A painter and printmaker of strong talent and intellect, Ellen Lanyon has been described by art historian Lucy Lippard as a "rare and peculiar American breed -- an honest, unpretentious, accessible, visionary artist, not unaware of, but resolutely independent of the imposed mainstreams of fashion". Naturalist and fantasist, her chief artistic concern over the past two decades has been to reveal the correspondences between nature and art as found in all manner of transformations and metamorphoses -- physical, magical, scientific, and/or psychological. This book documents 30 years of the surprising permutations of Lanyon's work, where obscure and bizarre objects, animals, landscapes and the instruments of human technology continually spring to surrealistic life. Together with an essay by Debra Bricker Balken, they present a comprehensive view of Lanyon's Unintentional Surrealism.
