Humans are creative; it is a quality embedded in the fabric of our being, and a reality that reflects our existence as being made in the image of God.This book is a compilation of our e-books Liturgy for Creatives and On Becoming Creative, and new reflections—encompassing Alabaster's lived experience as a creative company for the past two years. It is a first step, the beginning of a conversation that allows readers to engage their faith and creativity against the larger backdrop of the God who has made all that is made.

    In this illuminating, in-depth Q & A, “America’s storyteller” lets readers in on his philosophical approach to understanding our nation’s past, as well as a little family secret for overcoming your fears.Tom Roston is a veteran journalist who began his career at The Nation and Vanity Fair magazines, before working at Premiere magazine as a senior editor. He writes a regular blog about nonfiction filmmaking on PBS.org and he is a frequent contributor to The New York Times. He lives with his wife and their two daughters in New York City. Cover design by Adil Dara.

    Written for Americans, but equally amusing to anyone visiting the shores of the Great Southern Land, this book examines the relationship between Australia and the U.S., including how Australians view their American cousins. The author has plenty of experience of working and dealing with Americans. He is married to an American nurse and has lived his life within the massive cultural influence that America has shared with Australia since the Second World War. The author’s stories are brimming with empathy and jokes for his American audience. The book is written from the opinion of an Aussie Bloke and the easy-to-digest chapters are just long enough to leave the reader smiling and well informed.Topics include Blokes and Sheilas, Bloody Foster’s, Dangerous Creatures, Talking to Dogs, The GAFA, Speaking Strail-yun and Working for the Queen. Confused? You won’t be after reading this book!

    This is such a book. For more than two years, Linda Cateura has pursued teacher / artist David A. Leffel, notebook in hand, as he critiqued the work of students. Linda Cateura's succinct notes capture his insights, philosophy, painting hints, and general comments.Leffel's classic, painterly, twentieth-century old master style, much in the manner of Rembrandt or Chardin, affords ample illustration of the ideas expressed - through his many paintings, details, demonstrations, and diagrams, almost all in color.No matter what your level of ability, there is something here to apply to your own work, ideas that will cause you to rething your own ways of painting, hints to save you effort, or solutions to persistent painting problems.

    series.Fifty Fashion Looks that Changed the 1950s showcases fifty iconic outfits from one of fashion's most influential and exciting decades. From the bombshell glamour of Marilyn Monroe in How to Marry a Millionnaire to the emergence of teenage style, via the sculptural forms of Christian Dior's New Look and Balenciaga's double A-line, this elegant sourcebook celebrates all the looks that revolutionized fashion. With Paula Reed's lively and informative text and a wealth of fabulous photography, this book will be required reading for design students, collectors of vintage and all those who love fashion.

    The essays cover a wide range of topics, from magic and trance healing to cockfighting and seaweed farming. The author, who has lived on Bali for 28 years, is widely recognized as a self-taught guru of Balinese folk traditions.

    Black-and-white photographs of the world's most majestic ancient trees, from the yews of England to the baobabs of Madagascar.

    In the years that followed, she published other notable monographs, including "Aila" (2004), "The Eyes, the Ear" (2005) and "Semear" (2007). And now, ten years after her precipitous entry onto the international stage, Aperture has published "Illuminance," the latest volume of Kawauchi's work and the first to be published outside of Japan. Kawauchi's photography has frequently been lauded for its nuanced palette and offhand compositional mastery, as well as its ability to incite wonder via careful attention to tiny gestures and the incidental details of her everyday environment. As Sean O'Hagan, writing in "The Guardian" in 2006, noted, "there is always some glimmer of hope and humanity, some sense of wonder at work in the rendering of the intimate and fragile." In "Illuminance," Kawauchi continues her exploration of the extraordinary in the mundane, drawn to the fundamental cycles of life and the seemingly inadvertent, fractal-like organization of the natural world into formal patterns. Gorgeously produced as a clothbound volume with Japanese binding, this impressive compilation of previously unpublished images is proof of Kawauchi's unique sensibility and her ongoing appeal to lovers of photography.

    Few inventions have had the impact of this ingenious, elegant, and deceptively simple device.This gorgeous cornerstone volume, created in collaboration with the world-famous George Eastman House, celebrates the camera and the art of the photograph. It spans almost two hundred years of progress, from the first faint image ever caught to the instantaneous pictures snapped by today’s state-of-the-art digital equipment.The informative narrative by Todd Gustavson traces the camera’s development, the lives of its brilliant but often eccentric inventors, and the artists behind the lens. Images and highly descriptive captions for more than 350 cameras from the George Eastman House Collection, plus more than 100 historic photos, ads, and drawings, complement the text.A foreword by the George Eastman House Director Anthony Bannon, and insightful essays by Steve Sasson, inventor of the digital camera, and Alexis Gerard, visionary founder and president of Future Image Inc., completes this illuminating study of one of the greatest modern technological achievements.

