Geoff Hunt is known to millions of readers across the world as the artist responsible for the covers of Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin novels, and more recently for those of Julian Stockwin's Thomas Kydd books. He is widely acknowledged to be one of the leading marine artists of his generation. More than a showcase of the versatility and creativity of his work, this book, written by the artist himself, also reveals its accuracy, through five key case studies that explain the initial inspirations, gathering of source material and often lengthy artistic progression that leads to the creation of a finished painting. The artist has selected over 150 paintings and sketches to illustrate his prolific career, painting techniques and influences, dividing them into sections on Nelson's Navy, The American War of Independence, illustrating the naval writers and the Modern Maritime Scene, which includes recent commissions from the commercial sector and yachting community.

This richly illustrated books tells the story of the different ways in which women were represented in Italian Renaissance painting. It is clearly arranged into four distinct areas that relate to the function of the art work: marriage furniture, portraiture, the nude and depictions of female saints. Uncovering the many layers of meaning hidden in the iconography of these paintings, the book reintroduces us to the cultural context in which the artists operated, providing interesting new readings of well-known works by Raphael, Leonardo and Titian, among others. -- .

Based on hitherto overlooked archival material, this book reveals Nell Walden's significant impact on the Sturm organisation through a feminist reading of supportive labour that highlights the centrality of collaborative work within the modern art world. This book introduces Walden as an ardent collector of modern and indigenous art and critically contextualises her own art production in relation to expressionist concepts of art and to gendered ideas on abstraction and decoration. Visual analyses highlight how she collaborated with professional and experimental women photographers during the Weimar era and how the circulation of these photographs served as a means to intervene in the public sphere of culture in interwar Germany. Finally, the book provides an analysis of Walden's continuing work for Der Sturm after her voluntary exile from Germany to Switzerland in 1933 and highlights the importance of women's supportive labour for the canonisation and institutionalisation of modern art in museums and archives. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, visual studies, and gender studies.

This book provides practical examples of planning and organizing a paint shop in many different types of venues from community theatre to professional, summer stock to year-round. The text includes access to additional online resources such as extended interviews, downloadable informational posters and templates for budgeting and organizing, and videos walking through the use of templates and the budgeting process. Written for early career scenic artists in theatre and students of Scenic Art courses.

The first and highly-anticipated monograph on one of the most successful, collected, and exciting painters today Swiss-born Nicolas Party, one of the most successful and critically acclaimed artists working today, is known for his color-saturated paintings of everyday objects, with distinctly personal yet very accessible and recognizable imagery - bright, graphic patterns applied to canvases, ceramics, furniture, floors, ceilings, doorways, and walls. He captures the essence of his subjects in surprising ways, heightening their physical and emotional resonance. Fascinated by the power of paint to alter our perception of the built environment and, within a gallery context, how we experience art, Party regularly paints murals, either as stand-alone works or as carefully orchestrated settings for his practice. This is the first book dedicated to his practice and the first to examine in totality his career to date - it will be a must-read for collectors and followers of the contemporary art scene.

Originally published in 1950, this book shows that the religious and ethical values that St. Francis was striving after are as essential today as they were in his time. The book presents St. Francis as a complex personality and corrects the rather mawkish interpretation of certain legends. It deals with the environment and development of the saint's personality and chapters from his biographies by Thomas of Celano or St. Bonaventure and many black and white plates illustrating them which are reproductions of paintings by Italian masters from the XIIIth to the late XVth century.

In Esoteric Images: Decoding the Late Herat School of Painting Tawfiq Da'adli decodes the pictorial language which flourished in the city of Herat, modern Afghanistan, under the rule of the last Timurid ruler, Sultan Husayn Bayqara (r.1469-1506). This study focuses on one illustrated manuscript of a poem entitled Khamsa by the Persian poet Nizami Ganjavi, kept in the British Library under code Or.6810. Tawfiq Da'adli decodes the paintings, reveals the syntax behind them and thus deciphers the message of the whole manuscript. The book combines scholarly efforts to interpret theological-political lessons embedded in one of the foremost Persian schools of art against the background of the court dynamic of an influential medieval power in its final years.

