Built around the concepts of play and practice, Jo Toye embraces experimentation and innovation. Focusing on technique, line and "working small," she shares a host of unusual techniques and works with unusual materials. As many acrylic artists do, Jo creates primarily (but not exclusively) abstract art. Her emphasis on line and the use of line to build an understructure for design and composition is unique, as is her incorporation of "writing" into her paintings. Surely, few acrylic artists have ever thought of painting on a black surface or using razor blades masking fluid pens, applicator bottles or mouth atomizers to create and define line. These simple tools and concepts result in line work that is distinctive. Experimental Techniques in Acrylic Painting also adapts interesting mixed media techniques for use in creating in acrylic. Her takes on stenciling, sponging, masking, rolling paint, and working with gesso are not to be missed. Finally, also unique to this workshop in a book is the use of the small format painting and the emphasis on making "practice samples" that can be referenced at a later time for inspiration and direction in larger paintings.

The Lindley Library of the RHS has a collection of some 18,000 drawings and paintings by eminent botanical artists of all periods up to the present day. This book contains a selection of the rarest and most beautiful: flowers, fruit, fungi and other plants from all over the world, by artists such as G.D. Ehret, John and William Curtis, Ferdinand Bauer, William Hooker, W.H. Fitch, Augusta Withers, Margaret Stones and Mary Grierson. All the illustrations are reproduced from the artists' originals.;The book includes a history of the collection and each plate is accompanied by a description of its origin and artistic accomplishment, and a botanical and horticultural account of the plant itself.

Beautiful Lies documents Teheran-born, New York-based artist Ali Banisadr's 2021 show in Florence in honour of the 700th anniversary of the death of Dante Alighieri. The "beautiful lies" beneath which truth is hidden is an expression used by Dante in describing his writing - and allegorical poetry in general - and it is perfectly suited to Banisadr's work. His powerful brushwork and strong colours go below the surface of his personal reality, revealing violence and isolation, anguish and wonder, but also memories and imagination. For this show, which was split between two venues, he was commissioned to create an installation of site-specific paintings (also called Beautiful Lies). The text is by Sergio Risaliti, director of the Museo Novecento in Florence.

The Painter RAs photographed in their studios with examples of their work accompanied by a brief biography.

This volume in the 21st Century Oxford Authors series offers students and readers a comprehensive selection of the work of William Blake (1757-1827). Accompanied by full scholarly apparatus, this authoritative edition enables students to explore Blake's poetry, illuminated poetry, and prose alongside selections from his letters, manuscripts, notebook, advertising pamphlets, marginalia, and works he printed in conventional letterpress. The edition arranges Blake's works in chronological order, according to the date when they were first printed or, in the case of unpublished works, the years in which they were composed. With the help of editorial headnotes and annotations, this arrangement brings to the foreground Blake's material and intellectual labours as a poet, painter, prophet, and non-academic philosopher; the networks of acquaintances, friends, patrons, and enemies who helped support or provoke this work; and the tumultuous historical events he responded to, which included the beginning of modern feminism, the agricultural and industrial revolutions, the American and French Revolutions, William Pitt's so-called 'Reign of Terror' in Britain, an attempted revolution in Ireland (1798), a successful slave rebellion in Haiti (1791-1804), and the French revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. Some editions attempt to sanitize Blake, by hiding from view the most startling elements of his thought; but in this edition Blake's sexual, political, religious, and poetic heterodoxy comes into full view. At the same time, this edition foregrounds the dynamics of Blake's composite art, with equal weight given to its verbal and visual dimensions; makes visible the chief lines of force that structure his oeuvre; and highlights his developing thought on sapphism, sodomy, the body, relations between the sexes, the roots of violence, and the politics of imagination. This is a Blake whose dialogue with his own time anticipates much later developments, including modern depth psychologies; analyses of the social and psychological dynamics of war and peace; interest in the body, sexuality, and gender; and experiments in the relation between actual and virtual realities-a Blake who is provocative, unsettling, exhilarating, and somehow our contemporary. Explanatory notes and commentary are included, to enhance the study, understanding, and enjoyment of these works, and the edition includes an Introduction to the life and works of Blake, and a Chronology.

