Top Shelf presents Welcome to Forest Island, the flagship monograph by Bwana Spoons, a painter, designer, screenprinter, zine rocker, and toymaker whose work has been featured on a dizzying array of shoes, skateboards, apparel, baby strollers, art toys, and gallery walls throughout the Americas, Europe, and Asia.

All 144 full-color pages — including paintings, maps, sketches, comics, and more — are dedicated to Forest Island: the wild, hyperchromatic paradise Spoons has been constructing with his art for several years. The denizens of this mind-bending island include sweet whale-gators, boozy super-cicadas, arrow-slinging, basket-weaving bearded love tribes, an ex-hobo mushroom farmer, and one brutally intense bat who plays drums in a proto-metal band and would do just about anything to make a bagel relinquish its jelly filling!

Rendered in swaths of psychedelic fluorescents in a flurry of wild yet delicate brushwork, the explosive pages of Welcome to Forest Island establish Bwana Spoons as the cuddliest art-monster around, whose furious imagination is matched only by the intimacy of his handskills.

The thoughtful and provocative design, by Tokyo wunderkind Ian Lynam, elevates Spoons’ opus beyond a “mere” collection of jaw-dropping artwork to a true coffee table gem. Cloth-spined and case-bound, this full-color compendium heralds not only the birth of a wild and woolly nation, but also the arrival of a major new force in the art world.

"Bwana Spoons' art puts me in the mind of secure expansion, perfect days sculpting in seaweed and driftwood, forgetting about clocks, and unknowingly impressing your best friend." -- J. Otto Seibold, illustrator of Olive, the Other Reindeer

With an introduction by Tim Biskup.

144 pages, 6 1/2" x 9" Full-Color Hardcover Art Book

Top Shelf, 2009