Produktdetaljer
Biografisk notat
Tom de Freston is a visual artist based in Oxford. Among various fellowships and residencies he has held a Leverhulme residency at Cambridge University, a Levy Plumb Residency at Christ's College and the inaugural Creative Fellowship at Birmingham University. His work is regularly exhibited, and is represented in numerous public and private collections. With his wife, the writer Kiran Millwood Hargrave, he is the co-author of Orpheus and Eurydice and Julia and the Shark. Wreck is his debut non-fiction work.Géricault''s Raft stands as a statement as much as painting, a history lesson, a nightmare, a gigantic perfidy, a visual shorthand for abuse and disaster rendered in exquisite oils... In pulses of literary reference and art history and Gericault''''s own radical life story, de Freston evokes a provocative new voyage for the rotting raft - seen through his own visceral experience of the vast painting, and its uproarious terrors and visions, which hold a mortal but undying resonance for our own times... A stupendous work
- Philip Hoare,
To read Wreck is to observe a mind as it delves into the pentimenti of the past, moving through complexities of horror, art, solidarity, and trauma. Unforgettable
- Doireann Ní Ghríofa, author of A Ghost in the Throat,
Not only an extraordinary exploration of how an artwork is created but a devastating portrayal of what it means to means to struggle, to be human, to find hope. A darting, incredibly ambitious book which brings together the head and the heart. I am still ringing with the experience of reading it
- Daisy Johnson, author of Sisters,
Wreck is a stunning piece of writing - powerful, moving, and raw. It is electrifying
- Louise O'Neill,
I've never read a book like Wreck before. It pulled me in, engulfed me, cast me up, left me beached, left me wrecked. There are sudden vivid plunges into historical dreaming, dazzling close-readings of artworks, profoundly courageous passages of memoir, and as one proceeds through it one learns how to read it: by rhymes, echoes and flashes of lightning
- Robert Macfarlane,
A mix of art, identification and memoir... [Wreck] is a strange hybrid, but [de Freston] finds the right tone, and it becomes clear that what [he] is examining is not so much one painting as the relationship between art and suffering
New Statesman
Burns with an intensity that's sometimes disturbing and bewildering and, more often than not, powerfully moving
- Mark Bostridge, Oldie
A beguiling hybrid of memoir, art history and fiction... imaginative... lyrical
TLS