J. McGuinness Myers was a medical illustrator by profession. The paintings and drawings he created on site at the Bascom Palmer Eye Institute at the University of Miami illuminate diseases of the eye and would also intrigue anyone interested in contemporary or abstract art.
The variety of his subject matter coupled with his facility with paints, pencil, air-brush and ink is stunning to see. The finished works are immaculate, worthy of the technical skills of a miniaturist. The layman, ignorant of the medical details each picture is provided with, might spin any number of narratives from what is seen on the pages of “An Artist’s Perspective on the Eye.” There are what appear to be Op Art designs, diminishing vistas and swelling curves, images of swimming fish and even the suggestion of dancing flowers. A few of the paintings appear to represent perfect circles of celestial brightness, and one, illuminating the case of a melanoma of the retina, might be taken for a Japanese landscape.
Which is not to diminish the worth of “An Artist’s Perspective on the Eye” as a valuable medical book, nor to turn the tables on the expectations of art lovers. This volume insures that Myers’ treasured illustrations (along with the accompanying text) will find a degree of permanency.
- Published by The Bascom Palmer Eye Institute in cooperation with Fine Arts Press
- Text by Richard K Forster, MD, Helen L. Kohen, and Andrew A. Moshfeghi, MD, MBA
- Format: hard cover book and a separate, limited edition, hand numbered version of 500 copies housed in a slipcase
- dimensions: 11” x 11”
- 198 page plus cover / 126 illustrations
- hard cover: $42.00
- limited edition with slipcase: $60.00
- hard cover order number: FAP-125-H
- limited edition with slipcase order number: FAP-125-L
“Black Power * Flower Power” documents two of the most fascinating stories of 20th century America’s cultural history—the growth of the Black Liberation Movement embodied by the Black Panthers and the 1967 blossoming of hippie “flower power” in San Francisco’s Haight Ashbury district.
The history of video, in Southern California and at the Long Beach Museum of Art, is one of exchange (the sharing of technical skills and aesthetic approaches as well as critical and idealistic beliefs) and evolution (the exhibition and chronicling of the development of the medium over a period of twenty-five years). LBMA’s account is historically significant. In 1974, only four years after the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) began in the United States, LBMA launched a program of video art, a radical move by a small museum. This important decision not only brought LBMA into the international contemporary art stream, it also influenced and validated the (then) new medium that remains at the foundation of media art today.