysterious and inviting, and her narratives, whether about our coexistence with technology or our connection to nature, are always poignant and relatable. 2017's Wet Earth (included in this volume) is masterwork of wordless comics through its expertly paced moments of calm exposition and its explosive sequences of nature-versus-elf.

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Robert Storr - Phillip Guston (Abbeville Press, 1991)

PK: I first came to know of Phillip Guston's work through Marc Bell's Comics, specifically "Gustun on these Layers of the Earth" from the 2009 Collection "Hot Potatoe" - featuring the eponymous cyclopean character 'Gustun' based on similar characters from Guston's late work. This period of cartoon-adjacent painting from near the end of his life is what Guston is now most known for - but his career spanned many different approaches to image making, from his De Chirico inspired early works to being amongst the chief innovators of abstract expressionism in the 1950s. Like many cartoonists, I am infatuated with Guston's late period - but what inspires me most about Guston and his career overall is his willingness to destroy what he had done before - to tear it all down and start again.

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Recommended Addition to the Library

Julie Doucet - Time Zone J (Drawn & Quarterly, 2022)

PK: Julie Doucet's most recent book Time Zone J brought me back to comics after a period of reading next to none. Incredibly engaging in both its format and narrative - the latter unfolds in a kind of non-linear way as you traverse the sprawling pages meant to be read from the bottom up (but sometimes also not?) When you're finished, the sometimes-discontinuous images and text culminate into a very clear narrative. Time Zone J is a huge breath of fresh air at a time (IMO) where comics is a bit bereft of format-challenging works. I was lucky enough to see the original moleskine notebooks where Time Zone J was drawn in an exhibition of Julie's work at the Angouleme International Comics Festival this past January (drawn significantly smaller than the published edition!) We're blessed to have such a beautifully created and personal memoir published in a mass market format. Do not sleep.

Matthew James-Wilson is the founder of Heavy Manners Library, the editor of Forge. Art Magazine, and a photographer and writer based in Los Angeles.

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