Get nose to bloom with one of the most beloved subjects of painters for generations of artists with Expressive Flower Painting and master pedals, stems, colors, and more. It's almost always one of the first things someone tries to paint--center, petals, stem, voila! Expressive Flower Painting's exercises have a loose, free, contemporary style the likes of which you'd see in galleries, in shops, and even on clothing and home design goods. It's not intimidating, and yet the paintings are colorful, immediate, and joyful and speak to the artist's desire to play, be loose, and to create freely. Lynn Whipple paints wildly and in small to large formats with a combination of acrylic paint, charcoal, and colorful soft pastel. Expressive Flower Painting presents a range of creative painting exercises that help readers develop vibrant nature paintings. This exciting book is an in-depth expansion of Lynn's class called Big Bold Bloom Wild Painting, with additional content. Expressive Flower Painting covers mark making, layering techniques, how to do "spin drawings," color methods, painted backgrounds, working from life, and how to successfully combine a wide variety of media for the maximum effect.

Pocket Art features 100 artistic prompts to unleash your creativity. In Pocket Art, Lorna Scobie, the bestselling author and illustrator of the 365 Days series, encourages you to be confident with your art, embrace mistakes and to have fun along the way. It is full of activities to help kickstart your creativity, and the activities have been divided into three categories - art for relaxing, art for looking and art for inspiration - so you can feel inspired no matter what mood you're in. Full of tips to help spark creative ideas, as well as inspiration and support, Pocket Art is the perfect pocket-sized art book to take with you wherever you go.

This book undertakes a critical reappraisal of Minimalism through an examination of three key painters: Robert Mangold, David Novros, and Jo Baer. By establishing their substantive engagements with Minimalist discourse, as well as their often overlooked artistic exchanges with their sculptor peers, it demonstrates that painting crucially informed the movement's development, serving not only as an object of critique but also as a crucible for its most central tenets. It also poses broader disciplinary implications as it historicizes and challenges Minimalism's "death of painting" critiques that have been so influential to theories of modernism and postmodernism in the visual arts.

Many people crave a creative outlet, but more often than not, don't know where to start. In Colours, Giovanna Ranaldi invites you to nurture your creativity and build your confidence by taking inspiration from famous works of art that celebrate colour. Each section explores a particular aspect of colour, from basics such as the history of the colour wheel and using complementary colours, to understanding the impact colour has on our emotions and dreams. Throughout the book, Giovanna provides creative and fun prompts that will encourage you to draw or paint on the pages using various techniques. Colours is full of information on how to see colour and use it in your own artwork and is packed with inspiration from the world's most celebrated artists, including Paul Klee, Claude Monet, Vincent van Gogh, Sonia Delaunay and more. Colours is a short course in unlocking your creative self - perfect for budding artists of all ages who are keen to try out different artistic techniques and materials, and begin their artistic journey.

A FLAME TREE NOTEBOOK. Beautiful and luxurious the journals combine high-quality production with magnificent art. Perfect as a gift, and an essential personal choice for writers, notetakers, travellers, students, poets and diarists. Features a wide range of well-known and modern artists, with new artworks published throughout the year. BEAUTIFULLY DESIGNED. The highly crafted covers are printed on foil paper, embossed then foil stamped, complemented by the luxury binding and rose red end-papers. The covers are created by our artists and designers who spend many hours transforming original artwork into gorgeous 3d masterpieces that feel good in the hand, and look wonderful on a desk or table. PRACTICAL, EASY TO USE. Flame Tree Notebooks come with practical features too: a pocket at the back for scraps and receipts; two ribbon markers to help keep track of more than just a to-do list; robust ivory text paper, printed with lines; and when you need to collect other notes or scraps of paper the magnetic side flap keeps everything neat and tidy. THE ARTIST. Bex Parkin is an incredibly talented illustrator. Having spent many years based in London working in a range of artistic jobs, she now lives in rural Staffordshire. Her passion for print, pattern and colour was largely inspired by her work sourcing vintage and antique textiles for the fashion industry, which can be seen throughout her artworks. THE FINAL WORD. As William Morris said, "Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful."

