Gestalt theory and the psychology of visual perception form the basis for an analysis of art and its basic elements.

    This comprehensive collection is now in a paperback identical to the original clothbound edition. 130 color, 54 black-and-white illustrations.

    This book brings together these disparate worlds to show one medieval world, stretching from Connacht to Constantinople and from Tynemouth to Timbuktu. This set of reconstructions presents the reader with the future of the medieval past, offering appraisals of the evidence and modern historical writing. Articles are thematically linked in four sections, exploring identities in the medieval world; beliefs, social values and symbolic order; power and power-structures; and elites, organisations and groups. This set of views from multiple perspectives conveys the liveliness of current approaches to studies in the field.

    Chapters range from Blank Canvas: It's Your World, which illuminates how to approach each day, to Bravery Tests: Challenging Yourself, which draws upon your inner strength, to Happy Little Accidents: Creating Success from Failure, which affirms the power of positive thinking.Bob Ross's lessons gently encourage everyone to live their best Bob Ross life--an aspiration more important now than ever before.

    The Art of Rivalry follows eight celebrated artists, each linked to a counterpart by friendship, admiration, envy, and ambition. All eight are household names today. But to achieve what they did, each needed the influence of a contemporary--one who was equally ambitious but possessed sharply contrasting strengths and weaknesses.Edouard Manet and Edgar Degas were close associates whose personal bond frayed after Degas painted a portrait of Manet and his wife. Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso swapped paintings, ideas, and influences as they jostled for the support of collectors like Leo and Gertrude Stein and vied for the leadership of a new avant-garde. Jackson Pollock's uninhibited style of "action painting" triggered a breakthrough in the work of his older rival, Willem de Kooning. After Pollock's sudden death in a car crash, de Kooning assumed Pollock's mantle and became romantically involved with his late friend's mistress. Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon met in the early 1950s, when Bacon was being hailed as Britain's most exciting new painter and Freud was working in relative obscurity. Their intense but asymmetrical friendship came to a head when Freud painted a portrait of Bacon, which was later stolen.Each of these relationships culminated in an early flashpoint, a rupture in a budding intimacy that was both a betrayal and a trigger for great innovation. Writing with the same exuberant wit and psychological insight that earned him a Pulitzer Prize for art criticism, Sebastian Smee explores here the way that coming into one's own as an artist--finding one's voice--almost always involves willfully breaking away from some intimate's expectations of who you are or ought to be.Praise for The Art of Rivalry"Gripping . . . Mr. Smee's skills as a critic are evident throughout. He is persuasive and vivid. . . . You leave this book both nourished and hungry for more about the art, its creators and patrons, and the relationships that seed the ground for moments spent at the canvas."--The New York Times"With novella-like detail and incisiveness [Sebastian Smee] opens up the worlds of four pairs of renowned artists. . . . Each of his portraits is a biographical gem. . . . The Art of Rivalry is a pure, informative delight, written with canny authority."--The Boston Globe"Bacon liked to say his portraiture aimed to capture 'the pulsations of a person.' Revealing these rare creators as the invaluable catalysts they also were, Smee conveys exactly that on page after page. . . . His brilliant group biography is one of a kind." --The Atlantic "Perceptive . . . Smee is onto something important. His book may bring us as close as we'll ever get to understanding the connections between these bristly bonds and brilliance."--The Christian Science Monitor"In this intriguing work of art history and psychology, The Boston Globe's art critic looks at the competitive friendships of Matisse and Picasso, Manet and Degas, Pollock and de Kooning, and Freud and Bacon. All four relationships illuminate the creative process--both its imaginative breakthroughs and its frustrating blocks."--Newsday

    Frogger. Super Mario Bros. These classic videogames are burned into the collective consciousness of an entire generation, thanks to countless hours spent at pizza parlors and bowling alleys across the country. Now artists such as Gary Baseman, Tim Biskup, and Ashley Wood put their memories to paper, canvas, and wood to create original works of art inspired by the art of the videogame. Chuck Klosterman shares his thoughts in his distinctively insightful and entertaining style in a foreword on how videogames created a new playground for artistic expression. With more than 100 thought-provoking, amusing, and simply fun pieces of original art, i am 8-bit is a pixilated stroll down memory lane.

