Best of
Visual-Art

2014

A Beautiful Anarchy, When the Life Creative Becomes the Life Created


David duChemin - 2014
    Our lives can be a bold, beautiful, deeply human experience that can ripple out and touch others, but they have to be our lives. A Beautiful Anarchy is a vulnerable, honest, and insightful book about the human longing to create, whether that’s a family, a business, a book or a photograph. Our greatest creation can be an intentional life lived on our terms. For those that already identify as creative people, this book is an invitation to more intentionally explore your creative process. For anyone that’s ever said, “but I’m not really creative,” it’s a call to exhume a part of yourself that desperately needs to get out and breathe.This book is available on ABeautifulAnarchy.com or as a Kindle version from Amazon.

Art Journal Courage: Fearless Mixed Media Techniques for Journaling Bravely


Dina Wakley - 2014
    You'll get journaling prompts and techniques to help you develop a handwriting style you'll love and words you'll want to write! Then, you'll move onto drawing: you'll learn not only how to train your hand, but also how to appreciate your own unique drawing ability. As you continue through the eight chapters, you will learn additional mixed-media techniques to help you overcome your fears of new materials, using photos of yourself, creating layers, working without a plan and much more.Put your worries aside and create fearlessly!You'll find:- Eight common journaling fears dispelled - Twenty techniques to give you art journal courage - Dozens of colorful art journal pages to inspire your own art

YU+ME: dream Omnibus Book Two


Megan Rose Gedris - 2014
    Making her way through the surreal landscape, Fiona encounters friends to aid her and monsters bent on her destruction. Can she stay asleep long enough to make it to Lia? Should she stay asleep? Of course nothing is ever what it seems. That's how dreams go.

A Little History: Nick Cave & Cohorts, 1981-2013


Bleddyn Butcher - 2014
    And then enthralled. He set about trying to catch their lightning in his Nikon F2AS.That quixotic impulse became a lifelong quest. A little history got made on the way.Collected here for the first time are the fruits of his labour. A Little History is an extraordinary document, tracking Nick Cave's creative career from the apoplectic extravagance of The Birthday Party to the calmer disquiet of 2013's Push The Sky Away via snapshots, spotlit visions and sumptuous, theatrical portraits. It mixes the candid and uncanny, the spontaneous and the patiently staged, and includes eyeball encounters with Cave's baddest lieutenants, men for the most part who long since burned their own bridges down. Butcher's Nikonic eye defines moment after arresting moment in Cave's glorious, sprawling story: it's a splendid testament to two brilliant careers.

How to Write About Contemporary Art


Gilda Williams - 2014
    Invaluable for students, arts professionals and other aspiring writers, the book first navigates readers through the key elements of style and content, from the aims and structure of a piece to its tone and language. Brimming with practical tips that range across the complete spectrum of art-writing, the second part of the book is organized around its specific forms, including academic essays; press releases and news articles; texts for auction and exhibition catalogues, gallery guides and wall labels; op-ed journalism and exhibition reviews; and writing for websites and blogs.In counseling the reader against common pitfalls—such as jargon and poor structure—Gilda Williams points instead to the power of close looking and research, showing how to deploy language effectively; how to develop new ideas; and how to construct compelling texts. More than 30 illustrations throughout support closely analysed case studies of the best writing, in Source Texts by 64 authors, including Claire Bishop, Thomas Crow, T.J. Demos, Okwui Enwezor, Dave Hickey, John Kelsey, Chris Kraus, Rosalind Krauss, Stuart Morgan, Hito Steyerl, and Adam Szymczyk.Supplemented by a general bibliography, advice on the use and misuse of grammar, and tips on how to construct your own contemporary art library, How to Write About Contemporary Art is the essential handbook for all those interested in communicating about the art of today.

Lee Lozano: Dropout Piece


Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer - 2014
    In the late 1960s, she created a major series of eleven monochromatic Wave paintings, her last in the medium. Despite her achievements as a painter, Lozano is best known for two acts of refusal, both of which she undertook as artworks: Untitled (General Strike Piece), begun in 1969, in which she cut herself off from the commercial art world for a time; and the so-called Boycott Piece, which began in 1971 as a month-long experiment intended to improve communication but became a permanent hiatus from speaking to or directly interacting with women. In this book, Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer examines Lozano's Dropout Piece, the culmination of her practice, her greatest experiment in art and endurance, encompassing all her withdrawals, and ending only with her burial in an unmarked grave.And yet, although Dropout Piece is among Lozano's most important works, it might not exist at all. There is no conventional artwork to be exhibited, no performance event to be documented. Lehrer-Graiwer views Dropout Piece as leveraging the artist's entire practice and embodying her creative intelligence, her radicality, and her intensity. Combining art history, analytical inquiry, and journalistic investigation, Lehrer-Graiwer examines not only Lozano's act of dropping out but also the evolution over time of Dropout Piece in the context of the artist's practice in New York and her subsequent life in Dallas.

