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Alphabet Art colouring peter daglish’s colouring book
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n 1970, while teaching at the University of Victoria, Peter Daglish, a British artist whose work is housed at the Tate Modern, the National Gallery of Canada and other collections, created a set of ten lithographed panels, 21x31", printed on fine art paper and titled My ABC Colouring Book. Each panel illuminates two or three letters of the alphabet—A, B, C on one, D, E, F on another and so on—and each letter is given a simple sentence in the tradition of a child’s colouring book: “A is for Ailie,” “F is for fun+frolic,” “S is 4 ship.” The letters are further “illuminated” by images, words and patterns that make up a kind of “non-alphabetical vocabulary” drawn from lexicons of language, Alphabet Art 39