There is a vast collection of Indian natural history drawings in the Library of the Natural History Museum, London. Spanning a period of more than two hundred years, from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, they depict the rich variety of animals, birds and insects to be found in India and the magnificent flora of the different regions. The Art of India presents many of these beautiful images, from fine botanical and zoological illustrations through to depictions of colourful artefacts and trinkets purchased in local markets. The artworks originate from a variety of sources that include individual artists and collectors, as well as organised studies of Indian natural history in the pursuit of science, commerce and politics. They were produced by European and Indian artists who worked to advance the understanding of Indian natural history by recording, describing, classifying and naming the flora and fauna of the country.

Savour a taste of the edible alphabet, from A to Z. Throughout history, visual and performance artists have rendered their visions within the whimsical medium of food. In Carolyn Tillie's deeply satisfying A Feast for the Eyes, you'll embark on a delicious adventure that redefines the art world. Explore the surprising artistry of apple-head dolls, butter sculptures, coffee paintings and a grand cathedral carved entirely from salt. Learn about the ancient role of food creations in ritual and global folk art. Experience the modern magnificence of electrified vegetable sculptures and ethereal molecular gastronomy. Discover why Salvador Dali had an obsession with lobsters, and why there is a giant palace in the American Midwest made entirely of corn. Whether you're a food lover or an art aficionado, this book serves up an aesthetic banquet that will delight your senses - and nourish mind, body and soul.

Through words and photographs, environmental scientist Gretchen C. Daily and photographer Charles J. Katz describe how one relict tree-the magnificent Ceiba pentandra in Sabalito, Costa Rica-carries physical and spiritual importance. The people in the town of Sabalito call the tree la ceiba, a term said to be derived from a Taino word referring to a type of wood used for making canoes in the West Indies. Ceiba evokes times and places where people hollowed out the great cylindrical trunks and glided along languid rivers winding through lush tropical forest. Today the tree is known by different names in regions ranging from southern Mexico and the Caribbean to the southern edge of the Amazon Basin and in western Africa. The ceiba has survived what is probably the highest rate of tropical deforestation in the world. It is a legendary and vital tree in centuries-old forests in places like Costa Rica that were once almost completely forested (98 percent in the mid-twentieth century) and decades later have suffered devastating deforestation (34 percent by 1980). One Tree grew out of a conversation between photographer Chuck Katz and acclaimed ecologist Gretchen Daily about the relict tree-a single tree that remains standing in a pasture, for example, after the forest has been cleared from the land, and takes on iconic importance for the animals, plants, and people in the ecosystem. During a trip the authors took to Costa Rica, Katz focused his lens on the ceiba and a story was born. In descriptive language interwoven with scientific fact, Daily discusses the tree's historical and natural history and the ceiba species in general. She touches on the science of the Costa Rican rainforest and its deforestation and the cultural traditions, legends, and folklore of forests and relict trees. Katz's photographs of the massive tree and the village that takes care of it create an intimate work celebrating the visual and biological intricacies of trees.

Now available in paperback! Andrew Forkner's book provides you with all you need to paint a range of birds in acrylics; taking in birds of prey, songbirds and waterbirds from all over the world. It contains information on the materials and preparation you will need to capture the delicacy and majesty of the subjects.

In this mesmerizing book of photography, acclaimed photographer David Liittschwager reveals the unnerving beauty of three notoriously mysterious sea creatures--the jellyfish, octopus, and seahorse--and how they perceive the world. The jellyfish, the octopus, and the seahorse are among the most wondrous species on Earth--as well as some of the most difficult to document using traditional photography methods. Enter celebrated photographer David Liittschwager, who has spent decades developing specialized portraiture techniques to capture these creatures' pulsating bioluminescence, translucent bodies, and ethereal movements. This luminous collection showcases 200 of Liittschwager's most revealing photographs, paired with penetrating essays that explain how a creature without a brain or without bones perceives the world. Bestselling science writers Elizabeth Kolbert, Jennifer Holland, and Olivia Judson explain the biology and advanced cognitive abilities of these spineless denizens of the deep, exquisitely evoking their unnerving yet undeniable charisma. In these pages, you'll glimpse a seahorse only half an inch tall, a moon jelly spinning off a snowflake-shaped clone, and the blinking comb jelly, which may be the most ancient living animal on Earth. Both enlightening and profound, this enchanting book documents the expanding frontiers of marine science, creating a powerful testament to the value and beauty of these little-seen--and endangered--species.

