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.

This almanac of overlooked vintage subject matter has an emphasis on art, design, photography and culture. With an extensive array of rare images, Outr Journal presents a curated compendium of the unusual that takes its cues from cabinets of curiosities and journals of miscellany such as The Saturday Book of old. The focus on underground topics and pop culture extends across time and continents to include highlights such as: religious architecture in the Space Age, found photos and images of masked people, Satan, pop culture and many more.

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.

'Mr Roscoe's Garden is a key outcome of The Fragrant Liverpool project. Conceived by Jyll Bradley, this is a unique international art project exploring the stories, rites and exchanges that occur when a flower is cut and placed in the human hand. The project centres on the fascinating story of the Liverpool's Botanic Collection and the people involved in its intriguing history. Established by William Roscoe in 1802, and moved to more extensive sites in both 1846 when it became a public facility and in 1964, the complete Botanic Collection has not been on display since 1984 when it closed to the public in a political storm that mirrored the cataclysmic 1980s decline of Liverpool itself. The collection thus has both a glorious and tragic past. Jyll Bradley draws together the compelling tales of the Botanic Collection's history in this creatively ambitious and beautifully illustrated book, evoking the people that made the collection and the distant lands that supplied the plants. By the early nineteenth century the Liverpool Botanic Collection was one of the greatest botanic gardens of its day, filled with strange and rare plants arriving on ships through the City's port from an ever-widening imperial world. By the mid-twentieth the Collection included the greatest orchid collection ever amassed in municipal Britain, as it still does today. While the indignity of the closure lives on, so do, by miracle, the living plants and the dried plants (in Liverpool's magnificent Herbarium); the books; the paintings and all the other riches that have, at one time, or another, co-existed in the Liverpool Botanic Gardens. The glory days are still in the past, but the plant collections have continued to be nurtured and grown and Liverpool's current revival has signalled a new future for the Collection. Painstakingly designed by Jyll Bradley, Mr Roscoe's Garden is a work of art in itself. Its publication also coincides with the re-emergence of the collection as goes to the Chelsea Flower Show for the first time in 30 years and the Gardens open once again to the public.