Douglas Coupland: everywhere is anywhere is anything is everything


Hans Ulrich Obrist - 2014
    To date, existing publications on Coupland’s artwork have been limited in scope and focused upon only a limited portion of his oeuvre. This publication will therefore be an extensive resource for years to come on Coupland’s artistic practice, published in collaboration with a major exhibition of his work to be held at the Vancouver Art Gallery, May 31, 2014 – September 1, 2014.Alongside his celebrated status as author of 13 bestselling novels, including his seminal debut Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, Coupland output has taken on the commitment of a true multidisciplinarian, graduating in 1985 from the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design, Vancouver before furthering his aesthetic studies at the Hokkaido College of Art and Design in Japan as well as the Sapporo Instituto Europeo di Design, Milan. After concentrating on his literary works for the entire 1990s, Coupland returned to his dormant artistic practice at the turn of the century, exhibiting his work in many solo and collective exhibitions internationally. During the last decade and a half, he has also diversified further, emboldening his body of work within non-fiction, film and television, as well as foraying into fashion design.Leading from a multidisciplinary background, it would be expected that his work would follow the diverse and multi-media trajectory that it does, focusing on an equally broad spread of personal themes from a fascination with the corruptive desirability of popular culture to the intrigue of military imagery, resulting from Coupland’s childhood in such a family unit at the height of the Cold War. Intended as the definitive document of Coupland’s artistic career, the book will include reproductions of all the major series’ within his work alongside his most recent output and images of the installations within the exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery.

Retronaut: The Photographic Time Machine


Chris Wild - 2014
    Rather than nostalgia or folly, the aim is enlightenment, wonder and the pleasure of weirdness." --The Guardian    Based on the widely popular blog that started as a side project in a basement, Retronaut reveals strange yet enlightening photographs from the past that somehow seem to depict another version of now. Martha Stewart as a fashion model, Kim Jong Il in a bumper car, and Ronald Reagan modeling for a sculpture class—this quirky page-turner enriched with author Chris Wild’s unique wit and oddball knowledge is a must-have for collectors of the unusual.    Wild, a former museum archivist, has revolutionized the way we think of dusty photos—turning them into a sensation that has taken the Internet by surprise. He has selected over 300 of the best photographs from the site's most visited eras and themes, mashing up Victoriana with vintage advertising from the ’60s and ’70s and unearthing rare snapshots of evil dictators taking vacations. Page by page, this unconventional, thought-provoking photographic time machine will change what you think you know about history.

David Hockney: The Biography, 1975-2012


Christopher Simon Sykes - 2014
    His career has spanned and epitomized the art movements of the past five decades. Picking up Hockney's story in 1975, this book finds him flitting between Notting Hill and California, where he took inspiration for the swimming pool series of paintings; creating acclaimed set designs for operas around the world; and embracing emerging technologies—the Polaroid camera and fax machine in the seventies and eighties and, most recently, the iPad. Hockney's boundless energy extends to his personal life too, and this volume illuminates the glamorous circles he moves in, as well as his sometimes turbulent relationships.Christopher Simon Sykes has been granted exclusive and unprecedented access to Hockney's paintings, notebooks, and diaries, and a great number of them are reproduced here. Featuring interviews with family, friends, and Hockney himself, this is a lively and revelatory account of an acclaimed artist and an extraordinary man.

Drawings


Kurt Vonnegut Jr. - 2014
    This book brings together the finest examples of his funny, strange, and moving drawings in an inexpensive, beautifully produced gift volume for every Vonnegut fan. Kurt Vonnegut's daughter Nanette introduces this volume of his never before published drawings with an intimate remembrance of her father. Vonnegut always drew, and many of his novels contain sketches. Breakfast of Champions (1973) included many felt-tip pen drawings, and he had a show in 1983 of his drawings at New York's Margo Feiden Gallery, but really got going in the early 1990s when he became acquainted with the screenprinter Joe Petro III, who became his partner in making his colorful drawings available as silkscreens. With a touch of cubism, mixed with a Paul Klee gift for caricature, a Calder-like ability to balance color and line, and more than a touch of sixties psychedelic sensibility, Vonnegut's aesthetic is as idiosyncratic and defiant of tradition as his books. While writing came to be more onerous in his later years, making art became his joyful primary activity, and he made drawings up until his death in 2007. This volume, and a planned touring exhibition of the drawings, will introduce Vonnegut's legion of fans to an entirely new side of his irrepressible creative personality.

