{"id":25013,"date":"2021-11-23T08:00:29","date_gmt":"2021-11-23T08:00:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/?p=25013"},"modified":"2021-11-22T18:08:30","modified_gmt":"2021-11-22T18:08:30","slug":"pulling-weeds-from-a-cactus-garden-life-is-full-of-pricks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/2021\/11\/23\/pulling-weeds-from-a-cactus-garden-life-is-full-of-pricks\/","title":{"rendered":"Pulling Weeds from a Cactus Garden – Life is Full of Pricks"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\nBy Nathalie Tierce <\/strong>(Indigo Raven)
\nISBN: 978-1-73783-260-7 (PB) eISBN: 978-1-734174-4-1<\/p>\n

Win’s Christmas Gift Recommendation: <\/strong>Particularly Pointed Party Favours for all those Imminent, Inescapable Get-togethers\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 <\/strong>8\/10<\/strong><\/p>\n

The marriage of image and text is a venerable, potent and astoundingly evocative discipline that can simultaneously tickle like a feather, cut like a scalpel and hit like a steam-hammer. Moreover, repeated visits to a particular piece of work can even generate different responses depending on the recipient’s mood.<\/p>\n

If you’re a multi-talented artist like Nathalie Tierce, who’s excelled in film and stage production for everyone from the BBC to Disney and Tim Burton to Martin Scorsese; music performance design for Andrew Lloyd Webber and the Rolling Stones<\/strong>; gallery art; painted commissions and latterly, graphic narratives such as Fairy Tale Remnants<\/strong>, challenges must be a hard thing to find.<\/p>\n

Thankfully, human-watching is frequently its own reward, resulting in books like this slim, enthrallingly revelatory paperback (or digital digest) which forensically dissects human nature: exploring modern times and unchanging human nature through a lens of Lockdown and via the immortal truths of folklore as expressed in Aesop’s Fables<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

On show in this handy art boutique are stunning paintings in a range of media, but all rendered in the bizarrely baroque classical manner of Breughel or Bosch, albeit blended with the quixotic energy of cartoon satirists Gerald Scarfe and Ralph Steadman.<\/p>\n

Each condemnatory visual judgement is deftly wedded to moving, querulous and frankly often quite terrifying epigrams capturing contemporary crisis points of isolation, confusion, despondency and simple surrender to fate: summarised in fractured haikus and weaponised odes such as ‘Lost in a Supermarket’<\/em>, ‘Domestic Bliss’<\/em>, ‘Thoughts on the Outside’<\/em>,‘Destiny<\/em> Guides Our Fortunes’<\/em>, ‘Say No Meore’<\/em>, ‘The Lamb and the Wolf’<\/em>, ‘Clown Adrift’<\/em>, ‘Plucked<\/em> Grumpy Chicken’<\/em>,‘Speeding Back to the Comfort of Hell’<\/em>, ‘Tragic Circus’<\/em> and more.<\/p>\n

Blending wicked whimsy with everyday paranoia and neighbourly competitiveness, Pulling Weeds from a Cactus Garden<\/strong> is a mature delight for all students of human nature with a sharp eye and unforgiving temperament – and surely, isn’t that all of us?
\n\u00c2\u00a9 2021 Indigo Raven. \u00c2\u00a9 2021 Nathalie Tierce. All rights reserved.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Nathalie Tierce (Indigo Raven) ISBN: 978-1-73783-260-7 (PB) eISBN: 978-1-734174-4-1 Win’s Christmas Gift Recommendation: Particularly Pointed Party Favours for all those Imminent, Inescapable Get-togethers\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 8\/10 The marriage of image and text is a venerable, potent and astoundingly evocative discipline that can simultaneously tickle like a feather, cut like a scalpel and hit like a steam-hammer. … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Pulling Weeds from a Cactus Garden – Life is Full of Pricks”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[81,216,111],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-25013","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-art-books","category-lifestyle","category-satirepolitics"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4AFj-6vr","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25013","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25013"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25013\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25017,"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25013\/revisions\/25017"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25013"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25013"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25013"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}