It’s not too often that a high school art project morphs into a through-line in an artist’s professional practice, but for illustrator and printmaker Michael Ezzell, that’s exactly how his ongoing series The Junior Classic was born. Tearing pages from vintage books, he experiments with a range of media, compositional elements, and narratives that then inspire further paintings and prints.
“When I was starting out, I would just paint over the text of the page and create something brand new from some mundane book I had,” Ezzell tells Colossal. “Eventually, it evolved into using the page’s illustration or ornate chapter headings as a jumping-off point for what I would create on the page.”
Among many others, Ezzell especially graviates toward illustrations in the Alice in Wonderland series, originally drawn by Sir John Tenniel and reimagined during subsequent decades by more than half a dozen other artists like Mabel Lucie Attwell, Gwynedd M. Hudson, Maria L. Kirk, and even Salvador Dalí.
“I’ve gotten my book-hunting more down to a science now,” the artist says. “I look for weird and obscure manuals or children’s books with lots of pictures or funky text formatting. Anything that could have strange connotations when taken out of context is what I’m drawn to.” He approaches each page’s inherent qualities—a printed phrase or a small drawing—like a prompt or a call-and-response, which taps into a refreshingly different kind of problem-solving than working on a large, blank canvas.
Ezzell is particularly interested in world-building and immersive stories, and his motifs and characters take cues from tarot, Surrealism, playing cards, and early-20th-century fashion. The title of the series nods to a set of 10 books titled The Junior Classics, first published in 1912, which were intended for young readers as a counterpart to the Harvard Classics series.
The Junior Classic consists of more than 400 pieces (and growing), and Ezzell is currently working on his own tarot deck, which in turn is inspiring more narrative possibilities. See more on the artist’s website and Instagram.
