Product Description

In the Presence of Books is a celebration of the love of books and reading, as depicted by the popular paintings and pastels of Deborah DeWit Marchant. These soft paintings, pastels and oils on canvas and wood depict books and readers enjoying them in various scenes including grassy knolls, overstuffed armchairs by the fireside, in the car on a roadtrip, etc. Forewords by poet Kim Stafford and Randall Koch of Sitka Center for the Arts and Ecology.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #848317 in Books
• Published on: 2007-09-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 112 pages

About the Author
Deborah DeWit Marchant is a self-taught photographer, painter, and writer. She has been exhibiting her work in galleries in the Northwest for over twenty years, and her images have been used on the covers of books, magazines, and in calendars. Her work is housed permanently in the Museum of Art in Nevada and many corporate collections. She lives outside of Portland, Oregon. Her first book, Traveling Light: Chasing an Illuminated Life, has gone through two printings.

Customer Reviews

A Booklovers Book
The painter, photographer, and writer, Deborah DeWit Marchant, came into my life in 2003 through her book Traveling Light: Chasing an Illuminated Life. Ms. Marchant tells her story using both photographs and text, showing how the quality of light shines on everything we see; and how, in its infinite variations, it illuminates our world with a metaphysical quality, an unknowable mystery.

The ethereal quality of "light" also permeates Ms. Marchant's new book, In the Presence of Books, a compilation of fifty-six paintings. As the title promises, books (at least one) are present in every painting and every painting offers an allegory. The books in her paintings lie wide open or closed, their pages flat, their corners sometimes curled, sometimes fluttering as though sending a message, the letters of language floating in the air we breathe.

One painting shows a book, its pages face down on the rumpled bedsheet and pillow of a large inviting bed. I can envision the reader eager to return, to take up where she left off, to reflect before she sleeps. Books lie on tables, on chairs, beside coffee cups, and eyeglasses, in rooms that say: a reader lives here. Books are omnipresent: in the sunlight of day, indoors and out, in the soulful hours of night. I especially love a painting in which two people are seated opposite one another, each engrossed in a book, legs stretched out on the same ottoman, a fire roaring--a touching reminder that books enrich not only our solitude but our companionship as well. Another book rests in a tree, whispering its connection to its roots and branches.

Books, these paintings tell me, reveal the interrelatedness of Everything, the internal and the external. The paintings offer books as the key to mystery: the mystery of our humanness, the mystery of light, of night, the mystery of nature, of relationship, the mystery of language itself. Books are cherished in these paintings, possessing the potential for journeys to a vast unknown. Each painting might be called "An Ode to the Book;" books are indeed sacred artifacts.

Writing too is a major theme in this collection. As one who loves to write, my fingers can feel the luxurious quality of the writing paper lying on a desk, the stylish beauty of the pen poised to write, the potential thoughts of the writer--all connected to the beauty of sky, birds, and trees; the moods of seasons and time. The words inside of us and outside of us are waiting to be made real, whether we write them, read them or dream them.

This reviewer greatly values books, and rarely leaves the house without one tucked under her arm. They are my source of learning about the world and about myself, my opportunity to laugh and cry. I savor every painting in this collection. Ms. Marchant paints the world of books with her rich imagination and indisputable skill as an artist.

by Duffie Bart
for Story Circle Book Reviews
reviewing books by, for, and about women

A Haunting Collection of Pictures
It's better if you can buy Deborah Marchant's calendars. That way, you can live with each haunting reproduction of one of her paintings for at least a month, hanging in front of you on the wall, accessible as constant companion. However Marchant doesn't publish a calendar every year. So to fill the void during the dry years, I bought this book.

And indeed, a book isn't the ideal format for these paintings. Her collection inevitably becomes a coffee-table book, with only the cover picture always available. I have considered cutting out some of the inside pictures and putting them in 8x10 frames. But I don't think I'll be able to rid myself of the old classroom injunction against marking a book in any way. Anything bound as a book is sacred - actually a feeling that Marchant would probably be sympathetic to. So I'll have to settle for primarily that cover picture, unless I make a pointed effort to bring the book onto my lap and to page through it for more fleeting recalls of each picture in turn.

This book is very worthwhile though, even with the less than optimum chance it offers for associating with each picture. It's a collection of paintings about reading, about books. It's a reversal of the ancient order. As mentioned in the Introduction - Medieval scribes used to illuminate books with pictures. Their books contained pictures. But here, Merchant's pictures illuminate books; her paintings feature books.

Also, you'll find here a somewhat different type of collection than you get in her calendars. The calendars generally contain only what might at first glance appear to be simply comfortable, "cozy" scenes - scenes that are necessarily easy to live with. There are some of those reproductions in this book. But then there are also some paintings that aren't so easy or comfortable.

There are one or two that are downright surreal. For example, there's "The Exchange" which shows a book fluttering open in mid-air like a bird, dropping the letters of the alphabet like seeds into the receiving field underneath. A very telling metaphor.

But many of the realistic, ostensibly cozy pictures reproduced here, when peered at deeper and longer, actually take on an unsettling quality. They suggest something amiss, something even frightening. These pictures give meaning to the way most of Marchant's rooms go subtly tilt.

Kim Stafford has written a brief, but beautifully poetic Introduction. She does allude to this different facet of Marchant's work when she likens some of the repeat appearances of crows and cats in these pictures - to the appearance of "familiars." As she suggests, some of these paintings do seem to be casting a spell, and not necessarily at the hand of a "good" witch.

Then Stafford points out how many of the books in these paintings seem to be reading YOU. Yes, but their gaze is not entirely benign. They stare at you blank and bright, open-faced, yet strangely unrevealing - absorbing YOUR secrets while giving away none of their own.

Stafford also calls attention to the absences in many of the pictures. There's a pair of reading glasses and a book flung aside - and an empty chair. Stafford interprets this as an impulse conveyed by the book to the reader to get up and perhaps go to the window and dream after the longings roused in her by the books. Perhaps. But there's also a suggestion of some more sinister possibility in these pictures. Some of them suggest the midnight reader might have heard a disturbing sound downstairs and has gone to investigate.

"Feast" apparently shows a book open on a dining room table, with a vase of flowers and candles on either side. But there's a somberness, a dark velvet touch to the scene that makes one feel the presence of mourners in the wings somewhere. And except for the silverware on it, that ambiguous tabletop might suggest a closed coffin, kept in the house for the wake - the way things used to be done before these rites were removed to funeral parlors.

Then once or twice, you see someone reading, safely tucked in bed. But wait. There seems to be an almost unnatural flurry under the folds of her covers. Is something unsuspected in the bed? Then many of the pictures show people's backs, as if they were being silently observed by someone comng up behind them. Finally, there are those cats. A couple of them remain awake and alert to something - something coming up the path outside, something in the same room - while the human inhabitant dozes oblivious.

So this book contains a complex and subtle variety of pictures, evoking many moods and emotions. I highly recommend it as a first step to becoming acquainted with Marchant's genius.