Book picks similar to
Portraits by Ingres: Image of an Epoch by Phillip Conisbee
art
art-history
art-books
nonfiction
Art Psalms
Alex Grey - 2008
Art Psalms combines poems, artwork, and "mystic rants" that fuse imagination, creativity, and spirituality. Grey’s oracular poetry declares that art, both its creation and its observation, can be a spiritual practice. Many of these writings have been shared at gatherings worldwide, especially at New York City’s Chapel of Sacred Mirrors (CoSM), a contemporary sacred space co-founded by Alex and Allyson Grey. Selections include "Soul Marriage," which invites the reader to commit to personal and global transformation; "Guidance for Servants of God," precepts for life as a sacred path; and "The Plan," which aligns universal and individual creativity. The entire text of Grey’s spoken word performance, "WorldSpirit," is included here. Three annotated portfolios, "Meditations on the Divine Feminine," "Meditations on the Masters," and "Meditations on Mortality," explore the connection between drawing and meditation as ways of seeing. Equally meaningful for art lovers, the health and spiritual communities, and anyone seeking to develop their creativity, Art Psalms features over 150 new reproductions of drawings, paintings, and sacred geometry to enrich and awaken the inner artist in each of us.
Linocut for Artists & Designers
Nick Morley - 2016
Whether you are printing by hand on your kitchen table or on a press in a print studio, this book gets you started and goes on to explore the myriad creative applications of linocut. It encourages you to experiment with different approaches to image making and explores new ways of thinking about how linocut can be used. Nick Morley shares his experience and specialist knowledge to make this practical guide an essential companion for everyone interested in this addictive and absorbing medium.
The Lost Painting
Jonathan Harr - 2005
Here, a young graduate student from Rome, Francesca Cappelletti, makes a discovery that inspires a search for a work of art of incalculable value, a painting lost for almost two centuries.The artist was Caravaggio, a master of the Italian Baroque. He was a genius, a revolutionary painter, and a man beset by personal demons. Four hundred years ago, he drank and brawled in the taverns and streets of Rome, moving from one rooming house to another, constantly in and out of jail, all the while painting works of transcendent emotional and visual power. He rose from obscurity to fame and wealth, but success didn't alter his violent temperament. His rage finally led him to commit murder, forcing him to flee Rome a hunted man. He died young, alone, and under strange circumstances.Caravaggio scholars estimate that between sixty and eighty of his works are in existence today. Many others -- no one knows the precise number -- have been lost to time. Somewhere, surely, a masterpiece lies forgotten in a storeroom, or in a small parish church, or hanging above a fireplace, mistaken for a mere copy.Jonathan Harr embarks on a journey to discover the long-lost painting known as The Taking of Christ -- its mysterious fate and the circumstances of its disappearance have captivated Caravaggio devotees for years. After Francesca Cappelletti stumbles across a clue in that dusty archive, she tracks the painting across a continent and hundreds of years of history. But it is not until she meets Sergio Benedetti, an art restorer working in Ireland, that she finally manages to assemble all the pieces of the puzzle.
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 Art of Splatoon
Nintendo - 2017
. . and that's only an inkling of what's inside. We're not squidding around: this is a must have for all fans of Splatoon!Character illustrations!Concept art!Behind the scenes notes!All the content that splatters most!
Annotated Art: The World's Greatest Paintings Explored and Explained
Robert Cumming - 1995
Using detailed annotation of 45 works from the world's greatest artists, Art provides a deeper understanding and richer enjoyment of the masterpieces of painting.Great Art Made Accessible. This fascinating book takes an original approach to interpreting the lost language of art, using annotation to highlight everything you need to know to appreciate the world's favorite paintings, from Botticelli's The Birth of Venus to Picasso's Guernica. Art explains the artist's techniques and intentions and clarifies the meaning of obscure subjects, decoding the mysterious symbolism that can make even the most familiar painting elusive.Art is like a gallery full of the world's most spectacular paintings, including the devotional icons of the Gothic period and early Renaissance and the awe-inspiring achievements of the High Renaissance. It shows the splendor of the Baroque and Rococo, and scrutinizes the drama of the Neoclassicists and the Romantics. The enchantment of the Impressionist school and the complexities of the Cubist movement are also revealed in glowing color. Biographical notes on the artist place each work in its true personal and historical context.The book's generous size and faithful color reproduction allow every painting to be displayed accurately and in detail. At last, art lovers can truly enter the world of their favorite paintings.