Semina, 1955-1964


Wallace Berman - 2014
    Among its many contributors were Charles Brittin, Jean Cocteau, Walter Hopps, Cameron, Michael McClure, William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, John Wieners, Robert Duncan and Berman himself. With its loose-leaf poetry, collages and photography, the magazine has become a defining document of its period (particularly since the 2006 traveling exhibition "Semina Culture") and now sells for thousands of dollars. This volume allows its entire contents to be seen for the first time, reproducing every component of every issue of the magazine in full color. Published in collaboration with the Berman family and Berman's gallerist Michael Kohn, it also includes commentary and essays by friends, admirers and family in a laid-in pamphlet.

Pastels Unleashed


Margaret Evans - 2014
    She shares her huge enthusiasm for the medium and her expertise in the properties of pastels, showing how to choose papers or use underpainting techniques to make the most of them. She demonstrates the stages: sketching in, blocking in and then building up, that lead to a successful painting, and then the dry and wet techniques that really unleash the potential of pastels. She shows how to use turpentine and how to dilute or intensify colours, and there is information of composition, perspective, painting figures and mood and atmosphere, all helping equip the reader to paint in her fantastically creative way. She also shows how she develops painting ideas from her wonderfully inspiring photographs, workbooks and travel diaries. There are then six beautiful step by step demonstrations.

Shapes in Math, Science and Nature: Squares, Triangles and Circles


Catherine Sheldrick Ross - 2014
    Full of fascinating facts about these shapes and their 3D counterparts, Shapes in Math, Science and Nature introduces young readers to the basics of geometry and reveals its applications at home, school and everywhere in between. Puzzles and activities add to the fun factor.

Drawing and Painting with Watersoluble Media


Fiona Peart - 2014
    In this book Fiona guides you through four essential ways of working with watersoluble media; each of which can be applied to whatever you have in your cupboard at home – whether you have inks, watercolour or acrylic paints, watersoluble pencils or sticks – and they even encompass multimedia collage.Includes illustrated step-by-step example paintings and techniques for ease of use.Open this book and come into the vibrant and fresh world of watersoluble media!

David Lynch: The Unified Field


Robert Cozzolino - 2014
    Featuring work from all periods of Lynch’s career, this book documents Lynch’s first major museum exhibition in the United States, bringing together works held in American and European collections and from the artist’s studio. Much like his movies, many of Lynch’s artworks revolve around suggestions of violence, dark humor, and mystery, conveying an air of the uncanny. This is often conveyed through the addition of text, wildly distorted forms, and disturbances in the paint fields that surround or envelop his figures. While a few relate to his film projects, most are independent works of art that reveal a parallel trajectory. Organized in close collaboration with the artist, David Lynch: The Unified Field brings together ninety-five paintings, drawings, and prints from 1965 to the present, often unified by the recurring motif of the home as a site of violence, memories, and passion. Other works explore the odd, tender, and mincing aspects of relationships. Highlighting many works that have rarely been seen in public, including early work from his critical years in Philadelphia (1965–70), this catalog offers a substantial response to dealer Leo Castelli's comment when he enthusiastically viewed Lynch’s work in 1987, “I would like to know how he got to this point; he cannot be born out of the head of Zeus.” Published in association with the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts

Adrian Ghenie


Adrian Ghenie - 2014
    Ghenie intensifies the raw scream of Francis Bacon's paintings to an even greater pitch, revisiting the Holocaust (as in one famous painting of Josef Mengele) and extending Bacon's idiom of existential horror vividly into the present. Last year, his work featured in several museum exhibitions, including his first solo U.S. museum show at the MCA Denver and SFMoMA's seminal group exhibition Six Lines of Flight. In March 2013, Pace Gallery presented his critically acclaimed New York debut. While Ghenie continues to explore the darker moments in European history, social and political abuses of power, as well as his personal history, his compositions have become conspicuously more complex over the years, as he has turned increasingly toward a brighter and more colorful palette, confidently shifting between figuration and abstraction. This book unites 80 of Ghenie's key works from the past four years.

A History of Greek Art


Mark D. Stansbury-O'Donnell - 2014
    Information is presented clearly and contextualized so that it is accessible to students regardless of their prior level of knowledge A book companion website is available at www.wiley.gom/go/greekart with the following resources: PowerPoint slides, glossary, and timeline