    Nursing two reluctant knees and a can of Stella, he perambulates through the seasons seeking adventure in our city’s remote and forgotten reaches.When John Rogers packed away his rucksack to start a family in London he didn’t stop travelling. But instead of canoeing up the Rejang River to find retired headhunters in Sarawak, he caught the ferry to Woolwich in search of the edge of the city at Crayford Marshes.This Other London recounts that journey and many others – all on foot and epic in their own cartilage-crunching way. Clutching a samosa and a handful of out-of-date A-Zs, he heads out into the wilderness of isolated luxury apartment blocks in Brentford, the ruins of Lesnes Abbey near Thamesmead, and the ancient Lammas Lands in Leyton.Denounced by his young sons as a ‘hippy wizard’, Rogers delves into some of the overlooked stories rumbling beneath the tarmac of the city suburbs. Holy wells in Lewisham; wassailing in Clapton; a heretical fresco in West Ham. He encounters the Highwaymen of Hounslow Heath, Viet Cong vets still fighting Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket in Beckton, Dutch sailors marooned at Erith pier; and cyclists – without Bradley Wiggins’ sideburns – at Herne Hill Velodrome. He heads out to Uxendon Hill to witness the end of the world, Horsenden Hill to learn its legend, and Tulse Hill to the observatory of the Victorian Brian Cox.This Other London will take you into the hinterland of the city. The London that is lived in; the London where workaday dormitory suburbs sit atop a rich history that could rival Westminster and Tower Bridge. In an age when no corner of the globe has been left untrampled-upon by hordes of tourists, it is time to discover the wonders on our doorstep.This Other London is your gateway through the underexplored nooks of London. As Pathfinder wrote in 1911, ‘Adventure begins at home’.

    He takes us with him on his own journey of discovery, making us see the astonishing sophistication and power of the paintings, telling us what is known about their creators, the Cro-Magnon people who settled the area some 40,000 years ago.Beginning in 1879 with Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola, who found the astonishing paintings on the ceiling of a cave at Altamira, Curtis takes us among the scholars of prehistory, the archaeologists, the art historians who devoted their lives to studying and writing about the paintings. Among them: the famous Abbé Henri Breuil, who lay on his back in damp caves lit only by a lantern held patiently aloft by his faithful—and silent—female assistant, to produce the exquisite tracings that are the most reproduced renderings of the art; Max Raphael, the art historian who first understood that the animals on the walls were not single portraits but part of larger compositions; the beautiful Annette Lamming-Emperaire, resistance fighter turned archaeologist, whose doctoral thesis was so important that all theory since has flowed from her work; Jean Clottes and others still working as new caves and information come to light. In his own search for the caves’ meaning, Curtis takes us through the major theories—that the art was part of fertility or hunting rituals, or used for religious or shamanistic purposes, or was clan mythology—examining the ways in which ethnography, archaeology, and religion have influenced the thinking about the cave paintings over time.The Cave Painters is rich in detail, personalities, and history—and permeated with the mystery at the core of this art created so many thousands of years ago by human beings who had developed, perhaps for the first time, both the ability for abstract thought and a profound and beautiful way to express it.

    He tells of the Nazi cult of the primeval German forest; the play of Christian and pagan myth in Bernini's Fountain of the Four Rivers; and the duel between a monumental sculptor and a feminist gadfly on the slopes of Mount Rushmore. The result is a triumphant work of history, naturalism, mythology, and art. "A work of great ambition and enormous intellectual scope...consistently provocative and revealing."--New York Times"Extraordinary...a summary cannot convey the riches of this book. It will absorb, instruct, and fascinate."--New York Review of Books

    20,000 first printing.

    Running with the idea that our homes are where we are truly ourselves, Peter York's wildly original and scathingly funny look at the interior decorating tastes of some of history's most alarming dictators proves that absolute power corrupts absolutely, right down to the drapes. Mining rare, jaw-dropping photographs of interiors now mostly (thankfully) destroyed, York's hilarious profiles of 16 inner sanctums of the scary leaves no endangered tiger pelt unturned, from Saddam Hussein's creepy private art collection to General Noriega's Christmas tree to the strange tube and knob contraption in the Ceausescu bathroom. All your favorite dictators are here: Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, Tito, Mussolini, Mobutu, Idi Amin, Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos—each with their own uniquely frightful chic. An interior decorating book like no other, Dictator Style is a welcome tonic for a world in need of a good laugh at the expense of the all-powerful.

    He knows where priceless antiquities are buried, who is digging them up, and who is fencing and buying them. In this fascinating book, Atwood takes readers on a journey through Iraq, Peru, Hong Kong, and across America, showing how the worldwide antiquities trade is destroying what's left of the ancient sites before archaeologists can reach them, and thus erasing their historical significance. And it is getting worse. The discovery of the legendary Royal Tombs of Sipan in Peru started an epidemic. Grave robbers scouring the courntryside for tombs--and finding them. Atwood recounts the incredible story of the biggest piece of gold ever found in the Americas, a 2,000-year-old, three-pound masterpiece that cost one looter his life, sent two smugglers to jail, and wrecked lives from Panama to Pennsylvainia. Packed with true stories, this book not only reveals what has been found, but at what cost to both human life and history.