A host of illustrators are sent to unfamiliar cities in new book The Jaunt

On the spine of The Jaunt book there’s a Latin phrase printed in white capital letters – “qua patent orbis,” which translates as “as far as the world extends.” It’s a fitting motto for this interesting project, which began life as a blog back in 2013. The idea is simple enough, curator Jeroen Smeets sends an artist (Mike Perry, Jordy van den Nieuwendijk, David Shillinglaw) off to an interesting city (Istanbul, Riga, Porto, Los Angeles) in the hope that the trip will “take the artist outside of their comfort zone and let them experience completely new surroundings.”

In selecting the artists Jeroen picks people whose work he admires, and the cities shouldn’t be major creative hubs like London or New York. The only further rule is that the artist shouldn’t have ever been to their designated destination before.

On their return the artist then creates a screen print and these are sold to raise funds for the next tranche of trips. Now Jeoren has recorded the first ten jaunts in a great new book and he was kind enough to drop one into us during his short UK book tour last week. It’s a really smart looking thing and Jeroen and art director Jimme Bakker deserve credit for making sense of so much disparate material. Each trip opens with a handsome colour-tinted title spread and we’re then plunged into an interview, sketches and an array of photos the creatives took on the trip. Each one ends with a photograph of the artist and their final artwork.

The great success of the book is to feel cohesive while still giving each combination of artist, city and adventure the space to flourish, while also giving us a nicely leftfield insight into the creative processes of these practitioners.