#fred foss

Staff Pick of the Week!

Susan Estelle Kwas is a Milwaukee artist known for her vibrant illustrations and whimsical artist books. Her 2015 publication, A Collaborative Drawing Book is no exception as it invites readers into a visual conversation between Milwaukeean Fred Foss (1898) and Kwas (2015) over one hundred years in the making.

Kwas found Foss’ copy book in an antique shop and was so delighted by his graphite drawings that she decided to pair them with her own. Sometimes tucking characters into Foss’ scenery, other times superimposing them, Kwas’ colored pencil and watercolor contributions are nothing short of charming.  

Kwas rebound the book in montage sur onglets form (with pages sewn on stubs to release them from the confines of the gutter) in buffalo leather, preserving the original orientation of each page. The cover decoration was created by blind tooling inset leather strips and is complimented by marbled endpapers.  

View other staff picks here.

A Milwaukee Illustrator’s Feathursday

This week we present a few original watercolor drawings of birds by Milwaukee illustrator Susan Estelle Kwas from two one-of-a-kind books we recently acquired. The first and last illustrations are from her 2017 book The Secret Life of Poor Joanna Todd, which offers imaginative illustrative responses to three chapters in Sarah Orne Jewett’s 1896 novel The Country of the Pointed Firs. The chapters concern remembrances of Joanna Todd, “one o' your peculiar persons,” who after being jilted by her fiance becomes a hermit on a tiny, remote island off the Maine coast. Her former neighbors refer to her as “Poor Joanna,” but Kwas imagines the full and rich life she actually lives through thirteen, almost-wordless illustrations she created while on retreat at the Golden Apple Art Residency in Harrington, Maine. 

The other illustrations are from Kwas’s 2015 book A Collaborative Drawing Book, in which she responds directly to the drawings of an 1890s Milwaukee artist named Fred Foss. Kwas writes:

This book is a collaboration between two artists living in the same city one hundred and seventeen years apart. I found Fred Foss’ copy book in a local antique shop . . . . I was charmed by his sketches and doodles and decided to pair them with sketches from my own sketchbook. His are in pencil and my images are in pencil and watercolor. When I rebound the book, I preserved the orientation of each page.

Click on Susan’s titles to see more imagery from these books on her website.