Michael Williams: How to Ruin an Omelet

Michael Williams' How to Ruin an Omelet gathers a body of drawings made in dry marker, a medium the American painter has used as a loose, fast counterpart to his large abstract-figurative canvases.

The 64-page paperback, published by Karma in New York, reproduces drawings built from Williams' recurring cast of cartoonish, absurdist imagery, cracked eggs, distorted faces, and everyday objects rendered with a deadpan humor that undercuts their painterly complexity. Library of Congress cataloging places the drawings around 2016, and the book functions as a compact survey of a medium Williams treats as sketchbook and finished work at once.

Williams (b. 1978) is known for paintings that combine airbrush, digital printing, and hand-drawn marks into dense, layered compositions; Karma, which represents him, has published several volumes of his work, of which this drawing-focused book is among the more intimate.