Whether your character is jumping for joy or grappling with an opponent, this book provides all the essential techniques to draw more lifelike action figures in the classic Japanese manga style. The comprehensive introduction first shows the reader the physical anatomy of male vs. female figures and gives important tips on proportions, perspective and small but often-overlooked details such as the relative differences between male and female hands, fingers and feet. Five subsequent chapters cover over 40 action poses in the following categories: Chapter 1: Action (e.g. running and jumping) Chapter 2: Martial Arts (e.g. punching and kicking) Chapter 3: Interacting (e.g. judo holds and high fives) Chapter 4: Weapons (e.g. swords and knives) Chapter 5: Reacting (e.g. dodging a punch or taking a punch) Each pose and movement is illustrated with a rough sketch outline followed by a highlighted manga drawing containing detailed annotations by the author. After studying the sketches, you practice the drawing techniques in a tracing section at the end of each chapter. Each chapter also provides professional tips on the use of color and shading for greater realism. Special sections contain information and tips on particular topics of interest, such as how to draw clothes, hair and facial expressions or how to create special effects. At the end of the book, an actual 6-page comic strip gives readers the opportunity to practice what they have learned by filling in the missing elements.

2019 marked the 40th anniversary of Barbara Nanning's graduation in ceramics from the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam. Over those forty years, Nanning (b.1957) has become an internationally respected artist with work in countless public and private collections in the Netherlands and around the world. Originally, her reputation was due mainly to her pioneering ceramics and installations, which had completely abandoned the container form that had so long dominated studio pottery. But for the last 25 years Nanning has worked chiefly in a different medium: glass, in which she has created an amazing and multi-faceted oeuvre. Each year she spends an extended period in the Czech Republic, where expert glassblowers help her to conjure up the most extraordinary and thrilling objects in that material.

Minimal Conditions explores the expansion of sculpture into phenomenal and perception-based practices in and around the Los Angeles area in the 1970s, a time when California Light and Space art played a key role in the evolution of minimal art toward dematerialization. Focusing on the contingent and embodied nature of work by such artists as Robert Irwin, James Turrell, Doug Wheeler, Larry Bell, Eric Orr, and Maria Nordman, author Dawna L. Schuld proposes a method of analysis that considers these pieces not as discrete objects, but as diverse species of experience. Schuld's compelling study identifies perceptual, philosophical, and historical common ground shared by minimal artists working on both coasts and in the desert landscape.

Natural history and art have been life-long preoccupations of the leading British painter Kurt Jackson (b.1961). For this book, Jackson has returned to zoology, the subject he studied at university, to create a beautiful bestiary: a body of work about fauna. Bestiaries date back to medieval times when religious instruction promoted the study and interpretation of animal life, often with the aid of elaborate illustrations. Later, the religious framework fell away, as artists and authors including Picasso, Toulouse Lautrec, Guillaume Apollinaire and Jorge Luis Borges used the form as a means of exploring nature, humanity and the relationship between the two. Jackson's contemporary bestiary extends this tradition, looking closely at both everyday and lesser-known species of birds, insects, mammals and fish in order to stimulate readers' connections with and appreciation of the world around them. Combining stunning imagery with commentaries and poems written by the artist, the book gives fascinating insights into the working life of one of the most popular and original artists working in Britain today, and makes a perfect companion to both Kurt Jackson (2012) and Kurt Jackson Sketchbooks (2012/2014).

Experience the brilliant artist's lifelong obsession with nature and immersion in gardens, a bedrock of her hugely influential work. Yayoi Kusama's work is the product of an infinite curiosity and obsessive drive to create. Throughout the artist's long and varied career, there is one persistent yet little-studied through line-her deep engagement with nature. From early sketches depicting flowers at her family's plant nursery in Japan, to her most recent monumental sculptures of botanical forms poised to take flight, Kusama consistently calls our attention to the patterns, connections, and cycles of living things that are not always visible. KUSAMA: Cosmic Nature is the accompanying catalogue to the first comprehensive exploration of the artist's enduring fascination with the natural world, exhibited across the 250-acre landscape of The New York Botanical Garden. The exhibition examines her lifelong awareness and attunement to nature, which serves not merely as a source of inspiration, but is an integral source of power for her artistic language. This profound life force pervades all of Kusama's work, from studies of the molecular to contemplations of the universal, resulting in a transcendent, cosmic nature. Exhibition guest curator Mika Yoshitake, an independent scholar specializing in postwar Japanese art, and Joanna L. Groarke, NYBG exhibitions curator, catalogue co-editors, bring together essays by art historians, curators, and a scientist, who each present unique interpretations of Kusama's engagement with the natural world. Featuring more than 120 drawings, paintings, sculptures, and archival photographs, including stunning views of the works displayed in NYBG's gardens and galleries, KUSAMA: Cosmic Nature offers a new perspective on one of the world's most celebrated contemporary artists.

