You'll learn how to explore the use of color theory in abstraction and to use underpainting to bring structure and depth to your art. In addition you'll begin to understand how to work in a series and how this can help you develop your own personal style. A sampling of what you'll add to your creative toolbox: Pastel and acrylic techniques to use to complete your own paintings The benefits of expressing your ideas abstractly How to loosen up by using your nondominant hand and drawing to music Ways to express emotions through mark-making Using color and symbolism for expression Working with photos for inspiration Tips for using color studies Step into your own abstract frame of mind today!

    These influential essays, interviews, and critical and theoretical comments provide bold and fertile insights into the construction of visual knowledge. Featuring a wide range of leading and emerging artists since 1945, the collection—while comprehensive and authoritative—offers the reader some eclectic surprises as well.Included here are texts that have become pivotal documents in contemporary art, along with writings that cover unfamiliar ground. Some are newly translated, others have never before been published. Together they address visual literacy, cultural studies, and the theoretical debates regarding modernism and postmodernism. The full panoply of visual media is represented, from painting and sculpture to environments, installations, performance, conceptual art, video, photography, and virtual reality. Thematic concerns range from figuration and process to popular culture, art and technology, and politics and the media. Contemporary issues of gender, race, class, and sexuality are also addressed.Kristine Stiles's general introduction is a succinct overview of artists' theories in the evolution of contemporary discourse around art. Introductions to each chapter provide synopses of the cultural contexts in which the texts originated and brief biographies of individual artists. The text is augmented by outstanding photographs, many of artists in their studios, and vivid, contemporary art images.Reflecting the editors' shared belief that artists' own theories provide unparalleled access to visual knowledge, this book, like its distinguished predecessors, Hershel Chipp's Theories of Modern Art (with Peter Selz and Joshua Taylor) and Joshua Taylor's Nineteenth-Century Theories of Art, will be an invaluable resource for anyone interested in contemporary art."In New York in 1915 I bought at a hardware store a snow shovel on which I wrote 'in advance of the broken arm.' It was around that time that the word 'readymade' came to mind to designate this form of manifestation."—Marcel Duchamp (1961)"Women have always collected things and saved and recycled them because leftovers yielded nourishment in new forms. The decorative functional objects women made often spoke in a secret language, bore a covert imagery. When we read these images in needlework, in paintings, in quilts, rugs and scrapbooks, we sometimes find a cry for help, sometimes an allusion to a secret political alignment, sometimes a moving symbol about the relationships between men and women."—Miriam Schapiro and Melissa Meyer (1978)"I want to create a fusion of art and life, Asia and America, Duchampiana modernism and Levi-Straussian savagism, cool form and hot video, dealing with all of those complex problems, spanning the tribal memory of the Nomadic Asians who crossed over the Bering Strait over 10,000 years ago."—Shigeko Kubota (1976)"Black for me is a lot more peaceful and gentle than white. White marble may be very beautiful, but you can't read anything on it. I wanted something that would be soft on the eyes, and turn into a mirror if you polished it. The point is to see yourself reflected in the names. Also the mirror image doubles and triples the space."—Maya Lin (1983)"Artists often depend on the manipulation of symbols to present ideas and associations not always apparent in such symbols. If all such ideas and associations were evident there would be little need for artists to give expression to them. In short, there would be no need to make art."—Andres Serrano (1989)

    Museum attendance is surging. More people than ever call themselves artists. Contemporary art has become a mass entertainment, a luxury good, a job description, and, for some, a kind of alternative religion. In a series of beautifully paced narratives, Sarah Thornton investigates the drama of a Christie's auction, the workings in Takashi Murakami's studios, the elite at the Basel Art Fair, the eccentricities of Artforum magazine, the competition behind an important art prize, life in a notorious art-school seminar, and the wonderland of the Venice Biennale. She reveals the new dynamics of creativity, taste, status, money, and the search for meaning in life. A judicious and juicy account of the institutions that have the power to shape art history, based on hundreds of interviews with high-profile players, Thornton's entertaining ethnography will change the way you look at contemporary culture. 8 illustrations.

    Found everywhere from wine labels and high-end bar accessories to major motion pictures (Teacher's Pet, the upcoming Pink Panther), the visibility of this dynamic work has rapidly increased in the last few years to worldwide recognition and acclaim. Weirdo Deluxe is the first significant manifesto of the genrea riotous blend of pop culture, street culture, pop art, and surrealismand includes profiles of and interviews with 23 leading artists and hundreds of outrageous examples of their work. Special features include an expansive timeline, and peeks at the artists' collections and influences. Weirdo Deluxe is at once a primer and lowbrow art sourcebook as well as a visual homage to pop culture.

