How does a painter live in harmony with their work and the world?
Book of the Unknown Painter is a collection of aphorisms written by an anonymous artist known only as The Painter. While the first draft was written during a summer in China, these insights span a lifetime of reflection on art, offering a profound meditation on painting, creativity, the ego, and how an artist or anyone might live in accordance with their work and the world.
Throughout the book, The Painter invokes the need to envision painting as an act rather than an object, emphasizing the verb over the noun. To be fully appreciated, painting, according to the author, must be performed rather than merely looked upon.
Like painting itself, this book has no fixed beginning or end. Chapters group the aphorisms for flow, but readers are free to enter and exit as they wish. Book of the Unknown Painter will resonate with artists, writers, and creatives seeking new insights into their practice and deeper meaning in their lives.
LOCATION-BKS is an artist-run independent publisher dedicated to publishing mass-market paperbacks by artists. Submissions. Always. Welcome.
Unknown. The author publishes anonymously as "The Painter."
LOCATION was founded in 2010 as an artist-run, independent publisher dedicated to collaborative artist projects. Location books have been acquired by major museum libraries across the United States, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, SFMOMA, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, and the Walker Art Center.
In 2024, LOCATION-BKS, a new iteration of the project, evolved from producing limited-edition artist books to publishing text-driven, mass-market paperbacks. This shift expands opportunities for our artists, offering broader distribution and a greater audience while maintaining a commitment to innovative ideas that address the issues and aesthetics of our time.
Tess Rankin's translations of nonfiction, poetry, and short fiction have appeared in Huck Magazine, jubilat, Precog Magazine, and Barricade: A Journal of Antifascism & Translation. Her translations of art and cultural texts have appeared as part of a project sponsored by the Tabakalera Cultural Center, in the Argentinian Pavilion's 2017 Venice Biennale catalogue, in e-misférica, in materials for documenta fifteen (2022), and elsewhere.
Her translations of two children's books, by Mireya Tabuas and by Gerald Espinoza, are out now with Alliteration.
She also works with organizations such as the Museo Reina Sofía, Temblores Publicaciones, the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime, and Alliteration Publishing. She volunteers as a copyeditor for Critical Resistance's Abolitionist newspaper.
Her monograph, Feeling Strangely in Mid-Century Spanish and Latin American Women's Fiction: Gender and the Scientific Imaginary, is available with open access from Liverpool University Press.
