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On Storytelling: The Powells.com Interview with Donald Miller

1. 
   $13.99 Sale Hardcover add to wish list

   A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life

   Donald Miller

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Hrbarnett, September 19, 2008 (view all comments by Hrbarnett)
I didn't really find this work funny as much as being both beautiful and astounding.

What this author did was literally decompose a number of modern era masterworks and then he recomposed the pieces the individual elements of the paintings into systems of organizations. For example, if an artist painted say a zebra, the author would take all of the pieces of that zebra big and small but in their original shape and make an arrangement of them, say largest to smallest. The several really amazing things are: one that all of the pieces from the original art were included in his recompositions. These shapes were in their original color, size and texture, and all were there, as if cut out with an artist's x-acto knife and included in the recompositiions, not a piece was missing. This went from merely being a neat thing to observe for the first couple of examples in which the originals were fairly simple to, as the original pieces of art became increasingly complex, this feat then transcended from being interesting to becoming frankly astounding, unbelievable really in several cases. I don't see how he was actually able to do this on the complex ones especially ones with many pieces. I've been in art and design for 22 1/2 years (in architecture, not fine or graphic art) and can't fathom how this might have been accomplished. Perhaps there's a computer program for which I' unaware, but how could it decompose a painting into its often may pieces. For me, that feat alone makes the book a coffee table item and unless you can tell me there exists some simple algorithm for doing that then this book is a fascinating piece, a true conversation item.

But there's the real treat in that this supposed non artist offers. As I looked first at the original master pieces he selected, some of which I liked but many of which I don't care for, I was particularly struck that pretty much all of his reconfigurations were aesthetic improvements! (I'm really sorry because these are mostly modern masters and I tend to love samples of master painters of this generation but these rearrangements were truly great compositions). His rearrangements were simply lyrical in their composition - many I wanted to own and display in my home or office.

He literally "took apart" well known modern art pieces of all but the Van Gogh and then rearranged them into such beautifully organized compositions that I felt had he done a gallery show instead of publishing a book his originals and any serigraph would be snapped up and perhaps could become classics as well.

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Product Details

ISBN:

9783791330037

Publisher:

Prestel Publishing

Location:

Munich

Author:

Wehrli, Ursus

Subject:

General

Subject:

Individual Artist

Subject:

Painting

Subject:

Criticism

Subject:

Form - Parodies

Subject:

Composition (art)

Series Volume:

010-011

Publication Date:

September 2003

Binding:

Hardcover

Language:

English

Illustrations:

Yes

Pages:

48

Dimensions:

8.48x10.86x.36 in. .93 lbs.