Street Art: The Graffiti Revolution
Cedar Lewisohn - 2006
Developing out of the graffiti-writing tradition of the 1980s through the work of artists such as Banksy and Futura 2000, it has long since reached the mainstream. Street Art is the first measured, critical account of the development of this global phenomenon. Tracing street art’s origins in cave painting through the Paris walls photographed by Brassai in the ’20s through the witty, sophisticated imagery found on city streets today, the book also features new and exclusive interviews with key figures associated with street art of the last 35 years, including Lady Pink, Barry McGee, Shepard Fairy, Futura 2000, Malcolm McLaren, Miss Van, and Os Gemeos. Street Art reveals the extent to which the walls and streets of cities around the world have become the birthplace of some of the most dynamic and inspirational art being made today.
100 Manga Artists
Masanao Amano - 2017
This revised and updated edition delivers the lowdown on the latest and the greatest makers and shapers of the manga scene.Through an A–Z directory, we discover the superstars—both human and fictional—of what is now a vast global industry, inspiring advertisers, filmmakers, creative professionals, millions of avid fans, not to mention an entire cosplay lifestyle, in which manga devotees in elaborate costume meet to celebrate the existence of their characters at huge conventions from Los Angeles to Leipzig.From classic maestros—like Osamu Tezuka (creator of Astro Boy) and Katsuhiro Otomo (creator of Akira)—to newcomers such as Hajime Isayama, each entry includes biographical and bibliographical information, descriptions of main characters, and, of course, plenty of examples of the artist’s finest manga spreads and covers.
How to Make a Watercolor Paint Itself: Experimental Techniques for Achieving Realistic Effects
Nita Engle - 1999
Her method begins with action-filled exercises that demonstrate how to play with paint, following no rules. Subsequent step-by-step projects add planning to the mix, demonstrating how to turn loose washes into light-filled watercolors with textural effects achieved by spraying, sprinkling, pouring, squirting, or stamping paint. Engle's approach, and her results, are dramatic and dynamic; now watercolor artists can create their own exciting paintings with help from How to Make a Watercolor Paint Itself.
Claude & Camille: A Novel of Monet
Stephanie Cowell - 2010
But she was gone and he was old. Nearly seventy. Only cool paint met his fingers. “Ma très chère . . .” Darkness started to fall, dimming the paintings. He felt the crumpled letter in his pocket. “I loved you so,” he said. “I never would have had it turn out as it did. You were with all of us when we began, you gave us courage. These gardens at Giverny are for you but I’m old and you’re forever young and will never see them. . . .” In the mid-nineteenth century, a young man named Claude Monet decided that he would rather endure a difficult life painting landscapes than take over his father’s nautical supplies business in a French seaside town. Against his father’s will, and with nothing but a dream and an insatiable urge to create a new style of art that repudiated the Classical Realism of the time, he set off for Paris. But once there he is confronted with obstacles: an art world that refused to validate his style, extreme poverty, and a war that led him away from his home and friends. But there were bright spots as well: his deep, enduring friendships with men named Renoir, Cézanne, Pissarro, Manet – a group that together would come to be known as the Impressionists, and that supported each other through the difficult years. But even more illuminating was his lifelong love, Camille Doncieux, a beautiful, upper-class Parisian girl who threw away her privileged life to be by the side of the defiant painter and embrace the lively Bohemian life of their time. His muse, his best friend, his passionate lover, and the mother to his two children, Camille stayed with Monet—and believed in his work—even as they lived in wretched rooms, were sometimes kicked out of those, and often suffered the indignities of destitution. She comforted him during his frequent emotional torments, even when he would leave her for long periods to go off on his own to paint in the countryside. But Camille had her own demons – secrets that Monet could never penetrate, including one that when eventually revealed would pain him so deeply that he would never fully recover from its impact. For though Camille never once stopped loving the painter with her entire being, she was not immune to the loneliness that often came with being his partner. A vividly-rendered portrait of both the rise of Impressionism and of the artist at the center of the movement, Claude and Camille is above all a love story of the highest romantic order.
