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The Art of Magic: The Gathering - Innistrad
James Wyatt - 2016
These pages, lavishly illustrated with the award-winning art of Magic: The Gathering™, are your entry into a world beset by terrible evils on all sides and betrayed by the hope it held most dear. Tread lightly as you follow the heroic Planeswalkers of the Gatewatch as they investigate these dark mysteries, for the nightmare they will uncover is a threat to the whole Multiverse. The mysteries of Innistrad—its peoples, provinces, and monsters—await your arrival. But be careful as you peer into the darkness, for you might find something staring back.
Deep Dark Fears
Fran Krause - 2015
Based on the wildly popular eponymous Tumblr, Deep Dark Fears explores our odd, creepy, and hilariously singular fears. Animator, illustrator, and cartoonist Fran Krause brings these fears to life in vividly illustrated comics based on real fears submitted by readers (plus a few of his own). These "deep dark fears" run the gamut from unlikely but plausible to completely ridiculous, highlighting both our deeply human similarities and our peculiar uniquenesses.
Tulsa
Larry Clark - 1971
Its graphic depictions of sex, violence, and drug abuse in the youth culture of Oklahoma were acclaimed by critics for stripping bare the myth that Middle America had been immune to the social convulsions that rocked America in the 1960s. The raw, haunting images taken in 1963, 1968, and 1971 document a youth culture progressively overwhelmed by self-destruction -- and are as moving and disturbing today as when they first appeared. Originally published in a limited paperback version and republished in 1983 as a limited hardcover edition commissioned by the author, rare-book dealers sell copies of this book for more than a thousand dollars. Now in both hardcover and paperback editions from Grove Press, this seminal work of photographic art and social history is once again available to the general public.
The Forger's Spell: A True Story of Vermeer, Nazis, and the Greatest Art Hoax of the Twentieth Century
Edward Dolnick - 2008
The con man's mark was Hermann Goering, one of the most reviled leaders of Nazi Germany and a fanatic collector of art.It was an almost perfect crime. For seven years a no-account painter named Han van Meegeren managed to pass off his paintings as those of one of the most beloved and admired artists who ever lived. But, as Edward Dolnick reveals, the reason for the forger's success was not his artistic skill. Van Meegeren was a mediocre artist. His true genius lay in psychological manipulation, and he came within inches of fooling both the Nazis and the world. Instead, he landed in an Amsterdam court on trial for his life.ARTnews called Dolnick's previous book, the Edgar Award-winning The Rescue Artist, "the best book ever written on art crime." In The Forger's Spell, the stage is bigger, the stakes are higher, and the villains are blacker.
Chagall
Jacob Baal-Teshuva - 1995
Page after page of rich reproductions capture his use of intense, glowing colors and the unique world he created full of magic, enchantment and fantasy.
Turner: The Extraordinary Life and Momentous Times of J. M. W. Turner
Franny Moyle - 2016
M. W. Turner, one of Britain's most admired, misunderstood and celebrated artists J. M. W. Turner is Britain's most famous landscape painter. Yet beyond his artistic achievements, little is known of the man himself and the events of his life: the tragic committal of his mother to a lunatic asylum, the personal sacrifices he made to effect his stratospheric rise, and the bizarre double life he chose to lead in the last years of his life.A near mythical figure in his own lifetime, Franny Moyle tells the story of the man who was considered visionary at best and ludicrous at worst. A resolute adventurer, he found new ways of revealing Britain to the British, astounding his audience with his invention and intelligence. Set against the backdrop of the finest homes in Britain, the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution, this is an astonishing portrait of one of the most important figures in Western art and a vivid evocation of Britain and Europe in flux.Set against this spectacular and ultimately controversial career, Moyle also excavates the private Turner. Psychologically wounded as a child, by a family torn apart by death and mental illness, she suggests a man who could not embrace relationships fully until the very end of his life. Only then did he succumb to his love for the widowed Sophia Booth, concealing this all too human aspect of his life behind an assumed identity. She mines the poignancy of his final years, when, with his health ailing, Turner sought solace in a secret private life that had eluded him before and that he knew would scandalise the new generation of Victorians.
The Complete Illuminated Books
William Blake - 1974
For Blake, religion and politics, intellect and emotion, mind and body were both unified and in conflict with each other: his work is expressive of his personal mythology, and his methods of conveying it were integral to its meaning. There is no comparison with reading books such as Jerusalem, America, and Songs of Innocence and of Experience in Blake's own medium, infused with his sublime and exhilarating colors. Tiny figures and forms dance among the lines of the text, flames appear to burn up the page, and dense passages of Biblical-sounding text are brought to a jarring halt by startling images of death, destruction, and liberation. Blake's hope that his books would obtain wide circulation was unfulfilled: some exist only in unique copies and none was printed in more than very small numbers. Now, for the first time, the plates from the William Blake Trust's Collected Edition have been brought together in a single volume, with transcripts of the texts and an introduction by the noted scholar David Bindman. Includes: Jerusalem; Songs of Innocence and of Experience; All Religions are One; There is No Natural Religion; The Book of Thel; The Marriage of Heaven and Hell; Visions of the Daughters of Albion; America a Prophecy; Europe a Prophecy; The Song of Los Milton a Poem; The Ghost of Abel; On Homers Poetry and] On Virgil; Laocoon; The First Book of Urizen; The Book of Ahania; The Book of Los.