“We are all inside this thing—but how?” This book explores 21st century art’s reckonings with the technosphere. Almost unimaginable in its complexity and scale, a man-made megastructure surrounds all of us, and often seems inescapable. Outlining the poetics of encryption that attend to this infrastructural condition, Samman explores dramatic motifs including confinement, capture, and burial, as well as access and exclusion from secured domains. Poetics of Encryption excavates the art of our times as it quests through caves, cables, codes, satellites, and icons. Toggling between enlightened concern and occult dreaming it surveys a counter-intuitive aesthetic of the interface: Addressing those who cannot write code, this analogy in contemporary art stages its own ‘digital’, both virtually and analogue.

While recent studies in neuroscience and psychology have shed light on our sensory and perceptual experiences of art, they have yet to explain how contemporary art downplays perceptual responses and, instead, encourages conceptual thought. The Psychology of Contemporary Art brings together the most important developments in recent scientific research on visual perception and cognition and applies the results of empirical experiments to analyses of contemporary artworks not normally addressed by psychological studies. The author explains, in simple terms, how neuroaesthetics, embodiment, metaphor, conceptual blending, situated cognition and extended mind offer fresh perspectives on specific contemporary artworks - including those of Marina Abramovic, Francis Alys, Martin Creed, Tracey Emin, Felix Gonzales-Torres, Marcus Harvey, Mona Hatoum, Thomas Hirschorn, Gabriel Orozco, Marc Quinn and Cindy Sherman. This book will appeal to psychologists, cognitive scientists, artists and art historians, as well as those interested in a deeper understanding of contemporary art.

This intelligently argued, critical overview is invaluable for the way in which it reveals and makes coherent sense of the often bewildering diversity of styles, forms, media, techniques and agendas that proliferate in contemporary art. Now revised and expanded, Michael Archer's acclaimed book is brought right up to date with discussions about the comprehensive globalization of art since the 1990s, which has been reflected in the growth of the exhibition calendar and the number of new museums opening around the world. With over thirty new illustrations and an updated timeline and bibliography, Art Since 1960 provides an indispensable survey and source of information on the evolution of art over the past four decades.

The first major exhibition and catalog dedicated to the work of groundbreaking painter and filmmaker Mike Henderson. Mike Henderson (b. 1944) is a painter, filmmaker, and professor emeritus at University of California, Davis. Published to accompany his first museum retrospective, this catalog surveys Henderson's paintings and films from 1965 to 1985, which are rooted as much in Francisco Goya's horror of humanity as in Sun Ra's hope for a new Black future. In the work of that time, Henderson depicted scenes of racial violence, heteromasculinity, and abject social conditions with force and unflinching directness. In 1985, a studio fire damaged much of Henderson's output from the previous two decades, obscuring vital ideas about a time of tumult and change, often referred to as a world on fire. Mike Henderson: Before the Fire, 1965-1985 addresses Henderson's multifaceted art of that period, which examined and offered new ideas about Black life in the visual languages of protest, Afrofuturism, and surrealism. Published in association with the Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, University of California, Davis Exhibition dates: Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art January 29-June 25, 2023

Out of My Great Sorrows is the story of Philadelphia artist Mary Zakarian, whose life and work were shaped by the experiences of her mother, a survivor of the 1915 Armenian Genocide. Written by Mary Zakarian's niece and nephew, the narrative examines the complexities of the artist's life as they relate to many issues, including ethnicity, gender, immigration, and assimilation. Above all this is a story of trauma - its effects on the survivor, its transmission through the generations, and its role in the artistic experience. Zakarian painted obsessively throughout her life. As she gained recognition for her artwork, she became increasingly haunted by her mother's untold story and was driven to express the tragedy of the Armenian Genocide in her art. Zakarian's attempt to deal openly with the issues of trauma and guilt caused conflicts in her relationship with her mother. These emotions became a driving force behind her art as well as the basis for her personal difficulties. By examining Mary Zakarian's life and art, the authors bring new insights to the study of the Armenian experience. This moving story will inspire all those who have struggled to express themselves in the face of injustice and oppression.

Chuck Close immediately liked the idea of a book without words. As a child, his severe dyslexia stood in the way of reading, making images all the more important. To this day, he remembers a visual encyclopaedia from his early years and the feeling of being overtaken by the intensity of its pictures. The idea was also compatible with Close's ongoing interest in revealing the process of his work, which he accomplishes largely through visual presentation, using very few words, if any. Scribble Book is a self-portrait that emerges step-by-step out of the printing process, one plate and one colour at a time. The viewer follows a series of 9 individual plate proofs along with a corresponding series of 9 progressive proofs. By comparing the plate proofs against the progressive proofs, the viewer may ascertain not only the effect as one colour is added to another to create the final 9-colour self-portrait, but also the compositional decisions and careful modifications made by Close at each stage of the project. A similar work was made with 12 plates and included in the exhibition Chuck Close Prints: Process and Collaboration at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2004. It was an immediate success. However, Close became fully aware of the effectiveness of the work only by means of an error: two of the prints were hung out of sequence, a circumstance that evaded the notice of both Close and the museum staff. It was not long before representatives of the museum received letters from two visitors who had noticed the error. "And just imagine," Close relates, "if two people took the time to write letters, how many more must have figured it out and not bothered to write in " Careful viewing was all that was needed, and the work inspired just that. Scribble Book is presented in this Steidl edition as two accordion-fold books. The first shows the series of plate proofs, and the second the series of progressive proofs, culminating with a 9-colour self-portrait. For those seeking a more detailed understanding of the printmaking process, these books are accompanied by a separate text booklet in which the artist gives a personal account of the drawing process as recorded through the soft-ground etching method.