The Life and Works of Vincent Van Gogh
Janice Anderson - 1994
The quick brushstrokes of the Impressionists suited his temperament, as did his heavy use of impasto. This helpful volume shows many of van Gogh's best loved works, including the famous self-portrait with a Bandaged Ear, painted after he had cut off part of his ear in a fit of madness, Sunflowers, which were to him a symbol of power and beneficence, and The Starry Night, a painting which clearly expresses intensity and mental turbulence.
The Rescue Artist: A True Story of Art, Thieves, and the Hunt for a Missing Masterpiece
Edward Dolnick - 2005
They snatched one of the world's most famous paintings, Edvard Munch's The Scream, and fled with their $72 million trophy. The thieves made sure the world was watching: the Winter Olympics, in Lillehammer, began that same morning. Baffled and humiliated, the Norwegian police called on the world's greatest art detective, a half-English, half-American undercover cop named Charley Hill. In this rollicking narrative, Edward Dolnick takes us inside the art underworld. The trail leads high and low, and the cast ranges from titled aristocrats to thick-necked thugs. Lord Bath, resplendent in ponytail and velvet jacket, presides over a 9,000-acre estate. David Duddin, a 300-pound fence who once tried to sell a stolen Rembrandt, spins exuberant tales of his misdeeds. We meet Munch, too, a haunted misfit who spends his evenings drinking in the Black Piglet Café and his nights feverishly trying to capture in paint the visions in his head. The most compelling character of all is Charley Hill, an ex-soldier, a would-be priest, and a complicated mix of brilliance, foolhardiness, and charm. The hunt for The Scream will either cap his career and rescue one of the world's best-known paintings or end in a fiasco that will dog him forever.
Hieronymus Bosch: Visions and Nightmares
Nils Büttner - 2016
The creator of expansive tableaus of fantastic and hellish scenes—where any devil not dancing is too busy eating human souls—he has been as equally misunderstood by history as his paintings have. In this book, Nils Büttner draws on a wealth of historical documents—not to mention Bosch’s paintings—to offer a fresh and insightful look at one of history’s most peculiar artists on the five-hundredth anniversary of his death. Bosch’s paintings have elicited a number a responses over the centuries. Some have tried to explain them as alchemical symbolism, others as coded messages of a secret cult, and still others have tried to psychoanalyze them. Some have placed Bosch among the Adamites, others among the Cathars, and others among the Brethren of the Free Spirit, seeing in his paintings an occult life of free love, strange rituals, mysterious drugs, and witchcraft. As Büttner shows, Bosch was—if anything—a hardworking painter, commissioned by aristocrats and courtesans, as all painters of his time were. Analyzing his life and paintings against the backdrop of contemporary Dutch culture and society, Büttner offers one of the clearest biographical sketches to date alongside beautiful reproductions of some of Bosch’s most important work. The result is a smart but accessible introduction to a unique artist whose work transcends genre.
Lydia Cassatt Reading the Morning Paper
Harriet Scott Chessman - 2001
The story is told by Mary’s sister Lydia, as she poses for five of her sister’s most unusual paintings, which are reproduced in, and form the focal point of each chapter. Ill with Bright’s disease and conscious of her approaching death, Lydia contemplates her world with courageous openness, and asks important questions about love and art’s capacity to remember.
Elliott Erwitt: Snaps
Murray Sayle - 2001
A member of the prestigious Magnum agency since 1954, he has photographed all over the world and his images have been the subject of many books and exhibitions.Containing over 500 pictures, over half of which have never been published before, Elliott Erwitt Snaps is a unique and comprehensive survey of his work. From famous images such as Nikita Khrushchev and Richard Nixon arguing in Moscow in 1959 and Marilyn Monroe with the cast of the movie The Misfits, to his many more personal images of places, things, people and animals, Erwitt's unmistakable, often witty, style gives us a snapshot of the famous and the ordinary, the strange and the mundane over a period of more than half a century, through the lens of one of the period's finest image-makers.The book is arranged in nine chapters, each with a one-word title: Look, Move, Play, Read, Rest, Touch, Tell, Point, Stand. For Erwitt, whose photography is a study and celebration of life, these are the basic actions of life - the things people do. The photographs are not intended to illustrate the words, but the words act as a means of grouping and organizing, making broad connections and also playing with pun and ambiguity, in keeping with the visual games Erwitt plays.