In this critical investigation of one of the Caribbean's most distinguished artists, the work of Stanley Greaves is explored to explain his use of Guyanese physical reality and the various visual resources, including traditional African and Amerindian art and contemporary European surrealism, from which his work draws. Retrospective discussions of the different media in which Greaves worked cover sculpture, ceramic, figure paintings, and folk art. Also analyzed is his response to the years of political dictatorship and social collapse in Guyana in the 1980s, a political reality that emerges in his work.

That painting is at least in part an expression of the painter's personality is obvious from the differences between very impulsive and very controlled painters - between the paintings of a Picasso, for example, and a Piet Mondriaan. But these differences have not been looked at in a controlled setting. In this book, Machotka sets out to understand the images produced by a broad sample of students and to connect them to the students' inner lives - to their interpersonal relations, their wishes and fears, their impulses and inhibitions. Their image making was followed in detail and their personality was studied in a long clinical interview, producing a rich, individual picture of the style and substance of the inner life of each. Then the images were grouped into seven types by cluster analysis. The personal data were found to fit the image clusters closely: for example, images with little form and much narration were produced by people with strong compensatory longings, while dense, collaged images were made by participants who exercised relentless control over one major issue in their life. Other individuals had a strong need to integrate their lives and produced well-formed, well-composed images. As expected, no single motive explained all artistic activity - but the style of the images, such as their inhibited formality, abstractness, or fluid boldness, reflected what could be called the map of each participant's interpersonal world.

This definitive appreciation of Kahlo's career features gorgeous full-page reproductions and insightful commentary to illuminate connections between the artist's life and work. Few painters have been as celebrated and adopted into popular culture as Frida Kahlo-often to the detriment of her amazing achievements as a painter. In this striking volume, one of the world's foremost scholars on Kahlo's art looks past the hype to focus on the artist's technique and motifs. Reproductions of Kahlo's paintings, along with selected details, are accompanied by illuminating observations about the role of physical and mental suffering in the creative process, Kahlo's mastery and reinvention of European traditions, and the wealth of coded and metaphorical elements hidden in so much of her work. A rich and rewarding exploration of an artist all too easily reduced to a single narrative, this nuanced study is also an exquisitely produced celebration of Kahlo's genius.

"The journey to understand the painting is also the journey to understand Rothko, because the work is so thoroughly suffused with the man."--Christopher Rothko Mark Rothko (1903-1970), world-renowned icon of Abstract Expressionism, is rediscovered in this wholly original examination of his art and life written by his son. Synthesizing rigorous critique with personal anecdotes, Christopher, the younger of the artist's two children, offers a unique perspective on this modern master. Christopher Rothko draws on an intimate knowledge of the artworks to present eighteen essays that look closely at the paintings and explore the ways in which they foster a profound connection between viewer and artist through form, color, and scale. The prominent commissions for the Rothko Chapel in Houston and the Seagram Building murals in New York receive extended treatment, as do many of the lesser-known and underappreciated aspects of Rothko's oeuvre, including reassessments of his late dark canvases and his formidable body of works on paper. The author also discusses the artist's writings of the 1930s and 1940s, the significance of music to the artist, and our enduring struggles with visual abstraction in the contemporary era. Finally, Christopher Rothko writes movingly about his role as the artist's son, his commonalities with his father, and the terms of the relationship they forged during the writer's childhood. Mark Rothko: From the Inside Out is a thoughtful reexamination of the legendary artist, serving as a passionate introduction for readers new to his work and offering a fresh perspective to those who know it well.