Philippe Apeloig's design career began in 1985 at the Musee d'Orsay when he designed the poster for the Museum's first exhibition, `Chicago, Birth of a Metropolis'. He is noted for his posters, many of which are in the collection of MoMA, and his typography, including the typefaces Octobre and Drop. This exhibition and book surveys and explores the entirety of Apeloig's graphic design process and philosophy. His posters, logos, visual identities, books and animations are reproduced along with the steps in their development, and the major influences that fuel his work.

A remarkable illustrated volume of artwork and images selected from the diaries David Sedaris has been creating for four decades In this richly illustrated book, readers will for the first time experience the diaries David Sedaris has kept for nearly 40 years in the elaborate, three-dimensional, collaged style of the originals. A celebration of the unexpected in the everyday, the beautiful and the grotesque, this visual compendium offers unique insight into the author's view of the world and stands as a striking and collectible volume in itself. Compiled and edited by Sedaris's longtime friend Jeffrey Jenkins, and including interactive components, postcards, and never-before-seen photos and artwork, this is a necessary addition to any Sedaris collection, and will enthrall the author's fans for many years to come.

This book explores the career of the St Ives artist Kate Nicholson, daughter of Ben and Winifred Nicholson, from her early landscapes, the still lifes painted in Cumberland and St Ives, the abstracts - many of them inspired by her travels in Greece - to the late works made on the Isle of Eigg in the Hebrides. It examines her artistic relationship with her mother, with whom she painted side by side in Cumberland and Scotland, and on their many Greek travels. It also discusses her creative relationship with her father with whom she lived in St Ives in the mid-1950s for two years, as well as her friendship with many of the St Ives artists and her role in the Penwith Society.

Published to accompany the exhibition 'Kate Nicholson' at Falmouth Art Gallery, this book is the first monograph on this highly talented artist who deserves to be better known. It illustrates many works from both public and private collections and draws on groundbreaking new research, together with the author's experience of travelling with her on painting trips.

The groundbreaking sculptor's most comprehensive monograph to date

Jean-Michel Othoniel is an artist who creates sculptures that explore themes of fragility, transformation, and ephemerality. Using the repetition of such modular elements as bricks or beads, his work deploys various strategies that hint at loss and despair – cracks in his objects' perfect surfaces, negative spaces and, early in his career, transient materials such as sulfur. The most authoritative study of the artist's work to date, it includes intimate gallery pieces as well as monumental public commissions around the world.

Germany Divided explores a selection of unpublished and unseen works from some of the leading names in contemporary art. Showcased are key works from six artists who re-defined art in Germany in the second half of the twentieth century: Georg Baselitz; Marcus Lupertz; Blinky Palermo; A.R. Penck; Sigmar Polke and Gerhard Richter. In-depth biographical essays on each artist show how the division of Germany into separate states affected their work; and the importance of the experience of migration from East to West. The new consumer culture in the West contrasted starkly with the planned economy of the East. Artists on both side of the Wall were faced with the difficult emotional task of negotiating with the past; not only the recent history of the Third Reich, but the 'lost' traditions of German painting, particularly Expressionism, from which they had been cut adrift. Germany Divided explores the work of these artists in the broader historical context of Germany and Europe in the 1960s and 1970s, and shows how these debates placed crucial emphasis on the creation and display of art. Graphic traditions, reaching back through Expressionism to older traditions of print-making in Germany, were an essential part of the reconstruction of artistic life, and a basis for the phenomenal international success of German art on an international stage in the decades to follow.

The first monograph on this important but overlooked artist. Coincides with a major show of new work at Alan Cristea Gallery, London, 27 June to 31 July, 2019. Mick Moon RA was born in Edinburgh in 1937 and grew up in Blackpool. He studied at the Chelsea School of Art (1958-62) and later taught at the Slade School of Fine Art (1973-90). He was elected a Royal Academician in 1994 and his work now forms part of many public collections including those of the Scottish National Gallery, Tate and the Victoria and Albert Museum. Moon's paintings and prints combine a wide variety of media and techniques in complex and intriguing layers. More recently, photographic elements have formed part of his practice, along with textural materials such as wood and cloth which Moon combines with ink and paint. The art historian Mel Gooding provides an authoritative insight into Mick Moon's practice and a definitive overview of his career. He argues that Moon is one of the most important artists of his generation and asserts his place as one of the key figures of post-war British art.