One of the most fascinating under-the-radar art books of recent times is North Atlantic’s Migraine Art, a book based on a contest held in Germany which asked people to illustrate what a migraine felt like.
The results of the contest were incredible: crazy nightscapes, lightening bolts through the eyes, parts of heads missing…
You can see some of the work here on the publisher’s special Flickr stream. Check this one out to round out your Fine Arts collections.
“It has taken more than a decade and a half, but Migraine Art: The Migraine Experience from Within has been well worth the wait for all of us with an interest in visual phenomena and the brain…. [It] stands as the definitive work of its kind—an incomparable collection of material on the visual and other phenomena of migraine, and, by implication, on the brain processes which underlie these.”
—From the foreword by Oliver Sacks, M.D.
Wow, I love all those different interpretations of the experience of migraines. It’s fascinating to see the ways these artists express it in different ways. My favorite is 122, showing a person slumped over a table as the whole room is in ripples. I can imagine that’s how the world must feel sometimes to the migraine sufferer!