People Who Deserve It: Socially Responsible Reasons to Punch Someone in the Face


Casey Rand - 2010
     Sometimes society is wrong. Meet the best of the absolute worst-the perpetrators of the most wretched demonstrations of moral conduct ever:Super Snorer Terrible Baby Namer Hot Water User-Upper Express Checkout Cheater No-Umbrella Etiquette Lady Eight-Minute Voicemail Leaver Dude Who Takes Board Games Too SeriouslyPeople Who Deserve It exposes everyone and everything whose behavior, life choices, and sometimes odor leave humanity with only one painful option: a punch to the face.

Stories of Art


James Elkins - 2002
    Concise and original, this engaging book is an antidote to the behemoth art history textbooks from which we were all taught. As he demonstrates so persuasively, there can never be one story of art. Cultures have their own stories - about themselves, about other cultures - and to hear them all is one way to hear the multiple stories that art tells. But each of us also has our own story of art, a kind of private art history made up of the pieces we have seen, and loved or hated, the effects they had on us, and the connections that might be drawn among them.Elkins opens up the questions that traditional art history usually avoids. What about all the art not produced in Western Europe or in the Europeanized Americas? Is it possible to include Asian art and Indian art in 'the story?' What happens when one does? To help us find answers, he uses both Western and non-Western artworks, tables of contents from art histories written in cultures outside the centre of Western European tradition, and strangely wonderful diagrams of how artworks might connect through a single individual. True multiculturalism may be an impossibility, but art lovers can each create a 'story of art' that is right for themselves.

Who's Afraid of Contemporary Art?


Kyung An - 2017
    In this easy-to-navigate A to Z guide, the authors’ playful explanations draw on key artworks, artists, and events from around the globe, including how the lights going on and off won the Turner Prize, what makes the likes of Marina Abramovic and Ai Weiwei such great artists, and why Kanye West would trade his Grammys to be one.Packed with behind-the-scenes information and completely free of jargon, Who’s Afraid of Contemporary Art? is the perfect gallery companion and the go to guide for when the next big thing leaves you stumped.

Frida Kahlo


Elizabeth Carpenter - 2007
    During her lifetime, she was best known as the flamboyant wife of celebrated muralist Diego Rivera. Theirs was a tumultuous relationship: Rivera declared himself to be "unfit for fidelity." As if to assuage her pain, Kahlo recorded the vicissitudes of her marriage in paint. She also recorded the misery of her deteriorating health--the orthopedic corsets that she was forced to wear, the numerous spinal surgeries, the miscarriages and therapeutic abortions. The artist's sometimes harrowing imagery is mitigated by an intentional primitivism and small scale, as well as by her sardonic humor and extraordinary imagination. In celebration of the one-hundredth anniversary of Kahlo's birth, this major new monograph is published on the occasion of the 2007-08 traveling exhibition. It features the artist's most renowned work--the hauntingly seductive and often brutal self-portraits--as well as a selection of key portraits and still lifes; more than 100 color plates, from Kahlo's earliest works, made in 1926, to her last, in 1954; critical essays by Elizabeth Carpenter, Hayden Herrera and Victor Zamudio-Taylor; and a selection of photographs of Kahlo and Rivera by preeminent photographers of the period, including Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Lola Alvarez Bravo, Gisele Freund, Tina Modotti and Nickolas Muray. The catalogue also contains snapshots from the artist's own photo albums of Kahlo with family and friends such as Andre Breton and Leon Trotsky--some of which have never been published, and several of which Kahlo inscribed with dedications, effaced with self-deprecating marks or kissed with a lipstick trace--plus an extensive illustrated timeline, selected bibliography, exhibition history and index.

Gardenista: The Definitive Guide to Stylish Outdoor Spaces


Michelle Slatalla - 2016
    The team behind the inspirational design sites Gardenista.com and Remodelista.com presents an all-in-one manual for making your outdoor space as welcoming as your living room. Tour personality-filled gardens around the world and re-create the looks with no-fail planting palettes. Find hundreds of design tips and easy DIYs, editors’ picks of 100 classic (and stylish) objects, a landscaping primer with tips from pros, over 200 resources, and so much more.

Picasso: A Biography


Patrick O'Brian - 1976
    It is the most comprehensive yet written, and the only biography fully to appreciate the distinctly Mediterranean origins of Picasso's character and art.Everything about Picasso, except his physical stature, was on an enormous scale. No painter of the first rank has been so awe-inspiringly productive. No painter of any rank has made so much money. A few painters have rivaled his life span of ninety years, but none has attracted so avid, so insatiable, a public interest.Patrick O'Brian knew Picasso sufficiently well to have a strong sense of his personality. The man that emerges from this scholarly, passionate, and brilliantly written biography is one of many contradictions: hard and tender, mean and generous, affectionate and cold, private despite the relish of his fame. In his later years he professed communism, yet in O'Brian's view retained to the end of his life a residual Catholic outlook.Not that such matters were allowed to interfere with his vigorous sensuality. Sex and money, eating and drinking, friends and quarrels, comedies and tragedies, suicides and wars tumble one another in the vast chaos of his experience. he was "a man almost as lonely as the sun, but one who glowed with much the same fierce, burning life." It is with that impression of its subject that this book leaves its readers.

