Jon Dee Graham: Bear Witness 2008-2022 Hardcover – August 13, 2022

A retrospective of Jon Dee Graham's Bear art.2008-2022I AM KNOWN mostly for my music, my songwriting, and my misadventures.Around a decade ago I found myself drawing and painting bears…a bird or two here and there, but mostly just bears.People seemed to love them and I loved doing them so it became a thing I did.In my mind -a cramped and dangerous place- I had just started drawing bears, but my dear friend K McCarty promptly produced from her archives some primitive doodles of bears I’d done in the early 1980s.Apparently, the bears had been there all along, just waiting for me to notice them.Since then I’ve drawn and painted hundreds of bears.I haven’t scanned or photographed or kept track of all the individual pieces but I have photos of almost 300 of them. I most certainly have created many more bears than that.Some are whimsical, some are funny, some are dark, some are VERY dark, but all are dear to me.There’s also been a strange shift in my fan-base…there are, of course, fans who came to the bears via my music and performances, but in the last few years I’ve come across fans of The Bear who have no idea that I am primarily a musician.Why bears?Well, the truest answer is: because they are simultaneously adorable, beautiful, and entertaining, AND can break your back with one swipe of their mighty paw and then eat you alive. And if you watch enough videos of bears, their raw intelligence and anthropomorphic qualities are undeniable.BUTMy favorite explanation comes from a house concert I played, where I engaged the audience in a Q&A. Someone in the back of the room asked “Why bears?”. There was a moment of silence while I considered the question, when someone else in the room exclaimed in an exasperated tone “C’mon man…LOOK AT HIM!”Enjoy. Read more