    High Art Lite provides a sustained analysis of the phenomenal success of YBA, young British artists obsessed with commerce, mass media and the cult of personality Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin, Jake and Dinos Chapman, Marcus Harvey, Sarah Lucas, among others. In this fully revised and expanded edition, Julian Stallabrass explores how YBA lost its critical immunity in the new millennium, and looks at the ways in which figures such as Hirst, Emin, Wearing and Landy have altered their work in recent years.

    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.

    This vastly inhospitable location, called the playa, is the site of Burning Man, where, within a 9-mile fence, artists called Burners create a temporary city devoted to art and participation. Braving extreme elements, over two hundred wildly ambitious works of art are created and intended to delight, provoke, involve, or amaze. In 2013, over 68,000 people attended – the highest number ever allowed on the playa. As Burning Man has created new context, new categories of art have emerged since its inception, including Art to Ride, Collaborative Art, Art for Social Change, and of course, Art to Burn.The Art of Burning Man is an authorized collection of the best of Burning Man art from 1986 through today. Experience the amazing sculptures, art, stories, and interviews from the world’s greatest gathering of artists. Get lost in a rich gallery of images showcasing the best examples of playa art with over 200 photos. Interviews with the artists reveal not only their motivation to create art specifically for Burning Man, but they also illuminate the dramatic efforts it took to create their pieces. Featuring the incredible photography of long-time Burning Man photographers, Sidney Erthal and Scott London, an introduction from Burning Man founder Larry Harvey, and a preface from artist Leo Villareal, this stunning gift book allows Burners and enthusiasts alike to have a piece of Burning Man with them all year around.

    Acclaimed photographer Neil van Niekirk presents seven distinctly different lighting scenarios—available light, exposure metering, a touch of flash, bounced on-camera flash, off-camera flash, video light, and hard sunlight—to show readers how to manipulate the direction and quality of light, the subject’s and photographer’s position, and numerous other variables so as to turn a bad image into a stunning, professional-level portrait. Packed with dozens of instructional, full-color photos, this work also features 10 sample photo sessions, allowing readers the opportunity to see the seven lighting scenarios put to practice.

    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.

    In a body of work spanning over a half-century, he was variously a draughtsman, a printmaker, a sculptor and a painter. This short book is both a biography and a guide to his art. It focuses on the extraordinary works that Henri Matisse made during the last period of his life - the large-scale cut-outs on coloured paper, including his famous Blue Nudes, The Snail and Large Composition with Masks.

    Each one is unique; you can't paint one wrong! Painted Blossoms will encourage you to welcome creativity with ease as you discover ways to tend the garden within. In addition to watching yourself grow through seven different stepped-out flower projects, you'll learn basic design elements, how to get unstuck from the mud, how to carve your own stamps, cut your own stencils and more.A sampling of what you'll add to your creative toolshed:Techniques for creating a wide variety of flower shapesThe know-how to incorporate key design elements into your floral paintingsHow to absorb inspiration beyond the garden to include your favorite symbols, intentions and storiesTips and advice from over a dozen established artists--each with a unique floral styleNurture today what's waiting to bloom within you with Painted Blossoms!

    Now Watson-Guptill proudly presents the 25th Anniversary Edition. Each chapter is devoted to a different Old Master—Dürer, Titian, Veronese, Caravaggio, Vermeer, Hals, Rubens, and Rembrandt—and is divided into two sections. The first part describes the artist’s techniques and discusses how artists can incorporate these methods within their own personal style. The second part is a full-color demonstration. Author Joseph Sheppard traces the artist’s working sequence, colors and mediums, surfaces and tools, as he creates a new painting. With today’s resurgence of interest in Old Master techniques, this unique, practical, and inspiring book is sure to teach countless artists exactly How to Paint Like the Old Masters.

    In this trenchant illustrated essay, David Joselit describes how art and architecture are being transformed in the age of Google. Under the dual pressures of digital technology, which allows images to be reformatted and disseminated effortlessly, and the exponential acceleration of cultural exchange enabled by globalization, artists and architects are emphasizing networks as never before. Some of the most interesting contemporary work in both fields is now based on visualizing patterns of dissemination after objects and structures are produced, and after they enter into, and even establish, diverse networks. Behaving like human search engines, artists and architects sort, capture, and reformat existing content. Works of art crystallize out of populations of images, and buildings emerge out of the dynamics of the circulation patterns they will house.Examining the work of architectural firms such as OMA, Reiser + Umemoto, and Foreign Office, as well as the art of Matthew Barney, Ai Weiwei, Sherrie Levine, and many others, After Art provides a compelling and original theory of art and architecture in the age of global networks.