2012 Reprint of 1960 Edition. Exact facsimile of the original edition, not reproduced with Optical Recognition Software. In this unique and fascinating book, two collectors of pictorial symbols tell the story of flower symbolism, explaining its religious, magical and legendary significance and revealing hundreds of curious and little know facts. This is an essential work for folklorists, for artists and designers in all fields, for botanical and gardening specialists, and for all those who would be familiar with the hidden language of flowers, plants and trees. Profusely illustrated.

Award-winning haiku poet James Deahl teams up with photographer Richard M. Grove/Tai to create a volume of haiku sequences and photographs celebrating the beauty of Ontario, especially Hastings and Wellington Counties - North of Belleville. A great gift book for anyone that is interested in haiku and photography.

Choreographies of the Living explores the implications of shifting from viewing art as an exclusively human undertaking to recognizing it as an activity that all living creatures enact. Carrie Rohman reveals the aesthetic impulse itself to be profoundly trans-species, and in doing so she revises our received wisdom about the value and functions of artistic capacities. Countering the long history of aesthetic theory in the West-beginning with Plato and Aristotle, and moving up through the recent claims of "neuroaesthetics"-Rohman challenges the likening of aesthetic experience to an exclusively human form of judgment. Turning toward the animal in new frameworks for understanding aesthetic impulses, Rohman emphasizes a deep coincidence of humans' and animals' elaborations of fundamental life forces. Examining a range of literary, visual, dance, and performance works and processes by modernist and contemporary figures such as Isadora Duncan, D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, and Merce Cunningham, Rohman reconceives the aesthetic itself not as a distinction separating humans from other animals, but rather as a framework connecting embodied beings. Her view challenges our species to acknowledge the shared status of art-making, one of our most hallowed and formerly exceptional activities.

A brief movement after death by Caleb Cain Marcus explores the release of energy from the body into the universe when we die. The images were taken along the coasts of New York and California and contain sky and ocean-immense bodies of space that we can lose ourselves in; becoming part of their vastness. The inspiration for the book came to the photographer from a personal experience. With the birth of his daughter, his death suddenly felt very near. His childhood questions about what happens when we die resurfaced and Marcus began to think about how to visually represent what occurs after death. The work represents the starting point of his new practice that juxtaposes digital and hand-applied mediums to create a hybrid surface, color and edge that challenges the medium of a photograph and the way in which it is seen, understood and felt. With the motion of a pendulum the grease pencil is swung by a string to make tightly grouped marks that reference the finite quantity of time in a lifespan and that move across the paper as if in a formation of light leaving the earth.

In 1865, the American landscape painter Frederic Edwin Church and his wife, Isabel, traveled to Jamaica on a sojourn of recovery after the tragic deaths of their two young children Herbert and Emma. A time to mourn and escape from the constant reminders found at their home, Olana, the Churches' trip to Jamaica also provided ample inspiration for Frederic.

The Olana Collection includes eight oil sketches, an ink drawing, and a pencil drawing Church made in Jamaica. Five of these oil sketches on paper Church chose to mount to canvas and frame for his and Isabel's enjoyment; over the years they have hung in different rooms at Olana. From these works, and others held by the Cooper-Hewitt, Church created two major studio oils, The Vale of St. Thomas, Jamaica, 1867 (the Wadsworth Atheneum) and The After Glow, 1867 (the Olana Collection). Within Church's oeuvre the studies of Jamaican sunsets, mountains, and foliage are particularly lovely. Church wrote of Jamaica: "The scenery is superb. . . . I have accomplished a great amount of work but there is so much to do that I am at a loss to decide day by day what to paint."

The 2010 exhibit at Olana will help explain Church's working process by showing Sunset Jamaica and the resulting studio work The After Glow together; it will include five works never before exhibited and reveal Church's interesting use of his photography collection both as an aide-memoire and as substrate for sketching. Fern Hunting among Picturesque Mountains includes forty-eight color illustrations, as well as essays by Elizabeth Mankin Kornhauser (on Church's Jamaica work) and Katherine Manthorne (about Church's friends and fellow artists who also traveled to Jamaica to paint)."

