Looking for Snails on a Sunday Afternoon

Allison Sivak is a librarian in the Science and Technology Library at
the University of Alberta.

Part artist catalogue and part surrealist fairy tale, Looking for Snails
on a Sunday Afternoon consists primarily of fine reproductions of Rudolf
Kurz’s etchings, with some text.

Even with his cited influences of “Surrealism and the art of medieval
and Renaissance Northern Europe,” Kurz includes a Canadian twist; in
the introduction (a whimsical set of instructions on how to read the
book), he notes under the heading of ON: “backwards reads NO. A
‘no’ to all artists whose names start with a capital P! (Pollock,
Piet Mondrian, Picasso, Pissarro, Painters Eleven, Mary and Christopher
Pratt.” But it’s not all nonsense; Kurz opens the book with a
tribute to an early printmaking mentor, Bernhard Epple, and ends it with
a description of his etching and aquatint process.

The prints depict fantastic scenes of erotic masquerades and
anthropomorphic animals, sometimes fanciful and sometimes frightening.
Published by the Porcupine’s Quill, known for its excellent presswork,
Looking for Snails on a Sunday Afternoon is beautifully and cleverly
designed and printed, with foldout plates of larger etchings, repeated
details of the work throughout the book, and a playful approach to
typography. Occasionally, an image spread out over two pages has some of
its detail obscured by the fold, which is an unfortunate, if small,
compromise of quality.

Detailed and dense, rich in their blue and sepia tones, the etchings
demand a close look; looking is, as the author notes in the
introduction, “a good thing. It needs time and concentration. One can
look inwards or outwards. In this book we will look inwards—at the
landscape inside.” As the evocative title suggests, Looking for Snails
on a Sunday Afternoon is about spending time focusing on the disturbing
and pleasurable images inside.