Livingston artist and author John Henry Haseltine joins the select list of writers published by Elk River Books with his monograph of paintings and narratives, Westward & Miserable. The book officially launches on Tuesday, Sept. 17, with a reading and art display.
Westward & Miserable is an 80-page collection of full-color paintings of imagined Western scenes with an absurdist and often bizarre twist. Short explanatory essays accompany each image. The work is gathered from Haseltine’s gallery exhibitions in Livingston, including The Green Door Gallery, The Frame Garden, and Raised By Wolves Studios. It’s part regional history, part folklore, part Western mythology, but, Haseltine notes, “mostly it’s a book of lies … lies equally benevolent as they are pernicious.”
Betsy Gaines Quammen, author of True West: Myth and Mending on the Far Side of America, describes the book as “an irreverent rollick, dismantling myths and gonzoing Western history. Haseltine illustrates his outrageous collection of tall tales and spirited yarns with originality, charm, and joyfulness.”
Comedian, filmmaker and “Saturday Night Live” alum Rich Hall notes, “Haseltine’s visual style falls somewhere between those 70s Keane paintings of the kids with the debilitating myopic condition and bathroom wallpaper from that same era. The text accompanying each illustration is sly, precise and remarkable, considering—as far as I can tell—it has nothing to do with the actual illustration it prefigures. It would seem to me that Mr. Haseltine has produced this somewhat phenomenal book with no marketing strategy beyond launching a single copy into the ocean, hoping it washes up on a remote shore and generates a cargo cult.”
In addition to being a painter and writer, Haseltine is a frustrated theater artist, a failed filmmaker, a reviled musician and sometimes makes puppets but they aren’t super functional, and you have to be REALLY careful if you want to use them.
Elk River Books is located at 122 S. 2nd St. in downtown Livingston. The free event begins at 7 p.m., and a book signing and reception will follow.
