The Artist

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.

The Process

Toddson relies on a complex, intricate process that incorporates nearly two dozen steps. Sourcing the books, itself, can take several years.

There is effort and expense to find and secure each objet trouvé as they slowly accumulate — saved before the tumult of history sweeps them away. Toddson’s search for these precious materials has journeyed him through Eastern Europe to China and Germany, Sri Lanka, Amsterdam, and Mexico. New York City. The Deep South.

He has searched everywhere: forgotten barns, attics, basements, closing bookstores, antique stores, to post-natural disasters (where materials get waterlogged) and estate sales. Rainstorms. Missed planes. Confiscating illegal materials in China. Sitting with mourning families to hear incredible life stories.

Compositions evolve into highly textured mixed-media pieces and wall sculptures that incorporate reclaimed materials. A patchwork of inlaid vintage book covers from antiquity suspended in layers of resin, acrylic, and oil, with gossamer, hand-painted elements and found ephemera from around the globe: rare historical, journalistic, and intimate art objects, from the antiquated to the contemporary.

It’s a world of tactile assemblage, high textures, complex strata, found materials, vintage found curiosa, hand-painting, drawing, and photography. Resin demands a particular delicacy due to high volatility. Anderson’s choice resins are archival-quality, non-yellowing, naturally bio-based, and extremely costful. Perfect studio conditions, torches, and a skillful craftsman’s bone-deep understanding of procedure are necessary.

At heart, Toddson’s oeuvre is fundamentally process-propelled, rooted in an excavation of materiality and the tactility of language. His architecturally structured pieces become cultural arks, rummaged trove, protecting story and language so that communities can commune and connect through decades and even centuries.

Books forefront visual language, evolving viewers beyond simple deconstruction into entirely new abstractions of storytelling, memorabilia, curiosa, and sculpture. The libro sculptures are opaquely veneered and intensely overlaid, creating startling compositions that engage humankind’s intuitive desire to apprehend truths within disorder.

Toddson’s latest efforts center on shape-shifting pieces engaging with Western iconography. As the viewer approaches, images seemingly shift into new composition. These pieces are highly textural, make use of an array of found materials, resin, and photography, stepping toward vastness of vision protected by the boundaries of what the eye alone can see.