Puget Sound's rich abundance of life - from mammals to birds - can be attributed to the fact that the region is far more than just a body of water. Edged by an extraordinary range of habitats, this region is visited and occupied year-round by species that are finely tuned to exploit the resources here that are necessary for their survival. Birds are among the most obvious occupants of these communities, and witnessing their dynamic lives has been a source of inspiration for artist and naturalist Tony Angell. For nearly fifty years Angell has used Puget Sound's natural diversity as his artist's palette. In this book, he describes the living systems within the Sound and shares his observations and encounters with the species that make up the complex communities of the Sound's rivers, tidal flats, islands, and beaches: the fledging flight of a young peregrine, an otter playfully herding a small red rockfish, the grasp of a curious octopus. Angell goes on to explain the methods he uses in his art. The shapes, movements, patterns, and even temperatures and smells that he experiences in the field are all brought to bear on his work. His drawings bring clarity to his visual and emotional memories, and his sculptures allow him to approach a memory from many directions and retain that memory in his hands. In all of his work, he lets the passion and excitement of his discoveries drive his artistic expression. Angell augments his descriptions of the wildlife of the Puget Sound region and his working methods with two appendices listing guides and references to this and other regions by other artists and naturalists. These resources not only put wildlife viewers in touch with the times and places to view particular species, but also speak to the patience and willingness to be delighted that are necessary to increasing the understanding of our wild neighbors. See Tony Angell on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jCemt7hVK_4

Raphael Ritz (1829-1894) is one of the most important artists to have emerged from the Swiss canton of Valais. In the 1850s, Ritz, who later became famous as the "Raphael of the Alps," studied at the renowned Academy of Art in Dusseldorf, Germany, and perfected his technique in the genre of mountain painting, which focuses on the relationship between landscape and man. Ritz, who felt a strong connection to his roots, created landscape idylls in faraway Dusseldorf for an audience that appreciated regional peculiarities. At times with a touch of irony, he put his works at the service of a modern effort to illustrate the timeless character of everyday life. This new monograph looks at the work of the Valais-born artist beyond national borders and frames it in both the Swiss and international artistic contexts of the time. Ritz's correspondence with his father, Lorenz Justin Ritz, who was a painter as well, is also comprehensively examined for the first time: it constitutes an important testimony to his artistic self-discovery. Selected photographs by Swiss contemporary artists from the museum's collection show the Valais of today and establish a connection between Ritz's ethnographic view of his own origins and the present. Text in French and German.

A book of deeply personal and lush photographs, drawings, and writing, Blue Violet is Cig Harvey's celebration of the natural world and the senses. Blue Violet is a vibrant meditation on the procession of seasons, sensory abundance, and the magic in everyday life. Part art book, botanical guide, historical encyclopedia, and poetry collection, Blue Violet is a compendium of beauty, color, and the senses. Plants, flowers, and our experience of the natural world are the threads that tie this unique book together. Exploring the five senses, Blue Violet takes the reader on a personal journey through nature and the range of human emotions. As with her previous three titles - You Look At Me Like An Emergency, Gardening at Night, and You an Orchestra You a Bomb - this book invites the reader to pause, laugh, cry, create, and become more aware of the natural world. Images and text in a variety of forms (prose poetry, recipes, lists, research pieces, diagrams) focus on immediate experience to understand the vibrancy of the senses on memory and feelings.

This guide to painting watercolour landscapes is ideal if you want to learn to paint but are short on time. Broken down into 33 quick and easy paintings that take no more than 30 minutes to complete, this basic course will teach you all the skills you need to paint landscapes and their components, including trees in winter, sparkling water, hedgerows and gates, animals, human figures and buildings in the landscape. The 30-minute paintings are all worked at postcard size - ideal for a 6 x 4in (A6) watercolour pad, and tracings are included for those with limited drawing skills. Each small painting is a work of art in its own right, and can be stored in your portfolio for reference later, or framed and hung on the wall to impress your friends. The book is broken down into chapters that focus, respectively, on essential watercolour techniques including colour mixing and glazing; laying washes and creating skies and realistic-looking clouds; the rudiments of composition; trees and flowers in a landscape; water- still and moving, from stream to open sea; and the living landscape - human and animal figures, structures and buildings in the landscape. The final section of the book contains three complete paintings that demonstrate how to combine all the techniques and elements of painting landscapes, as gleaned from the preceding chapters. These paintings, too, are accompanied by actual-size tracings. There are 33 tracings in all to help you compose your own landscape paintings. Praise for the Ready to Paint in 30 Minutes series: "This is a genuinely exciting evolution of a popular series. You'll be guided through some simple exercises and on to complete paintings, gaining valuable insights that will develop and improve your skills." - Henry Malt, Artbookreview.net

Birds & Words is a true reflection of Charley Harper, that rare species of a man with twinkling eyes and smile, with wit as infectiously keen and light-hearted as his paintings. Harper the humorist is as captivating in the self composed stories that accompany his serigraphs as Harper the artist. This boxed reissue of the highly collectible 1974 classic is perfect for every bird lover, art collector and Charley Harper fan alike. Specially made cloth wrapped boxes open to reveal a numbered cloth bound book and one of four beautiful silk-screen prints, each estate stamped and hand numbered. A perfect gift for any occasion.

