In See What I’m Saying? wood engraver Jim Westergard puts his artistic talents—and his wicked sense of humour—into play with equal effect, offering a series of visual interpretations of some of the more quirky words and phrases that pepper the English language. Human beings rarely say exactly what they mean. The English language has evolved to embrace a dizzying array of linguistic tools that invite playful minds to introduce ambiguity and innuendo—and hilarity—into common parlance. In See What I’m Saying? Jim Westergard does just that, illustrating idioms with a series of exquisitely detailed engravings. Through these images, Westergard will insist you ‘keep an open mind’ and admonish you not to ‘turn a blind eye’ to the origin and evolution of colloquialisms. His visual interpretations are truly as ‘rare as hens’ teeth’, as he might suggest himself—or he’ll be ‘a monkey’s uncle’. 114 Pages8.75" x 5.5"2018 Jim Westergard was born in Ogden, Utah in 1939, moved to Alberta in 1975, and became a Canadian citizen in 1980. He has been creating prints from wood engravings since university days in the late 60s, and continues to create them on his cantankerous old VanderCook SP-15 proof press which he has affectionately named the ’Spanish Fly’. His recent titles include Oddballs (Porcupine’s Quill, 2015) and See What I’m Saying? (Porcupine’s Quill, 2018). The Porcupine’s Quill is an artisanal book publisher that values the art and craft of the book in form and content. They specialize in acquiring work by Canadian authors whose voices are new, underrepresented or verging on oblivion, with a particular focus on books that represent the intersection between literature and other creative disciplines: between text and image, memoir and music, letterpress and offset.
