Mike Stilkey's book sculptures: Painting visual narratives over the written word

Today’s young techie generation can scoff all they want. But there’s nothing more charming than holding a good old, hardbound book (the older, the better), sniffing its crisp pages, and turning each page as the story unfolds.

Swiping electronic images projected on a tablet's screen can never parallel that experience.

“The book is dying,” said Mike Stilkey, a Los Angeles-based artist who recently came here to install his 24-foot-high book sculpture in Fully Booked, Bonifacio High Street.

The sculpture, entitled “Discarded Romance,” reaches to the ceiling and consists of thousands of discarded books.

“I prefer my books over iPads like I prefer my records over mp3s. It’s not the same,” said Stilkey, a self-taught artist, who started doodling portraits over old books in 2004.

“I’d go to a thrift store and look for things that wasn’t particularly white. I had this fear of drawing on anything that’s white like a canvas,” he said.

A lover of books himself, Stilkey fished a book from his pocket during the interview. It was a small book of poems and illustrations entitled “The Jade Flute: Chinese Poems in Prose,” which he found in one of the thrift shops in Los Angeles.

He showed me the pages, which had a series of traditional woodcarvings printed on it. “I was intrigued by this book and I’ve been reading it since. I decided to keep this one,” he said.

Painting on discarded books    

Hard-core book lovers might find the thought of painting over books quite appalling. In fact, Stilkey, whose unique art form has been generally well received across the U.S., confessed he has had his share of haters.

“There’s one percent of people who think I destroy the books,” Stilkey said.

There was this old lady who was very upset with one of his sculptures in Houston, Texas. But when Stilkey explained that he sources discarded books from libraries and thrift stores, the lady changed her mind and her scorn turned into admiration.  

From doodling on book pages, Stilkey transitioned to drawing on book covers. And then the idea of stacking piles of books popped up.

“I hooked up with libraries in Los Angeles. I showed them my small sculptures. They then led me a room upstairs where there’s thousands of discarded books and they were like, ‘Take the books, take the books!’ I now have a warehouse that contains thousands of these,” Stilkey said.
The hardest part of his art process is stacking the books.

“The biggest challenge is mainly the texture, and also the gap between the books. Every book takes the paint differently. So it takes a long time to figure out which books to use,” said Stilkey, who uses a mix of acrylics, ink, colored pencils, paint and lacquer to draw his visual narratives.

For “Discarded Romance”, books with more colorful covers are placed around the painted figure, which is painted on the books with dark-colored covers.

Made of approximately 3,000 books, “Discarded Romance” was on exhibit in Times Square, Hong Kong, when Fully Booked purchased the sculpture to bring to Manila.

According to Stilkey, he works as spontaneously as he can. He doesn’t even plan what the image is until after he is finished stacking all the books. The drawing is the easiest part.

“Once the piece is up, I can just see the image on the books,” Stilkey said.

His work has been described as “Tim Burton-esque” and compared to German expressionism, with his elongated portraits featuring quirky animals that act like humans and Jack Sprat-looking men.

But Stilkey shrugged when asked about his subjects. “I try not to think about it too much. It actually comes from daily life—my family, my cat. A lot of subjects tend to look like my wife,” he said.

As more and more people turn to reading e-books and shelving their books in dusty attics and storage rooms, Stilkey’s sculptures remind us of the exquisite romance of the written word.

It’s painting a story among thousands of stories, blurring the boundaries of the visual arts and literature, as well as breathing new life to discarded books. How can tablets and e-books compete with that? — BM, GMA News

Photos by Jen Tarnate