    By controlling pencil pressure and stroke, understanding light and having knowledge of blending techniques, an artist can enhance their work and offer the “wow” factor needed to produce realistic artworks. Drawing Dimension - A Shading Guide for Teachers and Students offers a series of shading tutorials that are easy to understand and simple to follow. It goes beyond the standard "step by step" instruction to offer readers an in-depth look at a variety of shading techniques and their applications. Inside this book is a series of lessons designed to teach you how to add dimension to your own drawings, how to analyze real life objects and shade, create highlights, blend tones, and produce realistic drawings with ease. We will explore hatching, cross hatching, and stippling techniques and learn how to use contrast to set a mood and create a focal point. At last - we’ll put all of these skills to the test and work together to produce a beautiful piece of art. Drawing Dimension - A Shading Guide for Teachers and Students includes many resources to help you along the way through examples, tips on what you should aim for, and pitfalls to avoid. Each lesson is tailored to help you refine your shading techniques so you can add more depth and realism to your work. The book is perfectly suitable for beginners and moderates of all ages, students and teachers, professionals and novices; anyone can learn how to shade like a pro!

    Fresh coats of paint and newly pasted posters appear overnight in cities across the world. New artists, new ideas, and new tactics displace faded images in a perpetual process of renewal and metamorphosis. From Los Angeles to Barcelona, Stockholm to Tokyo, Melbourne to Milan, wall spaces are a breeding ground for graphic and typographic forms as artists unleash their daily creations.Current graffiti art is reflective of the world around it. Using new materials and techniques, its innovators are creating a language of forms and images infused with contemporary graphic design and illustration. Fluent in branding and graphic imagery, they have been replacing tags with more personal logos and shifting from typographic to iconographic forms of communication.Street Logos is a worldwide celebration of these new developments in twenty-first-century graffiti, an essential sourcebook for all art and design professionals, and a delight to everyone excited by the vitality of the street.

    Approaching the memorial, the ground slopes gently downward, and the low walls emerging on either side, growing out of the earth, extend and converge at a point below and ahead. Walking into the grassy site contained by the walls of this memorial, we can barely make out the carved names upon the memorial's walls. These names, seemingly infinite in number, convey the sense of overwhelming numbers, while unifying these individuals into a whole.... So begins the competition entry submitted in 1981 by a Yale undergraduate for the design of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. -- subsequently called "as moving and awesome and popular a piece of memorial architecture as exists anywhere in the world." Its creator, Maya Lin, has been nothing less than world famous ever since. From the explicitly political to the un-ashamedly literary to the completely abstract, her simple and powerful sculpture -- the Rockefeller Foundation sculpture, the Southern Poverty Law Center Civil Rights Memorial, the Yale Women's Table, Wave Field -- her architecture, including The Museum for African Art and the Norton residence, and her protean design talents have defined her as one of the most gifted creative geniuses of the age. Boundaries is her first book: an eloquent visual/verbal sketchbook produced with the same inspiration and attention to detail as any of her other artworks. Like her environmental sculptures, it is a site, but one which exists at a remove so that it may comment on the personal and artistic elements that make up those works. In it, sketches, photographs, workbook entries, and original designs are held together by a deeply personal text. Boundaries is a powerful literary and visual statement by "a leading public artist" (Holland Carter). It is itself a unique work of art.

    With an A to Z format that departs from the usual emphasis on genres and time periods, it offers an unparalleled overview of the most influential and best-loved American artists from Colonial times to the present. This book is now available in a new mini version that presents the compelling content of the original edition in a highly portable format that is both useful as a serious work of reference and fun for on-the-go art enthusiasts.The American Art Book presents 500 artists and their works, ranging from Puritan portraits to the luminous paintings of the Hudson River School and the American Impressionists, to the videos and digital works of today's most intriguing conceptual artists. Its alphabetical format generates intriguing juxtapositions: Jenny Holzer faces Winslow Homer, and Richard Avedon sits next to Milton Avery, encouraging readers to contemplate the connections between art and American history and popular culture. Each artist is represented by a full-page colour plate of a representative work, and an informative, engaging text which places the artist and the image in the context of contemporary movements and preceding traditions. The book includes an easy-to-use glossary of artistic terms and movements, and a directory of museums and public collections across the United States and around the world with important holdings in American art. With its original format and fresh selections of artwork, this volume offers a stimulating way to approach this rich, varied subject.