An in-depth exploration of Malevich's pivotal painting, its context and its significance Kazimir Malevich's painting Black Square is one of the twentieth century's emblematic paintings, the visual manifestation of a new period in world artistic culture at its inception. None of Malevich's contemporary revolutionaries created a manifesto, an emblem, as capacious and in its own way unique as this work; it became both the quintessence of the Russian avant-gardist's own art-which he called Suprematism-and a milestone on the highway of world art. Writing about this single painting, Aleksandra Shatskikh sheds new light on Malevich, the Suprematist movement, and the Russian avant-garde. Malevich devoted his entire life to explicating Black Square's meanings. This process engendered a great legacy: the original abstract movement in painting and its theoretical grounding; philosophical treatises; architectural models; new art pedagogy; innovative approaches to theater, music, and poetry; and the creation of a new visual environment through the introduction of decorative applied designs. All of this together spoke to the tremendous potential for innovative shape and thought formation concentrated in Black Square. To this day, many circumstances and events of the origins of Suprematism have remained obscure and have sprouted arbitrary interpretations and fictions. Close study of archival materials and testimonies of contemporaries synchronous to the events described has allowed this author to establish the true genesis of Suprematism and its principal painting.

Concerned with the idea that Wyndham Lewis was a mass of unbound impulses released from the rationalizing censorship of a respectable consciousness, this text argues for a more nuanced and historically aware view of Lewis and his work. The eight contributors consider Lewis's career from its inception to his final novels within a major focus on World War I and the inter-war period. Their essays examine Lewis's art, his post-war politics and aesthetics, the new turn his painting and thought took in the 1930s, and the connections between modernism, war and aggression. Overall, the collection offers a reassessment of the conventional view of Lewis as the uncontrolled aggressor of British modernism.

This book is an exploration of how art-specifically paintings in the European manner-can be mobilized to make knowledge claims about the past. No type of human-made tangible thing makes more complex and bewildering demands in this respect than paintings. Ivan Gaskell argues that the search for pictorial meaning in paintings yields limited results and should be replaced by attempts to define the point of such things, which is cumulative and ever subject to change. He shows that while it is not possible to define what art is-other than being an open kind-it is possible to define what a painting is, as a species of drawing, regardless of whether that painting is an artwork or not at any given time. The book demonstrates that things can be artworks on some occasions but not necessarily on others, though it is easier for a thing to acquire artwork status than to lose it. That is, the movement of a thing into and out of the artworld is not symmetrical. All such considerations are properly matters not of ontology-what is and what is not an artwork-but of use; that is, how a thing might or might not function as an artwork under any given circumstances. These considerations necessarily affect the approach to paintings that at any given time might be able to function as an artwork or might not be able to function as such. Only by taking these factors into account can anyone make viable knowledge about the past. This lively discussion ranges over innumerable examples of paintings, from Rembrandt to Rothko, as well as plenty of far less familiar material from contemporary Catholic devotional works to the Chinese avant garde. Its aim is to enhance philosophical acuity in respect of the analysis of paintings, and to increase their amenability to philosophically satisfying historical use. Paintings and the Past is a must-read for all advanced students and scholars concerned with philosophy of art, aesthetics, historical method, and art history.

Originally a film by British avant-garde filmmaker Nichola Bruce, The Romance of Bricks is a portrait of the artist Liz Finch: a British painter, performer and poet. From her life-changing accident and rural solitude to the mad social whirl of 80s London anarchic performances and up to the present day, The Romance of Bricks sews together archival film over many years to produce an intriguing glimpse into the private world of the artist. Featuring commentary from Jools Holland, Christine Binnie, Jennifer Binnie, John Finch, Brian Clarke, Aubrey Fabing, Richard Strange, Nicola Bateman Bowery, Francesco Brusatin and Martin Harrison alongside an intimate dialogue with the artist herself.

This book offers microhistories related to the transnational circulations of impressionism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The contributors rethink the role of "French" impressionism in shaping these iterations by placing France within its global and imperialist context and arguing that impressionisms might be framed through the mobility studies' concept of "constellations of mobility." Artists engaging with impressionism in France, as in other global contexts, relied on, responded to, appropriated, and resisted elements of form and content based on fluid and interconnected political realities and market structures. Written by scholars and curators, the chapters demand reconsideration of impressionism as a historical construct and the meanings assigned to that term. This project frames future discussion in art history, cultural studies, and global studies on the politics of appropriating impressionism.

One of the best-loved painters in English history, Thomas Gainsborough (1727-1788) was also one of the most personally engaging. Bon vivant, wit, amateur and enthusiastic musician, he charmed sitters and friends alike. His ebullient, if not always reliable, personality comes to life in these two memoirs, written by two very different friends.

