Music of the Spheres HC (2023 Hermes Press) Art Works of Mark Matthews comic books
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Published Jul 2023 by Hermes Press.$29.00
1st printing. Text by Robert Crafton. Art and cover by Mark Matthews. Mark Matthews has been making marbles for 35 years. Some-the banded lutzes and opaques, the latticino and solid and vane cores, the clambroths, onionskins, and peppermints-acknowledge their nineteenth century roots. Others-the precision air traps, the filigranas, the graals-employ techniques never before used in the making of marbles. Matthews makes marbles-spherical glass objects, to be sure, but glass spheres invested with a meaning, a significance, an aesthetic vision and purpose. In this sense, the marble is a means to an end, not an end in itself. Aesthetics-issues of form and color theory-combine with investigations into the physical and chemical properties of glass, which, in turn, engage social history and economic concerns, and all in the unlikely form of the marble, a crystalline sphere which, in Matthews' hands, produces its own kind of music. Hardcover, 10-in. x 12in., 320 pages, full color. Cover price $60.00.
