Art Mart features local artists

The Churchill Arts Council will launch its series of Lariat Courtyard ArtMarts on Thursday, and the series will continue on every Thursday at the Art Center through Sept. 18 from 5-8 p.m.

It will be a great chance to browse an eclectic array of artworks and other items produced by local artisans including Carol Baker, Dixie Bus/Fallon Girls (Vicki Detomasi, Terri Calleas, Susan McCormick), Denise Johnson, Stephanie Rose Long, Gil Martin, Korena Mewaldt, Mincer’s Silversmiths, Michelle Nelsen, April Oakden, Robyn Openshaw, Robert Petersen, Sarah Wharton Riggle, Kim Rowlett, Jaime Sammons, Kevin Sammons, and Diane Sewell.

There will also be music by local musicians and craft cocktails, beer and wine will be available for purchase. For more information on the ArtMarts, you can call Churchill Arts at 775-423-1440.

“The Graphic Canon: The World’s Great Literature as Comics and Visuals” (Seven Stories Press), edited by Russ Kick, is a massive three volume set of interpretations of some of the great works of literature in the manner of what have become known as graphic novels.

Drawings, collages and graphics by more than 50 artists — including Robert Crumb, S. Clay Wilson, Will Eisner, Roberta Gregory and Kim Deitch as well as many who have drawn for Marvel and DC comics — give fresh and pointed interpretations to literary works.

Volume 1, which covers from the epic of “Gilgamesh” to Shakespeare also includes interpretations of “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey,” Sappho’s poetic fragments, the Bible, Lao Tzu, “Beowulf,” Hildegard von Bingen, Chaucer, Dante’s “Divine Comedy,” “Don Quixote,” “Candide,” Mary Shelley and many others.

Volume 2 continues the survey covering literature from “Kubla Kahn” to the Bronte Sisters and “The Picture of Dorian Gray.” In this volume you’ll see interpretations of works by William Blake, Lord Byron, The Brothers Grimm, Dickens, Poe, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson and Lewis Carroll as well as the likes of Leopold von Sader-Masoch, Rimbaud, Tolstoy, Twain and Nietzsche.

Volume 3, covers from “Heart of Darkness” to Hemingway and “Infinite Jest,” and includes graphic interpretations of Sigmund Freud, “The Wizard of Oz,” Jack London, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka, Yeats and Wallace Faulkner, Sartre, Steinbeck and Kerouac, Kathy Acker and Cormac McCarthy.

Again and again, the adaptations are, as editor Kick notes, true collaborations between the original authors and today’s artists.

Kirk Robertson covers the local arts scene. To reach Kirk, email him at news@lahontanvalleynews.com.