Bruised Fruit

Bruised Fruit has much of what I love in an art book: A diversity of artwork that covers many years, notes on the images from the artist, black and white as well as color pictures, personal photos and anecdotes mixed in, photos illustrating the "under paintings" of finished works, and bits of other artist's work thoughtfully thrown in. All this plus it is 100% self-published and was extremely affordable at just 20 bucks.

Slow Jams (see previous blog entry) helped launch David Choe into a larger strata of the art world. He started to get solo gallery shows, mural commissions, work on movie sets, and magazine cover illustrations. He gained 20 pounds (forcing him out of the category of "starving artist") and legitimately added a couple of zeros onto the prices of his original work. This essentially priced his art out of range for many of his fans. Bruised Fruit gave the world a deep dose of Choe for an affordable price. It also spotlighted the diversity of Dave's work and the depth of thought (or sometimes lack of) behind his art.

This book covers a lot of ground. It has straight up watercolors, portrait oil paintings illustration work that was previously only printed in black and white, samples of Dave's, abstract aerosol art that then turned into figurative oil paintings, and menu illustrations. Lots of photos of his handmade gorilla figurines, as well as other character toys and the drawings that inspired them. There are detailed pencil drawing from the sketchbook, some rare computer generated Choe art (uggh), mural photos from 5 Color Cowboy salon in San Jose and some restaurant, lots of adventure vacation video stills, dirty collages, and lots of refined paintings and illustrations.

The best part is that almost every image is accompanied by Dave's personal back story, anecdotes, opinions, and insider information. It makes the book very autobiographical as well as visual.

The book is bisected by a story by Dave called "Yoffee Toffee" about his adventures traveling in Gaza. Illustrated with photos and sketches, Dave's gift of storytelling comes blazing through here. I still don't know if the story is real or made-up, and neither situation would be a surprise. Re-reading this story makes me hope that Dave's tale of his time in a Tokyo prison (the greatest orally related story I have ever heard in my life) comes out some day in book form. I heard once that Barron Storey was illustrating that tale... I wonder what happened to that project.

Bruised Fruit predates the current flurry of biographical art books being published, and perhaps even inspired many artists to look towards art books as a legitimate presentation of their creative vision. Long since out-of-print, you can still find this book on eBay for about 40 bucks, and I suggest you place your bid now before collectors put "the book that was made to offer Dave Choe's art at an affordable price" is no longer affordable.

This is an image of the book cover and a flyer from the West Coast Book Release & Signing Tour in March of 2002.