"SEQUINS AND SKELETONS: The Art of Miriam Wosk"
with introduction by Milton Glaser
and essay by Peter Clothier

This full color art book enters into the studio, process and inner world of California artist Miriam Wosk. She is pictured working in her light-filled Santa Monica studio, which is overflowing with sketchbooks, drawers, and boxes of carefully filed source materials, imagery from the natural world to the bizarre, as well as numerous works on paper and paintings in progress.

The featured collages are highly patterned, ornamental, and colorful Her constant theme, according to author Peter Clothier, is “the marvelous abundance of life in all its forms, whether human or animal, biological or botanical.” The dazzling, large-scale, thickly encrusted paintings depict a unique world reflecting Wosk’s visions, dreams, and metaphysical imagination. The paintings are obsessively made by pouring, painting, airbrushing, gluing, and embedding into this “over the top” mix. Inspired by nature, these iridescent apparitions glow from within as they desire to mirror the power of divine beauty and depict a cosmological universe inhabited by extraterrestrial flowers, starfish, bones, and crystalline bursts of dazzling energy. However, as Clothier writes, “Her lust for life in all its glorious manifestations has its counterpart in the ubiquitous evocation of shades of death…. She combines the elaborate ornamentation of style with the darker themes of sexuality and mortality.”

An alchemical process occurs in this mystical union of materials and imagery, a transformation of spirit into matter as she explores metaphors for a “self” existing in a world of mystery and chaos. Clothier writes that “she invites us to consider, in her artwork, what both science and spirituality teach us: that everything is interdependent…and that her quest above all is for the ultimate truth of this understanding, made manifest both in the beauty of the physical world and in the creative process of the artist.”

Published by La Luz de Jesus Press & Last Gasp. Visit prints & books to view all La Luz de Jesus Press titles.