Alphabhetto. An illustrated Alphabet Book by Joshua T. Pearson

Joshua T. Pearson has recently published an illustrated alphabet book called Alphabhetto that is all sorts of amazing. This book is an interesting take on the basic fundamentals that we teach our children at storytime, associating letters with a picture. The usual cast of characters that you relate to when thinking of the alphabet, Joshua has mixed these with the urban decay around us sometimes that we let disappear from our mind.  This book helps to captivate not only your child’s interest, but yours as well. You will be taken in by his creative use of poetry and clever visual settings.

Josh Pearson is a Tampa-based artist born in 1979. Raised in a small town in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, he collected random objects throughout his childhood and dismantled them constantly to create what he called “inventions”. At seventeen he began exhibiting his paintings and working for tattoo artists sketching custom pieces. Josh continued to arrange objects and construct “inventions,” going so far as to shift the plates and cups at the dinner table into different compositions every time he sat down. Soon, this obsession would find its’ way into his artwork. He started incorporating colorful collages of magazine clippings after running out of supplies in the middle of a painting, and the tattoo imagery began creeping into his paintings by combining his ink drawings with the collages. What started out as a means to an end, has become the practical approach to everything he does today. Creating something new using only discarded scraps forces him to face the limitations of the material and think around them. This alphabet of creatures was derived with the same philosophy. By examining ordinary objects we encounter every day, we may discover the hidden characters inside of them. We can choose to ignore our sometimes ugly urban environment or embrace it and see its potential.

We had a giveaway for this in 2011. Updated  Aug 31st 2014