Victor Melamed: Diagonal Frog

In the book "The Diagonal Frog," artist, teacher, writer, and musician Victor Melamed shares his experience using metaphor in teaching, creative work, and viewership, along with his views on art and exercises for creative thinking.

What do such different human endeavors as literature, music, and the visual arts have in common? Likely, the urge to take a fact of existence or consciousness, accessible either sensually or intellectually, and report on it—distorting it slightly, but through that distortion, adding something new, provided, of course, that the work is successful.

Simply put, very different types of art may exist in parallel, but they will always be united by one tool: metaphor. At least, that is what artist, musician, and, more recently, practicing prose writer Victor Melamed believes.

The author borrowed the image of the diagonal frog from digital art pioneer and veteran Kai Krause, who remarked: "A good analogy is like a diagonal frog." Using this image as a starting point, Melamed constructs a kind of treatise (or anti-treatise, depending on how you look at it) about, as one might easily guess, metaphor in art.

But he does so in such a way that the book about the diagonal frog itself becomes a diagonal frog, tracing the zigzags of the creative mind with its leaps, jumping from a focused exploration of metaphor training to abstract reflections on artificial intelligence, from comparing the creative approaches of Cézanne, Brodsky, and Herman Lukomnikov (in favor of the former) to Zen Buddhist theories and practices.

"'Talent' is a hatchet of a word. When we put it into the pot where an artist's creative personality and unique language are brewing, we add educational experience, viewer experience, life experience, the specifics of the body and mind, the social environment, a penchant for play, neuroses, the habit of holding one's creative work to high standards of quality, attention to nuance, consistency, stubbornness—and we throw talent to the dogs."

The book contains many exercises for independent practice aimed at general aesthetic development.

Author: Victor Melamed

Pages: 200 (offset paper). Paperback

Dimensions: 135x215 mm