This book traces an evolution of equine and equestrian art in the United States over the last two centuries to counter conventional understandings of subjects that are deeply enmeshed in the traditions of elite English and European culture. In focusing on the construction of identity in painting and photography-of Blacks, women, and the animals themselves involved in horseracing, rodeo, and horse show competition-it illuminates the strategic and varying roles visual artists have played in producing cultural understandings of human-animal relationships. As the first book to offer a history of American equine and equestrian imagery, it shrinks the chasm of literature on the subject and illustrates the significance of the genre to the history of American art. This book further connects American equine and equestrian art to historical, theoretical, and philosophical analyses of animals and attests to how the horse endures as a vital, meaningful subject within the art world as well as culture at large. This book will be of interest to scholars in art history, American art, gender studies, race and ethnic studies, and animal studies.

A key figure in the international avant-garde, Piet Mondrian (1872-1944) was at once an extraordinary painter and leading art theoretician whose influence resonates to this day. Coining the term "Neo-plasticism", he pursued a style of painting composed only of primary colors against a grid of black vertical and horizontal lines and a white base background. Mondrian's vision was that this essential painting would help to achieve a society in which art as such has no place, but rather exists for the total realization of "beauty." With stints in Amsterdam, Paris, London, and New York, Mondrian drew upon the modern metropolis and modern music, especially jazz, as points of inspiration. In 1917, he cofounded De Stijl, originally a publication, and subsequently a circle of practitioners, committed to a strictly geometrical art of horizontals and verticals. With key works and succinct texts, this introductory book presents Mondrian's distinctive and pioneering oeuvre, an abiding inspiration for fashion, art, architecture, and design, from White Stripes album covers to Yves Saint Laurent dresses. 2016 (c) US Mondrian/Holtzman Trust About the series Born back in 1985, the Basic Art Series has evolved into the best-selling art book collection ever published. Each book in TASCHEN's Basic Art series features: a detailed chronological summary of the life and oeuvre of the artist, covering his or her cultural and historical importance a concise biography approximately 100 illustrations with explanatory captions

After Vasari's Lives of the Most Famous Artists, The Life of Titian by the seventeenth-century Venetian artist and writer Carlo Ridolfi is the most important contemporary documentary source for our understanding of the great Renaissance artist. This new critical edition, the first translation into English of Ridolfi's biography, illuminates his life, his artistic production, and his early critical reputation. The editors address art-historical questions of attribution, provenance, and documentation that Ridolfi's biography raises. Two introductory essays present the nature, scope, and importance of the biography for the study of Titian and Venetian Renaissance art and place Ridolfi in the tradition of Renaissance biography and artistic literature. The annotations provide a useful and current bibliography drawn from both art history and literature.

The Life of Titian will be of interest to a wide audience of scholars and students of the history of Renaissance art, literature, language, and culture.

'Glorious' Guardian
'Revelatory' New Yorker
'Evocative' Los Angeles Times

In 1971, as her groundbreaking album Blue emerged as a singular commercial and critical success around the world, Joni Mitchell puzzled over what gift to give her friends that Christmas.

The result was a handmade book, with only one hundred copies produced, filled with Joni’s hand-written lyrics and reproductions of many of her stunning drawings — portraits, abstracts, random concertgoers, and more.

Each was given to a friend and, until now, the edition has remained private. Today, with Morning Glory on the Vine, Joni’s long-ago personal Christmas present is a present to us all.

This book examines Theodore Gericault's images of black men, women and children who suffered slavery's trans-Atlantic passage in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, including his 1819 painting The Raft of the Medusa. The book focuses on Gericault's depiction of black people, his approach towards slavery, and the voices that advanced or denigrated them. By turning to documents, essays and critiques, both before and after Waterloo (1815), and, most importantly, Gericault's own oeuvre, this study explores the fetters of slavery that Gericault challenged-alongside a growing number of abolitionists-overtly or covertly. This book will be of interest to scholars in art history, race and ethnic studies and students of modernism.

