Monokrome Volume 2 – Review

Monokrome Volume 2 – Review

By Arden de Raaij

*Sniff*.. Aaaahhh I love the smell of a fresh book, and the book that I have before me might be even fresher than those little pine-trees you hang from your rear-view mirror: Monokrome Volume two – ‘The world’s best graffiti in full kolour’. Created by Robert Whitelock and Aaron Munday, the second edition of Monokrome contains work from artists worldwide: ALERT, AMATIC, ASKE, ASKER, AWOL CREW, AZEK, BATES, CODAK, CAZYAPES CREW, DOES, EAZ1, ELSE, ESTRAI, HUSH, INKFETISH, JABA, JEROO, KOFIE, LIK, LOOMIT, MR.WANY, NICK ALIVE, PEETA, PROBS, PUPPET, REMIROUGH, RIET, RUSL, SHOK1, STENDUC, SUIKO, TILT and ZADOK. As you can see, great names from the UK to Brazil!  As the great people of Monokrome were generous enough to send us a copy, let’s see if it’s an added value to your designer-toys filled bookcase!

First impressions

Awww yeah! Monokrome volume two is such a color explosion that it’s almost too much for my senses! I say almost because there’s more than enough time to ‘study’ every part of every piece, unlike the insane amount of pictures that clutter your facebook wall on a daily basis. Honestly I feel that, between the social media sites, artist pages and blogs like us, there is just too much happening on the interwebs to actually spend some time on appreciating an artist’s work. I realize that in the end the only true way to appreciate a graffiti piece is to see the actual thing on the streets, but a book like Monokrome is like the next best thing and beats the hell out of a bunch of ill-named jpeg files in a forgotten folder.

Hah, I haven’t even opened the book yet and I’m already ecstatic.

Monokrome 2
Monokrome 2

First impressions (now for real)

On with the rest of it: The book has a sweet hard cover which is dominated by a piece of Jeroo and our favorite color. The back is a piece by KOFIE and we think that’s well chosen, he’s one of the most exciting artists we’ve seen in a while. The book contains 304 high quality full-color pages doing great justice to the works of the artists. The lay-out of the book is awesome; all the artists are in alphabetical order and have both portrait as landscape orientated pages making great use of the given space. As you’ve seen from the artist list the book is well curated and it delivers quality no matter which page you open it.

But wait, there’s more!

monokrome-003
Monokrome Vol.2 – Remi Rough

Words of meaning

Flicking through the book I noticed something I didn’t really expect: words! And not just words, it are quotes from proper interviews with each of the artists. As ‘curator’ of this art-blog I came to enjoy the ramblings of people who are obsessed with what they do. Their words can be amazingly inspiring, if you can manage to understand them. The great curating of this book makes not only for great art-work, but also for interesting words from people who do what they love all they long. It’s inspiring and well, us ‘normal’ folks could learn a thing or two of them ya know ;).

Concluding, Monokrome is an amazingly fresh book; well curated, quality colors and the words are definitely an added value too! I think this book will do great between your designer toys. Volume two definitely reaches to the bar volume 1 set. All in all Monokrome is a fantastic celebration of worldwide graffiti art.

Monokrome Vol.2 - Jabo
Monokrome Vol.2 – Jabo
Monokrome Vol.2 - Peeta
Monokrome Vol.2 – Peeta