By DAVID DUPONT
BG Independent News
Will Kiley Santino’s new book “Examples of Anything” is easy to describe and impossible to define.
The book is a progressive series of squares, each a small abstract painting with a word or phrase attached. And in that dynamic between words and images, the mystery begins.
What is the relation between the lime and sky blue watercolor square and the phrase “how lawnmowers say hi”?
And as the reader-viewer progresses, rhymes and echoes among squares reveal themselves, hinting at a narrative.
Santino, a Bowling Green native now studying art at the University of Wisconsin Madison, will only say that there’s “a through line about intimacy and closeness to another person.”
That plays out in an interior monologue of abstract illustration and elusive poetry. Santino said he wanted to create an experience that someone could take from beginning to end, or simply study a single page.
The images are abstract smudges of mood. The words may be mundane – “swing set” and “bike trail.” Does the image represent the words? What kind of person would pair those words and colors?
Other phrases are more evocative – “blaming autumn” and “cymbal shiver.” Others hint at narrative – “thrown out toys” and “the silence after everyone stops laughing.”
Santino shows his love of language by using arcane terms that will have even highly literate readers reaching for the dictionary – heliotaxis (movement of an organism in response to sunlight); keraunomancy (divination by thunderbolts); and borborygmus (a rumbling or gurgling made by the movement of liquid in the intestines).
And he’s not afraid to coin a term or two when his muse requires – “pregret” and “heartifact.”
Part poetry, part painting, “Examples of Anything” is a lyrical reflection on life as it is being lived.
The final words are: “All I want to say is something to you.” Then book ends with several pages of color fireworks.
This is the 27-year-old’s second book. His first, from 2015 was a children’s book, “My Week,” about a boy’s adventures through his fantastic hometown, a place every much like Bowling Green. He builds a child’s fantastic world, full of fanciful creatures and places.
Santino is a naturalist who explores fantastic worlds of his own creation.
“My Week,” Santino said, showed him he could produce a book and self-publish it.
He’s dreamed and worked at being a writer since he was a child. At 10, he said, he was always “starting stories and novels that were, in my head, 1,000 pages.” He wrote long passages of them. He drew their cities and characters in great detail.
He remembered starting to draw – though he only thought of them as doodles—while watching his older brother, Ian, playing video games. He’d sit and create new worlds inspired by what he saw on the screen.
He doodled incessantly, filling the margins of his stories with pictures. Those fantasies spilled out into the margins of his schoolwork, “much to the annoyance of my teachers.”
In high school at Maumee Country Day, a teacher suggested he go to art school. Santino told him he was a writer. He went off to the College of Wooster to realize that dream. There he continue to conceive of, and partially finish, mammoth projects including a massive four-part novel. Then he took a drawing class, and he realized his doodles could be something more. He graduated as an art major, though still intent on marrying literature with images.
He doesn’t see his work hanging in a gallery. He wants the intimacy of the printed page.
He’s loved the escape that books provide since he was a child chaffing at the restrictions of school. “It’s always been about books,” he said. “I loved the way they transported you and took you to interesting places. I haven’t been able to get away from the idea of making books in one or another.”
“Examples of Anything” started back in 2013. He had just filled a large sketch book with work related to the ongoing project “The Wonderful Plague.”
He wanted a break for working on an epic scale, so he bought small moleskin notepads at Art Supply Depo.
He drew grids of three by four squares. “I responded really well. It was a way to write a poem and combine it with colors.”
He would fill up a moleskin in two weeks, completing more than 100 since the time he started.
He published “My Week” in 2015. “That taught me a lot about the capabilities of how to self-publish a book.”
Turning to his notebooks, he realized he had the material for a full-length project. He started in spring 2015 and finished about a year later. All the while continuing his graduate work and working part time for TruScribe, creating whiteboard-style presentations. He’s since quit that job to concentrate on his artwork and out of concern for the strain on his drawing hand.
He’s worked in oils and acrylics painting larger scale work to hang in a gallery. “But it always came back to wanting something between two covers. … I talk a lot about the intimacy reading a book. It’s about getting close and really finding details.”
In a gallery the viewer stands back from the art. “It’s more sterile.”
To create “Examples of Anything” he drew and painted the images and hand lettered the words. Then he scanned them into InDesign software to finish them for printing.
The experience of producing two books has given him a sense of control over his imagination that spun out ideas of narratives that could never be completed. “It was nice to rein in that impulse,” he said. “Now that I know how to finish things, I can take on something larger and know how to get it done eventually.”
Santino is returning to an earlier story from “The Wonderful Plague” project. It’s story of a scientist sinking in a bathysphere into an undersea world, discovering specimens such as seahorses with saxophone noses that play music.
Some may remember these creatures from prints he would sell at art-a-site! in downtown Bowling Green.
He’s started the project, and plans to take 18 months to complete it. He’s ready to take the plunge back into a fantastic world of his own creation.
Both of “Examples of Anything” and “My Week” are available at Lulu.com.
http://www.lulu.com/shop/will-kiley-santino/my-week/paperback/product-22068422.html
Also available from Amazon.
For more examples of Santino’s work visit: http://www.willsantino.com/
