ToddsonWorks

Respected artist and book nomad Toddson has become a de facto archivist and antiquarian, a devotee of literary ephemera, diaphanous incunabula, singularly beautiful old books, and the lovely sundries often tucked within pages — marginalia, gloss, pressed flowers, photos, fabrics, letters.

In a modern world where life is flattened to a slim, scrolling glass dimension, Toddson insists on the primacy of being. Bodily, corporeal, physical. Things we can touch and hold. Things that have been touched and held. Salvaging mementos as an act of faith in human connection.

The world’s earliest books evolved sometime between the 2nd and 5th Centuries, hand-stitched, painstakingly created, sanctuaried from book burning in the quiet corners of monasteries, where monks sometimes chained the treasures to tables and chairs for safeguarding.

Toddson, a self-taught artist with a strong technical and creative background in graphic design, branding, and photography, has created a portfolio of work that has been notable and awarded at the national level for over a decade, with headline names among his devotees. Registers of precise, creative expertise directly cross-pollinate his artwork in startling, imagistically lucent compositions.

Toddson’s time-intensive, labor-intensive, technically demanding designs encompass innumerable moods and montages. A storm-eeried, light-illumned libro farrago of blue, gray, and green. A stiff-ruffled bird of prey aero-carving via heavy wing. Wavering, large-scale perforated glimpses of a flower blossom, each hand-cut sheet capturing an ethereal volatility and shape-shifting, lenticular précis. Collage intercrossing the serene profile of a woman with fiery, avian silhouette.

Book distressing has deep roots in the work of medieval monastic scribes, who would meticulously wash or scrape text from book pages to free them for another story.

In fact, for Toddson’s dense array of complex compositions, with their ozonic, tectonic, and oceanic moods rooted in books as physical art, storytelling is the raison d'être.

And it’s a long and human-hearted story, one that begins with Todd Anderson’s many journeys around the world and within the United States in search of damaged and irreparable books to use as foundation for ever-moving, ever-visually lyrical composition.