Piecebook

Sacha Jenkins & David Villorente
Prestel

For every piece you see on a wall by a trainline or adorning a billboard or on the side of a tower block overlooking the city’s skyline, there will be hundreds of sketches in an artist’s blackbook.

These now-famed artists honed their techniques and discovered brand new styles in the pages of these books before unleashing them onto the world and in Piecebook, Sacha Jenkins and David Villorente have managed to get these out to the masses at last.

What sets this book apart from the many others on graffiti is that the sketches are reprinted on a blank page, giving them a bold and brash presences, forcing the reader to acknowledge both the stripped down features of the art and the miniscule details involved in the make up of each piece. Whether they are coloured or left as simply an outline, the effect is just the same and will take hours of perusal to soak up everything between the covers.

The artists used in this book range from Peso 131 [1975] and In1 [1974] to Wild Style renowned Lady Pink [1980] and Lee Quinones [1982] to arguably two of the most revered of them all – Dondi and Iz The Wiz. It truly is incredible to see the early works of some of the pioneers of the graffiti phenomenon, being able to look at how these writers sketched during their own golden age and giving in insight into the work that was put into the art that made them known to the outside world.

This is in incredible book that goes where no other has and promises to be both educational and aesthetically pleasing to anyone that picks it up. A must have.

Abjekt.