- A historical fictional title from New York artist John Ransom Phillips featuring previously unpublished materialThis 200-page publication from artist John Ransom Phillips takes on US Presidents in his signature dreamlike style. Inspired by the Walt Whitman poem, The Dreamers, this historical fictional book takes us inside the minds and dreams of the current and former United States Presidents through the artist's distinctive paintings and poems. The book's chapters are named after all 45 US Presidents and includes previously unpublished works.

Sleeping Presidents

Arts & Photography

Phillips, John Ransom

Individual Artists

Black Book

We "take to our beds" to be born and to grow, to hide and to dream, to lie alone and cling together, to come of age and make love, to create and procreate, to ail and to heal, to rest and to die. Key rites of human passage occur underneath the swathes of sheets and blankets—intimate moments where we lose ourselves and then find ourselves again. Bed As Autobiography takes the subject of one's bed as a realm where extraordinary things take place. This book traces our journey from our first bed—the embryonic sac—to our final bed, the casket, through more than 100 of John Ransom Phillips's vibrant paintings. Exploring the beds we know to the ones we can only imagine, historic beds from prior lives and future beds in strangers' bodies through reincarnation, Phillips eloquently captures the essential sensuality of one's relationship to his or her bed. His paintings provide interpretive depictions of different kinds of beds, from the makeshift bed of a car seat to the glistening slope of a bathtub, and explore how the human body fits these beds. Accompanying these arresting full-color reproductions are an introductory essay by Wendy Doniger and an insightful interview with Phillips himself conducted by Ariel Orr Jordan. All our lives, we return to our beds: those places of privacy, comfort, and containment where we are most fully and honestly ourselves. Bed As Autobiography is a powerful visual investigation into the meaning of beds in daily life and the connections between all the beds we occupy over a life.

Bed As Autobiography: A Visual Exploration of John Ransom Phillips

Doniger, Wendy

Jordan, Ariel Orr

History & Criticism

Clarissa Editions

—This study includes more than 50 oil paintings, 200 watercolors, and 40 late nineteenth-century photographs In a series of oils, watercolors, and prose rich with historical allusion, John Ransom Phillips portrays the complexity of nineteenth-century pho tographer Mathew Brady. The photographs Brady made have long served to illustrate an era in American history, most notably his portraits of Abraham Lincoln and the images from the Civil War battlefields he captured. Pairing these photographs with his own work, Philips explores the career of this artist who wanted to make history and who had the genius to look beyond his New York portrait studio to the Civil War battlefields. Paradoxically, Brady sent assistants to photograph his most famous scenes, the battlefields at Gettysburg, Vicksburg, and Antietam, instructing them to re-arrange the dead to create images that would capture the public's interest.

Ransoming Mathew Brady

Hudson Hills Press

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Books by Phillips, John Ransom