Art Craft Design

"Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time".

Thomas Merton

Many of us have wondered about how an artist creates art. For those who have also wondered about the why of a fanciful piece of jewelry, a solemn sculpture, or a surprising new form of dinnerware, Russell Stephanchick's book, Art, Craft, Design, A Retrospective, provides the musings of a professional designer in the form of a collection of work wide ranging and intuitively curated, showing us fascinating aspects of the artist's impulse to create. The book is a loose chronology of Stephanchick's inspirations in subject and form, organized by successive phases of his mutating approaches to art, craft, and design media. The freedom of the book's structure is balanced by the sure consistency of the style and mood of the work included in this collection: Stephanchick's eye can find the serene beauty in both the design for a Smith and Wesson pistol display and in a Zen stone wrapping. To follow a path through this artist's book – either by contemplating its polished images or browsing its extensive groupings of art media – is to become enlightened about the natural rhythms of human creativity.

Joyce Kessler

professor emerita

The Cleveland Institute of Art