Book Description
In pursuit of their animal subjects, artists Olly & Suzi start by situating themselves in the subject's natural habitat--the wild. They approach as closely as possible and, working in tandem, quickly capture their prey on paper, using the day's particular combination of paints, brushes, burnt sticks, natural pigments, even blood, and then offer up the finished portrait to be paw-printed, tooth-bitten, or otherwise marked by the animal for authentication. Their collaborators have included anacondas, crocodiles, polar bears, and great white sharks. Of course, occasionally a leopard decides to rip apart its own image, or a rhino devours the canvas whole. While their art yields paintings of extraordinary beauty and power, Olly & Suzi consider it performance-based and site-specific: sometimes the only thing they come away with from an expedition is their lives. Spare, vibrant, and lyrical, the works that have survived Olly & Suzi's 15 years of adventures in such remote locales as Siberia, the North Pole, and the Galapagos Islands fill the pages of this equally boundary-defying book. Accompanied by dazzling photographs that document the pair's unique process, these paintings take the reader on a dynamic journey to the world's remaining, though endangered, wild places.

About the Author
Since meeting as art students in 1987, British artists Olly & Suzi have made works together in the wilds of Alaska, the Arctic, the African bush, the Kalahari Desert, the Australian Outback, the Amazon, Borneo, Mongolia, and elsewhere. Olly and Suzi each live with their families in London. Greg Williams is a photographer who has accompanied Olly & Suzi on many trip over the past 10 years. His work also appears regularly in such magazines as Esquire, Paris Match, Stern, The Sunday Times Magazine and Vanity Fair. Clive James has become famous as a poet, critic, novelist, autobiographer, and television performer. Steve Baker is Reader in Contemporary Visual Culture at the University of Central Lancashire in England.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

In pursuit of their animal subjects, artists Olly & Suzi start by situating themselves in the subject's natural habitat—the wild. They approach as closely as possible and, working in tandem, quickly capture their prey on paper, using the day's particular combination of paints, brushes, burnt sticks, natural pigments, even blood, and then offer up the finished portrait to be paw-printed, tooth-bitten, or otherwise marked by the animal for authentication. Their collaborators have included anacondas, crocodiles, polar bears, and great white sharks. Of course, occasionally a leopard decides to rip apart its own image, or a rhino devours the canvas whole. While their art yields paintings of extraordinary beauty and power, Olly & Suzi consider it performance-based and site-specific: sometimes the only thing they come away with from an expedition is their lives.Spare, vibrant, and lyrical, the works that have survived Olly & Suzi's 15 years of adventures in such remote locales as Siberia, the North Pole, and the Galapagos Islands fill the pages of this equally boundary-defying book. Accompanied by dazzling photographs that document the pair's unique process, these paintings take the reader on a dynamic journey to the world's remaining, though endangered, wild places.