Last Gasp Books

Our book Dying of Thirst: New Paintings by Gary Baseman received a rave review in the New York Times. Here’s an excerpt:

Gary Baseman, a painter and illustrator who created the animated series and feature film “Teacher’s Pet” and a successful line of collectible vinyl toys, is descended from the Wacky Pack generation. Like Panter’s work, his playfully dark renderings of libidinous skeletons, snarky devils, hunky snowmen and erotic bunnies, among other characters, have been hung in galleries and published in The New Yorker and Rolling Stone. His basic style is consistent with both “high” and “low” art worlds.

But in DYING OF THIRST: New Paintings by Gary Baseman (Last Gasp, $24.95), his obsession for Kewpie-esque nymphs is displayed as never before, in living color and in a large format. The imagery includes a collection of nudist “art” photographs overpainted with troll-like creatures in Pepto Bismol pink and Hershey’s brown. But most of the book features his signature nymphs cavorting with bears, bugs and other disquietingly cute characters. “Cute plus Sex, you might say,” Holly Myers writes in her introduction, “equals Creepy.” And while for some this would be an accurate description, also present in Baseman’s work is a cultivated naïveté, a style that is designed to lull and shock, but not excessively. Unlike Panter’s art, which displays a virtually childlike fascination with similar material, Baseman’s work in this book feels calculated to cater to today’s art fashions — ones that he has helped to create.

Dying of Thirst: New Paintings by Gary Baseman