Pollock and After: The Critical Debate brings together key writings on debates about Abstract Expressionism and Modernist art history. It is an essential resource for understanding post-war American art and culture. The second edition has been fully revised and updated in response to new critical approaches to post-war American art. It includes nine new articles and a substantial overview essay by Francis Frascina.
Articles are grouped into three parts, each with an introduction by Francis Frascina. Part One includes two foundational articles by the influential Modernist critic, Clement Greenberg, and represents the debate about Greenberg's work, with contributions by T.J. Clark and Michael Fried. Part Two focuses on revisionist writers, who questioned established ideas about Modernist art history, examining the relationship between Abstract Expressionism and the politics of McCarthyism and the Cold War.
The third part, which is new to the volume, is devoted to recent developments of revisionist critiques. Contributors explore the work of Greenberg's contemporaries, the relationship between critical and commercial responses to Abstract Expressionism, and perceptions of cultural value in the 1940s and 1950s, and challenge assumptions about ethnicity, gender and sexuality in the construction of the 'post-war American artist'.

The majesty of Earth's most magnificent features was the domain of Wilson Hurley (1924-2008). In paintings of natural wonders throughout the galaxy, he was committed to expressing his love of the richness of reality. His journey to become a revered twentieth-century American landscapist is brought to life in this intimate biography. Written for appreciators, collectors, and working artists, Hurley's goals and procedures - from thumbnails to plein air field studies and finished studio paintings - are elucidated in depth, including a commission that resulted in five monumental triptychs of our nation's most prized vistas installed at the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum.

Painting in eighteenth-century Yangchow, a city that dominated the political and economic scene of mid-Qing China, has traditionally been viewed as the product of a group of nonconformist, "eccentric" artists who were supported by wealthy merchants.
This book, however, does not focus on the creative energy of the individual artist, the rise of the Yangchow school of painting, or patronage narrowly defined. Rather, it studies eighteenth-century Yangchow paintings as artistic products shaped by collective social and cultural experiences, and by constant exchanges between the artists and their audience. The author examines the paintings as commodities, revealing the mechanism of their exchange and the values negotiated, and she interprets the paintings in a framework that moves beyond economics into the social, political, historical, and literary contexts of their creation and appreciation.
The book begins by considering merchant patrons long associated with the Yangchow school of painting, and goes on to reveal that there were patrons from lower socioeconomic levels who were, in fact, perhaps the major consumers of Yangchow painting. The author then discusses four artists who exemplify the diversity of backgrounds and artistic traditions of Yangchow painters and patrons.
Fang Shih-shu represents the traditional scholar painter of conservative orthodox landscapes. Huang Shen, by contrast, represents painters with craftsman backgrounds who mingle the values of the literati with the technical skill of artisans. The last two painters, Cheng Hsieh and Chin Nung, represent the emergence of new types of artists who adopted painting as an occupation and commercialized both their artistic products and their personal cultural refinement and literati status.
By reconstructing the economic lives of these artists, examining their social roles, identifying their networks of patronage, and investigating their aesthetic choices, this book illuminates the process of professionalization of the scholar-artist and the commodification of literati culture in late imperial China.

Although Vincent van Gogh's and Paul Gauguin's artistic collaboration in the South of France lasted no more than two months, their stormy relationship has continued to fascinate art historians, biographers and psychoanalysts as well as film makers and the general public. Two great 19th century figures with powerful and often clashing sensibilities, they shared a house, worked side by side, drank, caroused and argued passionately about art. Their brief venture together, richly documented in the artists' letters and paintings, would be compelling enough even if it had not culminated in the catastrophe of van Gogh's life - his ear cutting. This traumatic climax to van Gogh's and Gauguin's weeks spent in the "Yellow House" in Arles has raised profound questions about the nature of their relationship and about their behavior before and after van Gogh's self-mutilation."Van Gogh and Gauguin" explores the artists' intertwined lives from a psychoanalytic perspective in order to draw a nuanced and sophisticated picture of the artists' dealings with each other. The book also examines crucial art historical issues such as the aesthetic convictions that both united and divided the two men, and the extent to which they influenced each other's art.

