Reflections:
A Celebration of Strange Symmetry. By
Kerby Rosanes. Plume. $18.
Kerby Rosanes’ amazingly intricate black-and-white art, although
collected in coloring books for adults, always looks just fine – and even
better than fine – in its original form. A major reason for this is the attention
to detail: whether interpreting scenes from nature or creating fantasy worlds
and beings, Rosanes creates with so much care that even when creatures could
not possibly exist, it seems that if they did
exist, they would look as he portrays them.
A side effect of this attentiveness to precision creativity is that some
of Rosanes’ art is bilaterally symmetrical – to an extent not actually found in
most of the real world, but one that makes perfect sense in Rosanes’
environments. Reflections extracts
numerous examples of bilateral symmetry – and bilateral not-quite-symmetry –
from multiple Rosanes collections: Alien
Worlds, Animorphia, Fantomorphia, Fragile World, Geomorphia, Imagimorphia,
Mythic World, Mythomorphia, and Worlds
Within Worlds. As all those “morphia” titles indicate, Rosanes is
preoccupied with transformative art, and the use of mirror images is a
characteristic of his style. Thus, some pages in Reflections are perfect mirrors of each other: on two facing pages,
ducklike animals face each other, their feathers sprinkled with identical (but
mirror-imaged) jewels, crowns, scepters, rings, necklaces and more, while on
two other facing pages, mirror-image human-or-godlike female figures are
entwined with large and beautifully rendered snakes, one figure holding hers in
her left hand and the other holding hers in her right.
As interesting as the perfect reflections on facing pages are the ones
that are not quite perfect: seeing how Rosanes alters similar drawings can
inspire colorists to make their own subtle changes on pages opposite each
other, just as viewing perfect reflections may lead to a decision to color the
pages identically or differentiate
them through color selection. One almost-reflected woodland scene, for instance,
has two female fairy-like characters facing each other, but the face of the one
on the left is in three-quarter view, while that of the one on the right is in
profile; the one on the left holds out a flower to a hovering hummingbird,
while the one on the right is inviting a butterfly to land; and there are other
subtle and not-so-subtle differences as well. And then there are scenes where
facing pages only seem to show reflections – instead, they show variations on a
theme, like the two in which intricate multi-tentacled machines face off
against each other.
Rosanes’ use of similar left-and-right-page art sometimes invites
readers – whether or not they want to color the renditions – to examine things
very closely indeed. One two-page spread in Reflections
features two similar but, on close inspection, very differently detailed
crowns, which somehow are not crowns at all, since each contains an ocean or
other watery environment with clearly but differently drawn waves and carefully
delineated but, again, differently drawn ships making their way here and there.
Another double-page display features facing roosters with anatomical details
that are only slightly different – but their feathers are filled with
not-at-all-similar sprites, critters of various sorts, and even a playing card
on one side and a miniature rocket ship on the other.
Whether looking at the perfect symmetry of a double-page set of elephant heads – atop which are stairways to a ruined building plus various monkey-like creatures, raising the question of whether these are “real” elephants or part of a fantasy landscape – or at a fascinating single-page view of an owl that is half feathers-and-bones and half gears-and-metal, readers (whether or not they choose to color these works) will be fascinated by the way Rosanes pulls the eye into, around and through these many scenes. For those unsure of whether they want to color the art – or of how they want to color it – the book offers, at the beginning, six examples of colored versions of its contents, credited to different colorists, with a brief discussion of the ways in which each example uses color to make specific visual and perceptual points. Reflections thus invites reflections on symmetry, contrast, color use, and meaning, as well as on the thin line between highly realistic portrayals and ones that seems to be drawn carefully from real life but that in fact show beings from alternative realities or from the realm of pure fantasy.
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