Vendor
	Fritz Agency Christian Dittus
Original language
English

BEAR

Staffan Gnosspelius

Bear, Staffan Gnosspelius's debut book, is a gorgeous visual meditation on depression. In this deeply affecting, wordless picture book for adults, a bear is maddeningly afflicted with a cone that covers his head and that he is unable to take off. He furiously stomps and yells and tears at the cone, he implores the skies and fate for relief, he is drawn to dark and wild and scary places, the depths of his sadness feels like a defeat. It's a battle he wages until he's mentally and physically exhausted. Then, one day, Bear hears notes of music, the humming of a friendly hare. The hare hovers nearby, concerned, sometimes driven away by Bear's frustration and anger, more often staying close and gently offering support.

The author began drawing a bear with a cone on his head as a way to make sense how a person close to him was suffering from mental illness. The resulting book is both an emotional gut punch and a warm embrace, recognizable immediately to anyone who has ever suffered or loved someone who has suffered in similar dark places. In other words, all of us.

STAFFAN GNOSSPELIUS was born in Sweden and studied visual communications at Edinburgh College of Art and at Chelsea College of Art and Design in the UK. Since 2002 he has lived in London where he is a printmaker, illustrator, and artist. Staffan is the author of the children's book, Julia and the Triple C, which will also debut in the Fall of 2022.

Available products
Book Published 2023-01-01 by Seven Stories Press

Comments

Bear is an outstanding graphic story - an example of the power of images to communicate complicated feelings. -- Starred review

An excellent example of silent narrative conveying feelings of entrapment and resistance, feelings that are not easily described -- or even understood -- but still necessary to witness, to resolve. -- Shaun Tan

[...] As an allegory about depression, connection, and friendship, this work will strike a chord with receptive readers. Each page is a piece of art worth poring over. --Publisher´s Weekly Read more...

What better way to convey the feeling of the wordless country of depression and the adjacent state where the beloveds of the sufferers suffer alongside than through spectral prints and drawings that manage to be both terrifying and delightful? With Bear, Staffan Gnosspelius has captured the abysstentacled, thorned, rife with traps, drained of color, light, and languageand the respite and grace offered by love. This is a deeply tender and wondrous book. --Maud Casey, author of The Art of Mystery: The Search for Questions and The City of Incurable Women

[...] Though this debut adult picture book contains no words, its gritty, detailed sketches communicate the experience of mental illness -- and ways we can lean on one another despite it -- in acute detail. Read more...