Frida Kahlo: Life and Work


Helga Prignitz-Poda - 2004
    It consists of 143 paintings of small size, rarely larger than 20 x 30 inches, many of them now considered icons of 20th century art, most of them seIf-portraits. The reasons for this ostensible narcissism were closely bound up with Kahlo's biography, with the country and epoch in which she grew up, and with her decidedly eccentric character. It was no coincidence that the major enigmatic minds of the 16th century, namely Hieronymous Bosch and Pieter Bruegel the Elder, were among her favorite painters. For Frida Kahlo never displayed her wounds directly--be it the physical wounds caused by accidents and illness, or the psychological inner wounds. Hers is a subtly enciphered symbolic language, rich in metaphors drawn from almost all the world's cultures. Aztec myths of creation. Far Eastern and Classical Greek mythology, and popular Catholic beliefs all mingle in Kahlo's pictures with Mexican folklore and the stuff of quotidian life, with Marx and Freud. Andre Breton, one of her many admirers among the European avant-garde, once described Kahlo's art as a "colored ribbon round a bomb." Exotic and explosive, sensuous and fascinatingly vital in terms of artistic statement. Kahlo's paintings shed a complex and often frightening light on her soul, her "inner reality." as she called it. If the incessant commercial marketing of Kahlo's paintings over the past decade had obscured a clear view of her extraordinary oeuvre, this present monograph attempts to make amends "Frida Kahlo: The Painter and Her Work returns to the heart, to 42 select masterpieces, reproduced in full and in detail. The painterly quality, the beauty, and theimmense wealth of details in Kahlo's paintings is laid out before the reader's eyes, as is the abyss in which the artist found herself.

Leonardo da Vinci


Anna Abraham - 2014
    Best known as one of the world's greatest painters, he sketched the foundations for inventions that would not come to fruition for centuries. Born a bastard in a hillside village in northern Italy, Leonardo became the protégé of princes, popes, and kings. He mastered so many branches of science that scholars still debate whether he was greater as an anatomist, botanist, cartographer, engineer, geographer, or naturalist. Nevertheless, he died unhappy, believing he had failed to work the miracles of which he had dreamed. Here, from New York Times bestselling author Anna Abraham, is his extraordinary story.

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.

Sylvia Plath: Her Drawings


Sylvia Plath - 2011
    Catalogue to accompany the "Sylvia Plath: Her Drawings" exhibition at The Mayor Gallery in London (2nd November - 17th December 2011).

On-Camera Flash Techniques for Digital Wedding and Portrait Photography


Neil van Niekerk - 2009
    Techniques for using simple accessories such as bounce cards and diffusers, as well as how to improve a lighting scenario by enhancing it rather than overwhelming it, show photographers how to master this challenging aspect of portraiture.

The Portrait of Dr. Gachet: The Story of a van Gogh Masterpiece


Cynthia Saltzman - 1998
    Gachet, ' was sold for the astonishing price of $82.5 million. This fascinating book reconstructs the painting's journey and becomes a rich story of modernism and the forces behind the art market. 'Portrait of Dr. Gachet' was one of van Gogh's last paintings, completed just weeks before his suicide. Depicting the eccentric physician who was attempting to treat the artist, this painting was viewed by van Gogh as a summation of his ideas about portraiture. Cynthia Saltzman's book reconstructs the journey of this revolutionary and haunting painting, in which, as van Gogh wrote, he strove to capture the 'heartbroken expression of our time.' As Saltzman superbly shows, this painting not only evokes the ethos of modern life but also illuminates the ways in which art, politics, and the market have intersected in the 20th century. Affected by broad social and cultural change, the painting's fate was also influenced by innovations in the way art was sold and displayed, and by the growing role of dealers and museums.

Highland Knits - Sassenach Cowl: Knitwear Inspired by the Outlander Series


Interweave Magazine - 2016
    This simple, enduring design will have you stylishly covered no matter what place, or time, you call home.

The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence


Susie Linfield - 2010
    To look at these images is voyeuristic; to turn away is a gesture of respect.With The Cruel Radiance, Susie Linfield attacks those ideas head-on, arguing passionately that viewing such photographs—and learning to see the people in them—is an ethically and politically necessary act that connects us to our modern history of violence and probes our capacity for cruelty. Contending with critics from Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht to Susan Sontag and the postmoderns—and analyzing photographs from such events as the Holocaust, China’s Cultural Revolution, and recent terrorist acts—Linfield explores the complex connection between photojournalism and the rise of human rights ideals. In the book’s concluding section, she examines the indispensable work of Robert Capa, James Nachtwey, and Gilles Peress, and asks how photography has—and should—respond to the increasingly nihilistic trajectory of modern warfare.A bracing and unsettling book, The Cruel Radiance convincingly demonstrates that if we hope to alleviate political violence, we must first truly understand it—and to do that, we must begin to look.

Mosquito Point Road: Monroe County Murder & Mayhem


Michael Benson - 2020
    There’s Killer of the Cloth, The Baby in the Convent, Mosquito Point Road, Death of a First Baseman, The Blue Gardenia, and Pure/Evil. Three of the killers are female.