Fleshing out surfaces is the first English-language book on skin and flesh tones in art. It considers flesh and skin in art theory, image making and medical discourse in seventeenth to nineteenth-century France. Describing a gradual shift between the early modern and the modern period, it argues that what artists made when imitating human nakedness was not always the same. Initially understood in terms of the body's substance, of flesh tones and body colour, it became increasingly a matter of skin, skin colour and surfaces. Each chapter is dedicated to a different notion of skin and its colour, from flesh tones via a membrane imbued with nervous energy to hermetic borderline. Looking in particular at works by Fragonard, David, Girodet, Benoist and Ingres, the focus is on portraits, as facial skin is a special arena for testing painterly skills and a site where the body and the image become equally expressive. -- .

An extraordinary and inventive graphic biography, Steffen Kverneland's Munch explores the relationships and obsessions that drove the artist behind 'The Scream'. Using text drawn from the writings of Edvard Munch and his contemporaries, this extensively researched and beautifully drawn graphic novel debunks the familiar myth of the half-mad expressionist painter - anguished, starving and ill-treated - to reveal the artist's neglected sense of humour and optimism. Born out of a life-long fascination with all things Munch, Kverneland's award-winning seven-year project is the funniest and most entertaining portrait yet of a complex man and a pioneering artist. "Munch is a dazzling use of sequential storytelling... Rarely have I read a more entertaining biography." The Comics Journal

Enter The Madman's Gallery and discover an extraordinary, illustrated exhibition of the greatest curiosities from the global history of art, featuring one hundred magnificently eccentric antique paintings, engravings, illustrations, and sculptures, each with a fascinatingly bizarre story to tell. Brought to light from the depths of libraries, museums, dealers, and galleries around the world, these forgotten artistic treasures include portraits of oddballs such as the British explorer with a penchant for riding crocodiles, and the Italian monk who levitated so often he's recognized as the patron saint of airplane passengers. Discover impossible medieval land yachts, floating churches, and eagle-powered airships. Encounter dog-headed holy men, armies of German giants, 18th-century stuntmen, human chessboards, screaming ghost heads, and more marvels of the human imagination. A captivating odditorium of obscure and engaging characters and works, each expertly brought to life by historian and curator of the strange Edward Brooke-Hitching, here is a richly illustrated and entertaining gallery for lovers of outre art and history. A GLOBAL SURVEY: Here are European painters who used ground up Egyptian mummies as pigment, examples of the antique Japanese art of Gyotaku (fish stone rubbings) using dried fish as printing plates, a Parisian art hoax featuring paintings actually created by a chimpanzee, and much more. ODDITIES ABOUND: Depictions of the demon worms believed to cause toothaches carved into human molars: Check. A nude version of the Mona Lisa painted by the "bad boy" apprentice of Leonardo da Vinci: Here it is. The most admiring portrait of a cannibal likely ever produced: Presented in full color. EXPERT AUTHOR: Edward Brooke-Hitching is a master of taking visually driven deep dives into unusual historical subjects, such as the maps of imaginary geography in The Phantom Atlas or ancient pathways through the stars in The Sky Atlas, imaginative depictions of heavens, hells, and afterworlds in The Devil's Atlas, and the strangest books imaginable in The Madman's Library. Perfect for: Fans of beautifully illustrated works, art history, and unusual world atlas collections Readers of quirky history such as Schott's Miscellany, Atlas Obscura, and the wildly popular QI series (for which the author is a writer and researcher) Gift for a graduate, teacher, or student of world history, art history, library science, archeology, sociology, or any discipline engaged in the exploration of curiosities and human nature

This book examines the portrayal of themes of boundary crossing, itinerancy, relocation, and displacement in US genre paintings during the second half of the long nineteenth century (c. 1860-1910). Through four diachronic case studies, the book reveals how the high-stakes politics of mobility and identity during this period informed the production and reception of works of art by Eastman Johnson (1824-1906), Enoch Wood Perry, Jr. (1831-1915), Thomas Hovenden (1840-95), and John Sloan (1871-1951). It also complicates art history's canonical understandings of genre painting as a category that seeks to reinforce social hierarchies and emphasize more rooted connections to place by, instead, privileging portrayals of social flux and geographic instability. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, literature, American studies, and cultural geography.