Coffee Table Book of: Water Lilies (Paperback)

Description

Coffee Table Book of: Water Lilies is a large format book of still water, and everything it is doing while it looks like nothing.

Its large plates work the lily pond from the surface down: the red ribbed framework under a pad that keeps it flat, a bud forcing its way up through the surface film, a flower drawn back under water on its own coiling stem once it has been pollinated. Around them the pond itself: mist at dawn, rain breaking up the reflections, duckweed drifted into a line that makes the current visible.

Short notes run through the book on what is being looked at: why a pad has a notch cut into it, why a lotus is not a water lily at all, why a reflection is always darker than the thing reflected. Enough to reward a second pass, never enough to interrupt the picture.

The book follows a year: bare water in spring, a green floor at midsummer, the pads yellowing and sinking in autumn, and a skin of ice with one dead leaf set into it. The pictures run to the edge of the page and the wide frames open across the gutter.

Printed in full colour on heavy 150gsm coated paper at 216 x 279 mm (8.5 x 11 inches), as a paperback.