Blackstock's Collections: The Drawings of an Artistic Savant


Gregory L. Blackstock - 2006
    How much can a curious mind take in? And what can it do with all the data? Gregory L. Blackstock, a retired Seattle pot washer, draws order out of all the chaos with a pencil, a black marker, and some crayons.Blackstock is autistic and an artistic savant. He creates visual lists of everything from wasps to hats to emergency vehicles to noisemakers. In the spirit of the Outsider art of Henry Darger and Howard Finster, Blackstock makes art that is stirring in its profusion and detail and inspiring in its simple beauty. He has never received formal artistic training, yet his renderings clearly and beguilingly show subtle differences and similaritiesenabling the viewer to see, for example, the distinctive features of a dolly varden, a Pacific Coast steelhead cutthroat, and fourteen other types of trout.Each collection is lovingly captioned in Blackstock's unique hand with texts that reflect facts from his research as well as his passions and preferences. Blackstock's Collections contains over 100 extraordinary examples of his splendidly original taxonomy, offering a unique look inside the mind of a man making sense of life through art.Monsters of the Deep Major Forestry Pests The Great Cabbage Family The Spatulas The World War II U.S. Bombers The Buoys King Sized Jails Monsters of the Past Classical Clowns Great Italian Roosters Our State Lighthouses The Irish Joys

Photographs


Fred Herzog - 2007
    But outside the lab, Herzog also devoted himself to what was, at the time, an unusual and even frowned-upon medium, at least artistically: color photography. Laboring away as a virtually anonymous pioneer in this field, some 20 years before William Eggleston's watershed show at the Museum of Modern Art, Herzog was quietly documenting in rich Kodachrome the streets of Vancouver: its supermarkets, gas stations, bars, urban scenery and above all its working class culture. Herzog used slide film to make his photographs, which limited his ability to exhibit them and further marginalized his work; but in recent decades, happily, this color pioneer has drawn great acclaim, and this volume, the largest Herzog monograph yet published, does marvelous justice to his rich oeuvre.

Polaroids


Robert Mapplethorpe - 2007
    Robert Mapplethorpe's black-and-white Polaroid photographs from the 1970s--a medium in which he established the style that would bring him international acclaim--are brought together in this exquisite volume for the first time.Prestel Publications

Art Forms in Nature


Ernst Haeckel - 1974
    This volume highlights the research and findings of this natural scientist. Powerful modern microscopes have confirmed the accuracy of Haeckel's prints, which even in their day, became world famous. Haeckel's portfolio, first published between 1899 and 1904 in separate installments, is described in the opening essays. The plates illustrate Haeckel's fundamental monistic notion of the -unity of all living things- and the wide variety of forms are executed with utmost delicacy. Incipient microscopic organisms are juxtaposed with highly developed plants and animals. The pages, ordered according to geometric and -constructive- aspects, document the oness of the world in its most diversified forms. This collection of plates was not only well-received by scientists, but by artists and architects as well. Rene Binet, a pioneer of glass and iron constructions, Emile Galle, a renowned Art Nouveau designer, and the photographer Karl Blossfeld all make explicit reference to Haeckel in their work.

This Is Not a Photo Opportunity: The Street Art of Banksy


Martin Bull - 2014
    Banksy, Britain’s now-legendary “guerilla” street artist, has painted the walls, streets, and bridges of towns and cities throughout the world. Once viewed as vandalism, Banksy’s work is now venerated, collected, and preserved. Over the course of a decade, Martin Bull has documented dozens of the most important and impressive works by the legendary political artist, most of which are no longer in existence.

Leonardo da Vinci: The Complete Paintings and Drawings


Frank Zöllner - 2003
    This XXL-format comprehensive survey is the most complete book ever made on the subject of this Italian painter, sculptor, architect, engineer, scientist and all-around genius. With huge, full-bleed details of Leonardo's masterworks, this highly original publication allows the reader to inspect the subtlest facets of his brushstrokes. * Part I explores Leonardo's life and work in ten chapters. All of his paintings are interpreted in depth, with The Annunciation and The Last Supper featured on large double-spreads. * Part II comprises a catalogue raisonn? of Leonardo's paintings, which covers all of his surviving and lost painted works and includes texts describing their states of preservation. * Part III contains an extensive catalogue of his drawings (numbering in the thousands, they cannot all be reproduced in one book); 663 are presented, arranged by category (architecture, technical, anatomical, figures, proportion, cartography, etc). This sumptuous TASCHEN offering is the most thorough and beautifully produced Leonardo book ever published, and this special edition offers it for a third of the usual price.

The Art of Movement


Deborah Ory - 2016
    Featured are more than 70 dancers from companies including American Ballet Theatre, New York City Ballet, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, Martha Graham Dance Company, Boston Ballet, Royal Danish Ballet, The Royal Ballet, Abraham in Motion, and many more. Accompanying the photographs are intimate and inspiring words from the dancers, as well as from choreographers and artistic directors on what dance means to them.

