Behind the Art
Storyteller: Margi Denton, USA
What compelled you to make this art photo book?
I was looking for a tool to help me evaluate my art work. I had some new images and wanted to test them before working them into an edition of prints. I typically print and paste my images into my Moleskine sketchbook for this but MILK Books teaming up with Moleskine gave me the opportunity to size and move around the images on my screen. It’s a great way to curate work…. definitely a tool I will use again.
What is your favorite image in the book and why?
This spread of my abstractions really worked for me (above). I like the layout—the square of color next to the full-page bleed. The contrast of imaging is interesting—painting/sculpture, color/monochromatic. And the similarities relate—line, repeats, grids.
What is your favorite story behind a single shot in the book?
More than often, I will create something and focus on the piece in front of me only to notice in my periphery that the leftovers of what I am leaving behind is more interesting than that which has my concentrated attention. That was how this piece came about (see page 19). I think about the news and information—how we read and how we edit. I followed a hunch to alphabetize the front page of the New York Times. From that, I could see that I had a stencil from which to spray a pattern. But then it was the painted stencil that proved to be most interesting.
The story behind the above left image:
In 2006, my oldest son was in Libya shooting for the New York Times. I didn’t want to disturb him while he was working. He wasn’t one to twitter much but the writer he was working with did. So I followed his colleague and collected his tweets. Then it struck me that I could abstract the tweets (abstractions of abstractions), letterpress print them and then arrange them in various ways. I call this my tweet tube.
