Animals and Artists discusses a selection of modern and contemporary artworks that challenge traditional representations of nonhuman animals, and that expose human viewers to animal otherness. It argues that the individuated and discrete human self in possession of consciousness, rationality, empathy, a voice, and a face, is open to challenge by nonhuman capacities such as distributed cognition, gender ambiguity, metamorphosis, mimicry and avian speech. In traditional philosophy, animals represent all that is lacking in humankind. However, Animals and Artists argues that just because humans frame 'the animal' as a negative term, their binary opposite and everything that they are not, does not mean that animals have no meaning in themselves. Rather, animals in their very unknowability, mark the limits of human thinking. By combining art analysis with poststructuralist, post humanist and animal studies theories as well as scientific research, Elizabeth decentres the human and establishes a new position where differences are embraced. In our current moment of ecological crisis, Animals and Artists brings readers into solidarity with other animal species, among them spiders, silkworms, bees, parrots and octopuses. The book raises empathy for other live forms, drawing attention to the shared vulnerabilities of human and nonhuman animals, and in so doing underlines the power of art to bring about social change. Readers will include animal studies scholars, artists, art historians, Jean Painleve scholars, Surrealist enthusiasts, non-academics who are concerned about the human-animal relationship, the environment or larger identity politics issues.

Take your colouring to the next level by doing it with stickers instead of pencils! Each one of the 12 designs in this book has spaces for mosaic shapes that you fill in using the pages of different coloured stickers in the back, allowing you to create one-of-a-kind mosaic designs. Colour-by-sticker is a fun new way to express creativity and explore colour, and this series gives readers the freedom to create their own unique designs, no artistic ability required. Sticker Mosaics: Exotic Animals features 12 different beautiful ocean images to colour with the included 25 sheets of stickers. Whether you choose the brightly coloured macaws, a curious chameleon, or a friendly alpaca, you'll be creating a truly unique work of art that any animal lover will adore.

A large part of photographer/artist/printmaker Steve Miller's work has been devoted to walking the line to the intersection of art and science. In Radiographic we get to see the first collision of these incredible experiments in book form. Working with scientific equipment including electron microscopes, X-rays, MRI machines, and even Rorschach blots, Miller examines natural subjects (and sometimes man-made ones) through an x-ray technology that results in the creation of surprisingly beautiful representational and abstract imagery. Admired equally by scientists with whom he has worked at places like New York's Brookhaven National Laboratory; art curators who have exhibited and/or written about his work, like The National Academy of Sciences in Washington, DC and essayist Peter Schjeldahl; as well as consumers who eagerly snatch up his wall-sized prints at places like Artspace, Miller's totally breakthrough and exciting explorations have created the unique profile of an artist who thinks conceptually while engaging universally, making exquisite artworks based on such diverse elements as blood cells, x-rays of plants and animals from the Amazon rainforest, the folding of proteins, and the movement of ions. Impossible to describe without sounding ridiculously arcane, but impossible to resist once the artworks are viewed, this book offers an opportunity to see the work of a creative talent described by The New Yorker magazine as "qualifying as a Prophet". Here is a man who has expanded the boundaries of what we know as 'art'.

Art has always been inspired by the wildlife around us. Since earliest times we have been continually fascinated by both wildlife and the challenge of representing it. This book sets the scene of how wildlife has been portrayed in art and guides the reader through the principles of practical drawing and painting wildlife. It covers recommended equipment, techniques, fieldcraft, composition and anatomy, and offers help for those wishing to exhibit their work.

These composite landscapes are recreated places from an estranged homeland. Visible and obscured parts of the landscape suggest the interplay of effects between man and nature, as well as the imperfections of memory. The discontinuity induces the viewer to draw on their own experiences to complete the work. The textures of human fingerprints in the work evokes the uniqueness of our connection with nature and our impressions upon it.