The Art of Avatar: James Cameron's Epic Adventure
Lisa Fitzpatrick - 2009
The film follows the story of an ex-marine who finds himself thrust into hostilities on a distant planet filled with exotic life forms. As an avatar, a human consciousness in an alien body, he finds himself torn between two worlds, in a desperate fight for his own survival and that of the indigenous people. The Art of Avatar, the companion book to this epic 3-D action adventure, explores the developmental and conceptual art used by the creative team to create the original world of Avatar. With over 100 exclusive full-color images including sketches, matte paintings, drawings, and film stills, The Art of Avatar reveals the process behind the creation of set designs for the imaginative vistas, unique landscapes, aerial battle scenes, bioluminescent nights, and fantastical creatures. Interviews with art directors, visual effects designers, animators, costume designers, and creature makers bring insight into this creative process. The Art of Avatar brings readers behind the scenes of this unprecedented moviegoing experience.
Sleeping by the Mississippi
Alec Soth - 2004
Sensuous in detail and raw in subject, Sleeping by the Mississippi elicits a consistent mood of loneliness, longing, and reverie. "In the book's 46 ruthlessly edited pictures," writes Anne Wilkes Tucker, "Soth alludes to illness, procreation, race, crime, learning, art, music, death, religion, redemption, politics, and cheap sex." Like Robert Frank's classic The Americans, Sleeping by the Mississippi merges a documentary style with a poetic sensibility. The Mississippi is less the subject of the book than its organizing structure. Not bound by a rigid concept or ideology, the series is created out of a quintessentially American spirit of wanderlust.
Bernini: The Sculptor of the Roman Baroque
Rudolf Wittkower - 1997
Inventive and skilled, he virtually created the Baroque style. In his religious sculptures he excelled at capturing movement and extreme emotion, uniting figures with their setting to create a single conception of overwhelming intensity that expressed the fervour of Counter-Reformation Rome. Intensity and drama also characterize his portraits and world-famous Roman fountains.
Shadowline: The Art of Iain McCaig
Iain Mccaig - 2007
It is, to me, the most interesting place to hunt for stories." So begins this stunningly realized and beautifully rendered new work from master storyteller and artist Iain McCaig. McCaig is best known for his work as a principal designer on the three Star Wars prequels, including the iconic characters Queen Amidala and Darth Maul, as well as his work on many major motion pictures, television, and video games. His work can be seen in such acclaimed films as Terminator 2, Hook, Francis Ford Coppola's Dracula, Interview with a Vampire, and Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Shadowline presents a stunning portfolio of more than two decades of McCaig's masterful concept designs and storyboards, cover art and illustrations, as well as his private sketchbooks and personal paintings, all woven together within the confines of an engrossing, otherworldly tale.
Interviews with Francis Bacon
David Sylvester - 1975
His monumental, unsettling images have an extraordinary power to disturb, shock, and haunt the spectator, "to unlock the valves of feeling and therefore return the onlooker to life more violently".Eminent writer and curator David Sylvester provides the definitive account of the career of an artist whose friend and collaborator he was for more than forty years. Drawing on his unparalleled personal knowledge of Bacon's inspirations and intentions, he first offers a critical overview of the development of Bacon's work from 1933 to the early 1990s, and then addresses its crucial aspects. Sylvester also reproduces previously unpublished extracts from his celebrated conversations with Bacon in which the artist speaks about himself, modern painters, and the art of the past. Finally, he gives a brief account of Bacon's life, correcting errors that elsewhere have been presented as facts.Accompanying the incisive and revealing text are reproductions of almost every Bacon work discussed, including twelve triptych fold-outs. The most complete work on Bacon yet, this book constitutes a portrait of one of the creative geniuses of our age by a writer of comparable distinction.
Lust for Life
Irving Stone - 1934
"Vincent is not dead. He will never die. His love, his genius, the great beauty he has created will go on forever, enriching the world... He was a colossus... a great painter... a great philosopher... a martyr to his love of art. "Walking down the streets of Paris the young Vincent Van Gogh didn't feel like he belonged. Battling poverty, repeated heartbreak and familial obligation, Van Gogh was a man plagued by his own creative urge but with no outlet to express it. Until the day he picked up a paintbrush.Written with raw insight and emotion, follow the artist through his tormented life, struggling against critical discouragement and mental turmoil and bare witness to his creative journey from a struggling artist to one of the world's most celebrated artists.
Art Since 1900: 1900 to 1944 (Vol. 1)
Hal Foster - 2011
Each turning point and breakthrough of modernism and postmodernism is explored in depth, as are the frequent anti-modernist reactions that proposed alternative visions of art and the world. Art Since 1900 introduces students to the key theoretical approaches to modern and contemporary art in a way that enables them to comprehend the many “voices” of art in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Color: A Natural History of the Palette
Victoria Finlay - 2003
Extracted from an Afghan mine, the blue “ultramarine” paint used by Michelangelo was so expensive he couldn’t afford to buy it himself. Since ancient times, carmine red—still found in lipsticks and Cherry Coke today—has come from the blood of insects.