Robert Seydel: A Picture Is Always a Book

He exhumes and invents, treating style, composition, imagery, and identity as raw material. It’s as if the work sprouts from the fingers of a living reading list. -- Owen Daniel * Hyperallergic *
One of the beauties of A Picture is Always a Book: Further Writings from Book of Ruth is that it's primarily a book about process. I picked it up not knowing what in the world to expect, yet found myself completely entrenched—in the best sense—within Robert Seydel's complex thought processes. It could be a result of the mercurial text itself, as it strays from prose to poetry in an instant. Or the superimposed doodles and drawings Seydel himself made upon the pages themselves—made just so they interact with the text physically. Or some strange combination of both. And the effect is two-fold. You read the book, then you see the book, each reading lending new information to what the other reading lacked, or perhaps could not suggest on its own. Once or twice through the text and you will not be able to separate image from word as a symbiotic relationship develops. -- John Gibbs * The Improbable *