Denis Wirth-Miller and Dicky Chopping were a couple at the heart of the mid-twentieth century art world, with the visitors' book of the Essex townhouse they shared from 1945 until 2008 painting them as Zeligs of British society. The names recorded inside make up an astonishing supporting cast - from Francis Bacon to Lucian Freud to Randolph Churchill to John Minton. Successful artists, although not household names themselves, writing Dicky and Denis off as just footnotes in history would be a mistake. After Denis's death in 2010, Jon Lys-Turner, one of two executors of the couple's estate, came into possession of an extraordinary archive of letters, works of art and symbolically loaded ephemera the two had collected since they met in the 1930s. It is no exaggeration to state that this archive represents a missing link in British art history - the wealth of new biographical information disclosed about Francis Bacon, for example, is truly staggering. The Visitors' Book is both an extraordinary insight into the minutiae of Dicky and Denis's life together and what it meant to be gay in pre-Wolfenden Britain, as well as a pocket social history of the era and a unique perspective into mid-twentieth century art. With reams of previously unseen material, this is a fascinating and unique opportunity to delve into post-war Britain.

An in-depth look at the work and career of this fascinating artist, who is having a profound impact on contemporary painting Nigel Cooke is known for his complex paintings, which thematically explore the meeting point between creative labour, consciousness, art history, consumer culture, and nature. Primarily centred on meticulously painted, large-scale urban landscapes, which he calls 'hybrid theatrical spaces', Cooke's work employs disparate styles, often integrating trompe l'oeil miniature rocks and trees with backdrops of graffiti-marked buildings, to create scenes conveying obscure and macabre narratives. This survey of Cooke's career to date explores the artist's style, approach, and impact on contemporary art and includes his very latest works, completed shortly before publication.

George Stubbs: 'all done from Nature' presents the first significant overview of Stubbs's work in Britain for more than 30 years and brings together 80 paintings, drawings and publications from the National Gallery's Whistlejacket to pieces never previously seen in public. Stubbs produced exceptional images of animals and people throughout his career. These were a product of his keen scientific eye and uncommon sense of compassion. Rather than trust to history and the untested example of his precursors, he championed doing as a way of thinking and deployed picture-making in pursuit of reality. On the title page of The Anatomy of the Horse, his groundbreaking publication that rewrote our understanding of equine biology, Stubbs confirmed that everything that followed was 'all done from Nature' - meaning that it all derived from his own painstaking analysis of the subject in front of him. George Stubbs: 'all done from Nature' accompanies the major exhibition at MK Gallery in Milton Keynes and the Mauritshuis in The Hague and includes new writing on the artist by Nicholas Clee, Martin Myrone, Martin Postle, Roger Robinson, Jenny Uglow and Alison E. Wright.

For Rene Magritte, painting was a form of thinking. Through paintings of ordinary objects rendered with illusionism, Magritte probed the limits of our perception-what we see and cannot see, the nature of representation-as a philosophical system for presenting ideas, and explored perspective as a method of visual argumentation. This book makes the claim that Magritte's painting is about vision and the act of viewing, of perception itself, and the process of how we see and experience things in the world, including paintings as things.

Paul Gauguin created some of the most advanced art in a brilliant generation of artists - all of whom struggled against the stifling conformity of the late 19th century's artistic mainstream.
He created paintings whose radically simplified lines and colors echoed the unschooled art of the rustic and native cultures he loved. After his famously disastrous stay with Vincent van Gogh in southern France, Gauguin escaped European civilization for the Polynesian islands. Immersing himself in the culture, he produced a series of radiant canvases and powerful sculptures - his last great works.
From his childhood in Peru to his experiences in Tahiti, the story of Gauguin's life is recounted in authoritative text by an expert on the post-Impressionists, coupled with powerful imagery by an award-winning illustrator.