Secrets


Luis Royo - 1996
    Each collection sparkles with pieces seen on book covers from around the world. Fantasy, science fiction, eroticism, etc... Royo has devised a special personal mix of media that makes his work so uncannily real, so beguilingly engaging as to make him a best-selling star.

The Painterly Approach: An Artist's Guide to Seeing, Painting and Expressing


Bob Rohm - 2008
    More than painting an appealing landscape, it's about making your viewer feel the wind, experience the dance of shadows and sunlight, and admire the wondrous intermingling of colors that attracted you to your subject in the first place.In this gorgeously illustrated book, Bob Rohm shows you how to see the world from a painterly perspective and translate it into expressive, poetic paintings that elicit an emotional response from your viewer.Clearly illustrates how to choreograph color, value, composition, texture and other fundamental elements to achieve those elusive qualities of mood and emotionFeatures 9 step-by-step demonstrations (in oil, pastel and acrylic) on capturing a vivid sense of time and placeCovers brushstrokes, painting with a palette knife, edge control, shadows and other advanced art techniquesThis book focuses primarily on landscape painting but offers valuable lessons for approaching any subject in a personal and engaging way.

Framed Ink: Drawing and Composition for Visual Storytellers


Marcos Mateu-Mestre - 2010
    Using his experiences from working in the comic book industry, movie studios and teaching, Marcos introduces the reader to a step-by-step system that will create the most successful storyboards and graphics for the best visual communication.After a brief discussion on narrative art, Marcos introduces us to drawing and composing a single image, to composing steady shots to drawing to compose for continuity between all the shots. These lessons are then applied to three diverse story lines – a train accident, a cowboy tale and bikers approaching a mysterious house.In addition to setting up the shots, he also explains and illustrates visual character development, emotive stances and expressions along with development of the environmental setting to fully develop the visual narrative.

Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs


Sally Mann - 2015
    . . racial complications, vast sums of money made and lost, the return of the prodigal son, and maybe even bloody murder."In lyrical prose and startlingly revealing photographs, she crafts a totally original form of personal history that has the page-turning drama of a great novel but is firmly rooted in the fertile soil of her own life.

Francis Bacon: 1909-1992


Luigi Ficacci - 1999
    Mixing realism and abstraction, Bacon delves deep beneath the surfaces of things, opening up the human body to reveal the chaos that lies within and struggling with all that is inexplicable. Erotic and grotesquely beautiful is the work of this legendary painter whose haunting, distorted figures have inspired entire generations of painters who seek to emulate his highly original style.

Animal Anatomy for Artists: The Elements of Form


Eliot Goldfinger - 2004
    Designed for painters, sculptors, and illustrators who use animal imagery in their work, Animal Anatomy for Artists offers thorough, in-depth information about the most commonly depicted animals, presented in a logical and easily understood format for artists--whether beginner or accomplished professional. The book focuses on the forms created by muscles and bones, giving artists a crucial three-dimensional understanding of the final, complex outer surface of the animal. Goldfinger not only covers the anatomy of the more common animals, such as the horse, dog, cat, cow, pig, squirrel, and rabbit, but also the anatomy of numerous wild species, including the lion, giraffe, deer, hippopotamus, rhinoceros, elephant, gorilla, sea lion, and bear. Included are drawings of skeletons and how they move at the joints, individual muscles showing their attachments on the skeleton, muscles of the entire animal, cross sections, photographs of live animals, and silhouettes of related animals comparing their shapes and proportions. He offers a new and innovative section on the basic body plan of four-legged animals, giving the reader a crucial conceptual understanding of overall animal structure to which the details of individual animals can then be applied. The chapter on birds covers the skeleton, muscles and feather patterns. The appendix presents photographs of skulls with magnificent horns and antlers and a section on major surface veins. Incredibly thorough, packed with essential information, Animal Anatomy for Artists is a definitive reference work, an essential book for everyone who depicts animals in their art.

Cut It Out


Banksy - 2005
    Full color, and including some of most famous/notorious works to date, including 'exhibiting' his work at the Tate Gallery in London. Quite superb.

Paul Strand: Masters of Photography Series


Paul Strand - 1987
    Purity, elegance, and passion are the hallmarks of Strand's imagery. This inaugural volume of Aperture's "Masters of Photography" series presents 41 of Strand's greatest photographs, drawn from a career that spanned six decades. Included are his earliest experimental efforts, created from 1915 to 1917, which Alfred Stieglitz declared had begun to redefine the medium. Subsequent photographs reveal the artist's impeccable vision in locales as diverse as New England and the Outer Hebrides, France and Ghana. During Strand's last years, he concentrated on still lifes and the poignant beauty of his own garden at Orgeval, France.In an introductory essay, Mark Haworth-Booth, Curator of Photography at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, provides an overview of the artist's life and his enduring contribution to photography.