Drinking Like a Fish

The photographic surrealism of Patrick Livingstone, internationally renowned for his oil painting, is presented here for the first time. Inspired since childhood by Dali and Magritte, his photo-surrealist paintings are amazingly detailed, and often humorous. Surreal humour awaits the reader inside, illustrating the artists wry Irish wit, a delight to behold. The images themselves often seem simply a little strange, until you read the title, and then the humour appears from behind the surreal mask. A typical example is "Heavy Metal", where the red peppers are perfectly in balance with the brass weights on the opposite side of the scales. They are being painted by a wooden hand, normally used as a model by the artist, with Cadmium Red paint. Cadmium, as I'm sure you know, belongs to the group of "heavy metals", so we wait to see if the painter will "tip the scales" with his painting. In another painting we see sea shells and waves, both of which can be said to illustrate the ratio of numbers first discovered be the Italian mathematician, Leonardo Bonacci (c. 1170 - c. 1250)--known as Fibonacci. The shells are further arranged in a "Fibonacci Spiral", while hovering over a sea of "Fibonacci waves". Many a speculator has lost his shirt trading in stocks and shares, guided in vain by Fibonacci waves. This book would make a great gift for any art lover with a sense of the bizarre. This book contains around thirty unique paintings, representing the artist's most recent work.