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OVER & OVER in 7/27 NY TIMES BOOK REVIEW! · Aug 5, 11:33 AM

Sunday July 27, 2008
Steven Heller

Baseman’s work is not included in Michael Perry’s OVER & OVER: A Catalog of Hand-Drawn Patterns (Princeton Architectural Press, paper, $35), but he has had an influence on the current revival of graphic patterns. In fact, the endpaper for “Dying of Thirst” is a splendid example of the kinds of patterns now being devised by graphic and fashion designers and illustrators as both integral works of art and designs for T-shirts, textiles, wallpaper and even dinnerware. Perry, who last year came out with a book about hand-drawn typefaces, is interested in celebrating handicrafts in the computer era, but “Over & Over” is also a showcase for contemporary patternmakers. “We are pattern-searching animals,” Jim Datz writes in his introduction. “Pattern is as much to be found as it is to be made, simultaneously organizing space and complicating it — order and disorder cohabiting.”

Datz’s introduction offers a bit of context to the new pattern fashion, albeit in a somewhat florid way, but the book is basically a collection of ornamental designs and short biographies of their makers that read like promotional material. Some images are engaging, like Maxwell Paternoster’s mélange of digital machinery and Lung’s doodle patterns, which look as if they were made with colored ballpoint pens while the artist was waiting for the caffeine to wear off. Others are delightfully silly, like Jeremyville’s pattern of buzzing bees suckling compliant flowers. The common denominator in all these designs is complexity, which Datz suggests may be a “response to a decade of restraint, when a strain of austere Swiss modernism rose up to dominate the design world” — although I could have sworn that was 20 years ago.

Over and Over: A Catalog of Hand-Drawn Patterns
Mike Perry
$35.00
8×10 inches, Paperback, 256 pages
250 color illustrations

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