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by Richard Toronto (Author)
Take a deep dive into the world of Richard Sharpe Shaver's bizarre art, and uncover the secrets of an ancient civilization.
For 15 years prior to his death, Shaver obsessed over the texts and images he saw embedded inside rocks. It was an alien world that few, other than Shaver himself, could see. He began painting what he saw and thus became one of the most controversial outsider artists of the 20th Century. Art historians have compared Shaver's vision to that of fellow outsider artist Stanislaw Szukalski. Work by these two men was exhibited together for the first time in Pasadena, California in 2009. Rokfogo: The Mysterious Pre-Deluge Art of Richard S. Shaver is the largest collection of Shaver's artwork ever published, with more than 300 illustrations.This beautiful two-volume set documents in intimate detail, the lives and customs of the half human, half fish inhabitants of Richard Shaver's prehistory world. Discover the secrets of a pre-Deluge civilization through Shaver's illustrations, essays, paintings, photographs, and ephemera, as you gain insight into his strange painting technique. Unlock the mysteries of an antediluvian world in Rokfogo, the Mysterious Pre-Deluge Art of Richard S. Shaver.Author Biography
In 1972 Richard S. Shaver opened a letter from an inquisitive California kid named Richard Toronto. As the story goes, Shaver's reply changed Toronto's life forever. For the next four years until Shaver's death in 1975, Toronto enrolled in Shaver's rock book correspondence course, where Shaver encouraged him to photograph rocks and become a writer. A few years after Shaver's death, Toronto founded Shavertron, a fanzine for Shaver Mystery buffs. In time it gathered a cult following, keeping Shaver's memory alive for 29 issues from 1979 to 1992 as "The Only Source of Post-Deluge Shaverania." It took another 35 years before Toronto wrote the book that became Shaver's first published biography: War Over Lemuria. Since its publication in 2013, Toronto's California-based Shavertron Press has produced several ground-breaking new works on Shaver and the Mystery. ROKFOGO, a two-volume set devoted entirely to Shaver's Outsider Art career of painting and photography, was the first of its kind. The Shavertron collection, Toronto says, is his farewell to Shaver, as he plans to gafiate from the Shaver Mystery in 2014. Toronto attended San Francisco and Sacramento State Universities, graduating in 1994 with a BA in Journalism. He worked in the Arts in Mental Health program at Napa State Hospital in Napa, California, where he taught photography to the criminally insane. He also covered the arts and entertainment beat, among others, as a reporter for a suburban daily newspaper in the San Francisco Bay Area. His first magazine article about Richard S. Shaver appeared in Beyond Reality magazine in 1976. In 2002 he converted Shavertron to an E-zine, where it can be found at www.shavertron.com to this day.
