Sandra Blow (1925-2006) is among the most important British artists of the later twentieth century. During a time of rapid change in the art world, her commitment to abstract painting resulted in a large and diverse body of work of distinctive power and subtlety. Michael Bird's fascinating survey of Sandra Blow's life and art is now available for the first time in a handsome paperback edition. Compiled in collaboration with the artist during the last years of her life, it provides a definitive overview of her career. The book is lavishly illustrated throughout with a fully representative selection of Blow's work. In this highly readable account, Michael Bird looks in depth at Blow's evolving studio practice and the personal nature of her abstract vision. He places Blow's achievement firmly within the wider context of British and international art movements of the post-war period and late twentieth century. He also casts new light on the role played in her life by Alberto Burri and Roger Hilton, two influences she acknowledged to be crucial to her art. Through close attention to Blow's working methods, this book provides a unique insight into her creative process. It reveals the intensity of emotional engagement and technical experimentation that lie behind the apparent spontaneity of her vivid handling of materials, colour and form.

One of Britains foremost printmakers, Norman Ackroyd CBE RA has spent a lifetime recording the coastal landscapes of the British Isles. A Shetland Notebook contains forty of his vivid landscape sketches in watercolour. Made in the open air, often aboard a pitching and tossing fishing boat, these lively, spontaneous works capture the unique atmosphere of these remote and beautiful islands. The notebooks unusual format is due entirely to the artist, who uses sheets of various types of paper torn to fit into a loose-leaf ring binder made from two pieces of wooden picture-backing; this he tucks into his coat pocket, ready for use whenever the need arises. His brief but engaging commentaries place each sketch in its context. Following the success of A Line in the Water , Ackroyds collaboration with the award-winning poet Douglas Dunn OBE, published by the Royal Academy in 2009, A Shetland Notebook is an essential purchase for all admirers of this most characterful artists work.

The paintings are grouped under various headings to take the reader through specific visual experiences beginning with some of the artist's tools, colour palettes and showing the development of texture. Seascapes and shorelines are the first stop, going through to the moors,hills and beyond.

At the beginning of 2020, just as global Covid-19 restrictions were coming into force, the artist David Hockney was at his house, studio and garden in Normandy. From there, he witnessed the arrival of spring, and recorded the blossoming of the surrounding landscape on his iPad, a medium he has been using for over a decade. Working outdoors was an antidote to the anxiety of the moment for Hockney – 'We need art, and I do think it can relieve stress,' he says. This uplifting publication – produced to accompany a major exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts – includes 116 of his new iPad paintings and shows to full effect Hockney's singular skill in capturing the exuberance of nature.

Over the past decade, Frank Bowling has enjoyed belated attention and celebration, including a major Tate Britain retrospective in 2019. This comprehensive monograph, published in 2011, is now available in an updated and expanded edition. Born in British Guiana in 1934, Bowling arrived in England in his late teens, going on to study at the Royal College of Art alongside David Hockney and Derek Boshier. By the early 1960s he was recognised as an original force in the vibrant London art scene, with a style that brilliantly combined figurative, symbolic and abstract elements. Dividing his time between New York and London since the late 1960s, he has developed a unique and virtuosic abstract style that combines aspects of American painterly abstraction with a treatment of light and space that consciously recollects the great English landscape painters Gainsborough, Turner and Constable. In a compelling text the art writer, critic and curator Mel Gooding hails Bowling as one of the finest British artists of his generation.

In this remarkable, inspiring collection of essays, acclaimed writer and critic Olivia Laing makes a brilliant case for why art matters, especially in the turbulent political weather of the twenty-first century. Funny Weather brings together a career's worth of Laing's writing about art and culture, examining their role in our political and emotional lives. She profiles Jean-Michel Basquiat and Georgia O'Keeffe, reads Maggie Nelson and Sally Rooney, writes love letters to David Bowie and Freddie Mercury, and explores loneliness and technology, women and alcohol, sex and the body. With characteristic originality and compassion, she celebrates art as a force of resistance and repair, an antidote to a frightening political time. We're often told that art can't change anything. Laing argues that it can. Art changes how we see the world. It makes plain inequalities and it offers fertile new ways of living.