A beautiful book that argues artists were fascinated by still life painting considerably earlier than previously thought This eloquent and generously illustrated book asserts that artists were fascinated by and extremely skilled at still life significantly earlier than previously thought. Instead of the genre beginning in the early 17th century, noted scholar David Ekserdjian explores its origins in classical antiquity and the gradual re-emergence of still life in Renaissance painting. The author presents a visual anthology of finely executed flowers, fruit, food, household objects, and furnishings seen in the background of paintings. Paintings are reproduced in full and paired with detailed close-ups of still-life elements within the work. Ekserdjian further examines both the artistic and symbolic significance of a chosen detail, as well as information about each artist's career. Featured works include radiant paintings from Renaissance greats such as Da Vinci, Durer, Holbein, Michelangelo, Raphael, and Van Eyck, as well as the work of less-celebrated masters Barthelemy d'Eyck and Ortolano.

This comprehensive guide to painting landscapes in watercolour features the expert tuition of six renowned watercolour artists. It covers all aspects of painting, from materials and techniques through to planning a painting, sketching and perspective. Learn the techniques of wet into wet, spattering, dry brushing, lifting out and using salt to create texture and interest, and follow the step-by-step demonstrations to create realistic water, skies, reflections and buildings, as well as mood and atmosphere. With nine beautiful projects to try, and numerous examples of the authors' work to inspire you, this is the ideal introduction to landscape painting for artists of all abilities. This book includes material previously published in the highly successful Step-by-Step Leisure Arts series and the Watercolour Tips and Techniques series.

Hugh Morton has seldom been seen in his adult life without a camera around his neck. Much to the benefit of his beloved home state, he has crisscrossed North Carolina, from highlands to lowlands, recording nearly every step along the way. While many of his photographs of the state's people, places, and events were collected in Hugh Morton's ""North Carolina"", this new book showcases a generous collection of his signature wildlife and nature photography and includes a few of the photographer's favorite pictures of people and events that were not included in the first volume. The scenic and nature photographs are organized geographically, from the mountains to the coast. Revealing Morton's curiosity about and love of the natural world, photographs feature woodland creatures, waterfalls, beaches, and more. Some images will be familiar to those who live or travel in North Carolina. Many of the photographs here have been recovered from deep within Morton's personal archive, bringing to print some long-hidden treasures. Consisting of 162 photographs, this collection is a rich and rewarding display of North Carolina's natural bounty as it has evolved before the eyes of one of the state's most popular photographers.

A lush visual document of the Clark Art Institute's first-ever outdoor exhibition, featuring the work of six significant contemporary artists working in sculpture today A reverence for nature and a desire to further enliven the surrounding trails, pastures, and woods inspired Ground/work-the Clark Art Institute's first outdoor exhibition-which this book records and situates within the broader context of contemporary sculpture. The six major site-responsive commissions created by Kelly Akashi, Nairy Baghramian, Jennie C. Jones, Eva LeWitt, Analia Saban, and Haegue Yang are documented throughout the seasons, alongside texts that reflect upon and illuminate the individual and collective responses of artists. Process shots and working documents are placed alongside grand single shots of artworks and their landscape contexts. Critical texts represent a wide range of significant voices in the field of contemporary art. Distributed for the Clark Art Institute Exhibition Schedule: Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA (October 6, 2020-October 17, 2021)

Hugh Laidman headed the U.S. Marine Corp. art program, was commissioned by the National Gallery of Art to do work for NASA, taught art, and was a successful syndicated cartoonist. All his skill and experience as both artist and teacher is distilled in Drawing Animals, a concise, easy-to-follow, beautifully illustrated guide for artists at all levels, beginner to expert. Laidman offers invaluable advice on methods and techniques before proceeding to the heart of the book: expertly rendered, step-by-step, instructional drawings of more than two dozen animals, from cats and dogs to elephants and gorillas. The emphasis throughout is on understanding animal anatomy and behavior as a guide to creating natural, expressive drawings, while developing an individual style and approach. Unabridged republication of the edition published by E. P. Dutton, New York, 1979. 26 lessons with varying numbers of illustrations.