Thanks, Tyler.
There's a long tradition of visual artists,
as well as performing artists, using
the great works of literature as the basis for their own art.
Renaissance painter Titian, William Blake, Salvador Dali,
the sculptor Rodin, Tchaikovsky, Kate Bush, Iron Maiden,
Steven Spielberg, Baz Luhrmann, and underground comics legend
Robert Crumb, are a few people who
have taken a literary classic and re-envisioned it
through their own art.
With his amazing new book, Whitman Illuminated,
Allen Crawford has joined these ranks
with a highly graphic 21st century style.
His approach hearkens back to the illuminated manuscripts
made by monks in the Middle Ages, but with bold new twists.
Allen and his wife Susan run an art and design studio
in New Jersey.
Among other things, they created illustrations
of 400 species of ocean life.
These illustrations are on permanent display
at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.
Now, Allen apparently realized that he
had a taste for epic projects, because he turns his attention
to "Song of Myself," Walt Whitman's masterpiece,
a sprawling, endlessly complex hymn to life and existence.
Working on a grand scale, Allen elaborately
hand-lettered the entire thing and he wove hundreds
of illustrations into the mix.
I'm not aware of any other artists doing
this sort of dense, winding lettering merged
with illustrations.
The reader reviews on Amazon and Goodreads,
two forums with very tough crowds,
are overwhelmingly positive, even glowing.
The New York Times described the book as zestful, which I love.
Allen is showing us this endlessly dissected poem
in a new light, one that forcefully demonstrates
it's zestful thundering glory.
So now, please welcome, Allen Crawford.
[APPLAUSE]