The Art Of Big O: Foreword by Roger Dean - Hardcover Hardcover – October 10, 2014

Imprecionante

A very nice big art book by Michael Fishel. It is well worth buying and keeping. A British version of the Art of Rock.

I have just received a copy of The Art of Big ‘O’ Produced by Michael Fishel It is a very colourful and densely illustrated book with a focus on the artists who produced posters for the company including mine. Peter Ledeboer worked as art director for Oz a visually stunning underground magazine transported from Australia. Peter founded Big ‘O’ with posters by such artists as Martin Sharp who was famous for album covers such as Cream’s Wheels of Fire and Disraeli Gears and who was key to the image of Oz. Big ‘O’ played a very important role in my career in that they both published my posters and distributed my first book “Views” both of which sold huge numbers. It was great working with Peter and Big ‘O’ and it’s very good to see this book out. Michael needs congratulating for doing it and for prizing first the images and then a forward out of me. - Roger Dean

If like me you grew up in the 70's/80's you may remember how significant the poster was as an art form. There were many stores in town that would sell posters, not like today of pin up girls and footballers, rap stars and game shots...but genuine works of art. I would often hang out with friends and see which poster they had, or drool at the ones they had put up in the art class at school.Among the poster companies, Big O was perhaps the most famous.This book collects 17 artist/contributors to the companies success.Now, I have to say, the book was not what I expected...I read about the book on Rodney Matthews facebook page, he has been my favourite artist for as long as I can remember.The book itself when I found it, is print on demand. This means that you could be waiting up to 2 weeks to receive it if it's not in stock. This also led to my first concern, what will the quality be like?I am pleased to say the quality is excellent, but again not what I was expecting. I thought an art book may have glossy pages, but it is a heavyweight matt paper throughout and this shows off the art very well.So, I was expecting a book of posters. perhaps a poster on every page? But that is not what you get. Each artist has 7-8 pages giving a brief synopsis of their bigography along with many images showing their work to break up the text. There are full page artworks, but not as many as I was expecting. Having said that they have done a very good job with the book and it is a great taster to see what these artists were capable of.