Beautiful Books Rich in Substance; You wouldn't be disappointed if you judged these books of photographs, paintings and images by their covers, but it's the content inside that makes them stand out

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Dec 22, 2003

Byline: Stephen Goode, INSIGHT

Some books are beautiful things but don't have much inside to recommend them. Others are rich when it comes to content, yet come up short when judged by looks. Insight has chosen five published in 2003 that score high in both categories.

Two are books packed with photographs - one of pictures from all over the globe, with a few from the universe in general; the other contains nothing but photographs of the people and their homes in a small portion of the mountains of North Carolina. A third presents the work of an underappreciated American painter. A fourth takes up the gardens and culture of China, and the fifth displays close-up images of moths, stupefying in their variety and complexity.

* One of the big mistakes often made about serious art in America is to assume that it's done in New York City and Los Angeles but nowhere else in between. There is good painting to be seen in Albuquerque and in Miami, in St. Louis and in Minneapolis, and in small-town America. And in Utah, too, as In Natural Light: Paintings by VaLoy Eaton shows on its every page. Eaton is a friend (and cousin) of Orrin Hatch, Utah's senior senator, who owns several of the artist's paintings and wrote a foreword to this book. The introduction is by Vern G. Swanson, director of the Springville Museum of Art in Utah.

Eaton is a landscapist of considerable skill who is particularly good at rendering snow and winter scenes. He's good at people, too. His American West is the familiar West of wide-open spaces; men, women and children on horseback; and abandoned farm buildings and machinery. He also does scenes from Mormon history. And light, very often the luminous light of an autumn morning, plays a big role in Eaton's paintings. In much of his work, he shares with his viewers what it must have been like to grow up in a very rural and beautiful part of the country, and to love the place deeply.

The artist is quoted in the book's introduction as describing his work this way: "I come from a family of pioneers, people who built the farms and ranches that spread out over the valley. Here's where I was born and raised, and this is my favorite place to paint. It's remote, has great sunlight spilling across a wide-open valley, and has all different types of landscapes. There are towering trees, livestock that has to be moved from season to season, and great trout fishing." Eaton's artistic credo would be incomprehensible to many New York and L.A. artists. "Artists should paint from their own experiences," he says. "They are at their very best when they are putting a bit of themselves into their work. The end result is something that no one else could have done."

Eaton maintains that painting is "making honest statements about simple subjects and interpreting them in a personal way." It's his very politically incorrect view that "I'm always aware that the sunlight and the subjects of my paintings come from God. I didn't invent them. My paintings are an expression of what I see and my appreciation of it; something I take from my own soul and try to put it on canvas."

* "Today, the photographic archive of the National Geographic Society encompasses a staggering 10.5 million images, both published and unpublished," states the forward to Through the Lens, which offers readers hundreds of great photographs from that collection.

The images are divided roughly by geography, with chapters on "Europe" and "Asia," on "Africa & the Middle East," and on "The Americas," the "Oceans & Isles" and, lastly and inevitably, it now being the 21st century, "The Universe."

Pictures of children and animals are well-represented. This is, after all, a publication of the National Geographic Society. Altogether, the work of more than 80 photographers both living and dead appears between the covers of this book. Most of it is color photography, but there are great black-and-white shots too.

The great but now-dead photographers include Maynard Owen Williams, who was among the small group of reporters allowed into Tutankhamen's tomb in Egypt after it was discovered in 1922. Work by the late Hiram Bingham, who chronicled his 1911 discovery of Machu Picchu in the pages of National Geographic, also is included. Among the many highly regarded contemporary photographers are Randy Olson, who recently published a book on country fairs; Carol Beckwith, who has three books on Africa to her credit; and underwater photographer Emory Kristof, who is a National Geographic contributing photographer-in-residence.

There's a surfeit of great pictures in this book, and it's difficult to pick out a few that stand out over the others. But a black-and-white shot taken of Adm. Richard E. Byrd in 1930 is memorable. Beside Byrd is his pet terrier, Igloo, who had accompanied the explorer on his historic flight across the South Pole the year before. Another black-and-white, C.E. Akeley's photograph of a black rhinoceros, is a great animal picture. It helped illustrate Sir Harry Johnston's story about former president Teddy Roosevelt, "Where Roosevelt Will Hunt," that appeared in the March 1909 National Geographic.