Permanent Fun

Permanent Fun is Bill Sullivan's account of his own studio process, following a repertoire of figurative forms from first line drawing through prints and posters to finished oil painting.

The book is built as an insert-filled composition notebook, and the cover carries the marbled blue and the ruled title label of the school-supply original. Across 148 pages the same figures recur in successive states, so the sequence works as a record of how the pictures were arrived at rather than a presentation of finished work. S U N hand bound the book in a signed edition of 50.

Sullivan (b. 1965) lives and works in New York, and his prints, books and paintings are held by the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He co-founded S U N in 2014 and has used the press for a run of image-driven books that fall between the artist's book and the catalogue, among them Reckless Spring (2015), Letters of People (2016) and Forest Hills, his history of tennis in Queens.