    Installation Art provides the first clear account of the rise of installation as a form while revisiting and, in some cases, reassessing many well-known names of post-1960 art. This lavishly produced volume also introduces the reader to a wider spectrum of younger artists yet to receive serious critical attention. Artists featured include Vito Acconci, Joseph Beuys, Christian Boltanski, Marcel Broodthaers, Judy Chicago, Olafur Eliasson, Group Material, Isaac Julien, Ilya Kabakov, Yayoi Kusama, Cildo Meireles, Robert Morris, Bruce Nauman, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Smithson, Bill Viola, and many others.

    Author JoAnneh Nagler wants you to welcome your creativity and continue to make art—but to do so with a plan. In this groundbreaking book, she provides step-by-step strategies to teach writers, sculptors, painters, musicians, designers, and other artists how tohave a well-supported, well-lived life—and make art at the same time.Learn how to:Answer your own artistic callings and get to your art workGive up starving and struggling and build a supported, creative daily lifeManage time, money, and day jobs with easy-to-learn, simple toolsDevelop rock-solid creative work ethics and motivational skillsNo matter what kind of creative person you are, this book has the tools you need to live the life you’ve always wanted to live—right now, and for your whole life long.

    Unlike many of his peers, he has explored these issues through the medium of painting, challenging it to meet the demands posed by new forms of conceptual art. In every level of his varied output--from his austere photo-based realism of the early 60s, to his brightly colored gestural abstractions of the early 80s, to his notorious cycle of black-and-white paintings of the Baader-Meinhof group--Richter has assumed a critical distance from vanguardists and conservatives alike regarding what painting should be. The result has been one of the most convincing renewals of painting's vitality to be found in late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century art. With an extensive and insightful critical essay by curator Robert Storr, a recent interview with the artist, a chronology, an exhibition history and nearly 300 color and duotone reproductions, Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting marks a significant contribution to the understanding of contemporary art in general, and Gerhard Richter in particular.

    You choose whether to let the sun blaze or the rain pour, to move a maple tree here or make the trail wind over there, to subdue a hillside with quiet greens or make a forest glow with dazzling golds and reds. It's not only a matter of what to paint, but how to go about painting it.This book examines, one at a time, the three major elements of landscape painting: water, sky and land. You will be encouraged to try numerous ways of painting each one. Then you can choose the methods that best express how the outdoors speaks to you.Let this reliable collection of tips, techniques, ideas and lessons be your companion on a sure path to creative fulfillment and better watercolor landscapes.

    The image didn t just bring revered faces together for the first time; it marked the beginning of a new fashion era and a new understanding of female beauty. Coinciding with his major retrospective at the Kunsthal in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, this book gathers more than 400 images from four decades of Lindbergh s photography to celebrate his unique and game-changing storytelling and the new romantic and narrative vision it brought to art and fashion. Whether in striking single portraits or dramatic situations of figure and setting, we trace the photographer s cinematic inflections and his provocative play with female archetypes as subjects adopt the guise of dancers, actresses, heroines, and femmes fatales. Raw and seductive at once, we see how Lindbergh s trademark monochrome pictures also redefined standards of beauty by emphasizing spirit and personality as much as looks, celebrating the elegance and sensuality of older women, and privileging natural and authentic beauty in an era of pervasive retouching. In a testimony to Lindbergh s illustrious status in the fashion world, his images are contextualized by commentaries from collaborators such as Jean Paul Gaultier, Nicole Kidman, Grace Coddington, Cindy Crawford, and Anna Wintour, who chose Lindbergh to shoot her first US Vogue cover. Their tributes explain what makes Lindbergh s images so unique and powerful. Exhibition Peter Lindbergh. A Different History of Fashion at Kunsthal, Rotterdam, The Netherlands, September 10, 2016 February 12, 2017Text in English, French, and German"

    George Kubler draws upon new insights in fields such as anthropology and linguistics and replaces the notion of style with the idea of a linked succession of works distributed in time as recognizably early and late versions of the same action. The result is a view of historical sequence aligned on continuous change more than upon the ecstatic concept of style--the usual basis for conventional histories of art.

    Expressing yourself creatively--through drawing, painting, sculpture, photography--allows you to tap into a source of inner wisdom that provides guidance, soothes emotional pain, and revitalizes your being.The Soul's Palette reveals art's transformative powers. Exercises include working with materials for drawing, painting, sculpting, and collage; simple drawing and journal projects; self-guided meditations and affirmations; ideas for cultivating intuition, inspiration, and spontaneity; exploring personal symbols; and making art a spiritual practice.