Going along with the theme of non-traditional mediums and eco-friendly art, I wanted to share with you all one of my favorite artist,
Alex Queral. Queral started creating celebrity portraits after finding a stack of phone books laying around. Everyone knows the phone book is slowly fading away since most get their information from the internet. So the amount of phone books that are looked over and not taken are thrown away or just rot away. Queral took this into consideration and decided to put them to good use and have them last forever. He carves 3-dimentional celebrity portraits out of these phone books. The process is slow and tedious. He starts by cutting into the phone book with an X-ACTO knife and pulls back the layers. If he makes a wrong cut, he starts his portraits all over again. Nothing says perfection more than this. And because of this, I admire him and his work even more.
Barack Obama
Albert Einstein
Pee-Wee Herman
Clint Eastwood
For Queral, the use of phone books is about more than just recycling. The concept and meaning behind his work is powerful. He states, ‘In carving and painting a head from a phone-book directory, I’m
celebrating the individual lost in the anonymous list of thousands of
names that describe the size of the community.’ I find this admirable and inspiring from its contradiction. Portraying a well-known person on a book of unknown names and numbers is clever and witty. It shows how much one person can impact thousands. That's how I see it anyways. He finishes off the pieces with a black wash to enhance details and then seals everything with a transparent acrylic layer to maintain the work. This takes the phrase book art to a new level. Check out more incredible work from Queral
here.
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