Did you know... The Galapagos Penguin's speckled markings make each of them as unique as a snowflake? The Emperor Penguin weighs the same as a Labrador retriever? The Adelie Penguin takes its name from the sweetheart of a Napoleonic naval captain turned explorer? From tiny fairy penguins to the regal emperor penguin, street artist and ornithologist, Matt Sewell, illustrates one of the world's favourite birds in this charming follow-up to Owls, Our Garden Birds, Our Songbirds and Our Woodland Birds. Matt captures the famously quirky characters of penguins through his unique and much-loved watercolours accompanied by whimsical descriptions. You'll discover everything you've ever wondered about this enigmatic bird and his feathered friends from across the globe.

Tree Lines unites striking ink drawings of high-altitude pine trees with poetic vignettes about how people interact with mountain environments. The drawings and text work together to form a direct artistic encounter with timberline conifers. The husband and wife team of Valerie and Michael Cohen employ a unique process whereby she draws in isolation, gives him her drawings, and he then writes whatever he's inspired to create. Neither offers the other any kind of feedback or instruction. The result is an accessible and deeply engaging work that is also extremely well researched; the Cohens bring a lifetime of scholarship in literature, history, and the environment to this work. The drawings are black-and-white, pen-and-ink representations of high alpine ecosystems. The prose is stripped bare, abbreviated in an epigrammatic style that is poetic and spontaneous. Trees represented here are the Western Juniper or Sierra Juniper, the Limber, and the Bristlecone Pine-three species of long-lived, slow-growing conifers that grow across the Great Basin. While they represent only a small portion of the vegetative culture high in the western mountains, the Cohens use representation as abstraction as is utilized by writers and artists to convey a unique kind of microcosm of our natural environment. This book compares to such classics as Leopold's A Sand County Almanac, and Berger's Ways of Seeing, which open up lines of observation, analysis, and art for a new generation of readers.

When first-time author and artist Deborah Paris stepped into Lennox Woods, an old-growth southern hardwood forest in northeast Texas, she felt a disruption that was both spatial and temporal. Walking the remnants of an old wagon trail past ancient stands of pine, white oak, elm, hickory, sweetgum, maple, hornbeam, and red oak, she felt drawn into a reverie that took her back to 'the beginning, both physically and metaphorically.'Painting the Woods: Nature, Memory and Metaphor explores the experience of landscape through the lens of art and art-making. It is a place-based meditation on nature, art, memory, and time, grounded in Paris's experiences over the course of a year in Lennox Woods. Her account unfolds through the twin arcs of the changing seasons and her creative process as a landscape painter. In the tradition of Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, narrative passages interweave with observations about the natural history of Lennox Woods, its flora and fauna, art history, the science of memory, Transcendentalist philosophy, the role of metaphor in creative work, and even loop quantum gravity theory. Each chapter explores a different aspect of the forest and a different step in the art-making process, illuminating our connection to the natural world through language, comprehension of time, and visual depictions of the landscape. The complex layers of the forest and Paris's journey through it emerge as metaphors for the larger themes of the book, just as the natural world underpins the art-making drawn from it. Like the trail that winds through Lennox Woods, memory and time intertwine to provide a path for understanding nature, art, and our relationship to both.

In recent years, there has been intense debate about the reality behind the depiction of maritime cityscapes, especially harbours. Visualizing Harbours in the Classical World argues that the available textual and iconographic evidence supports the argument that these representations have a symbolic, rather than literal, meaning and message, and moreover that the traditional view, that all these media represent the reality of the contemporary cityscapes, is often unrealistic. Bridging the gap between archaeological sciences and the humanities, it ably integrates iconographic materials, epigraphic sources, history and archaeology, along with visual culture. Focusing on three main ancient ports - Alexandria, Rome and Leptis Magna - Federico Ugolini considers a range of issues around harbour iconography, from the triumphal imagery of monumental harbours and the symbolism of harbour images, their identification across the Mediterranean, and their symbolic, ideological and propagandistic messages, to the ways in which aspects of Imperial authority and control over the seas were expressed in the iconography of the Julio-Claudian, Trajan and Severii periods, how they reflected the repute, growth and power of the mercantile class during the Imperial era, and how the use of imagery reflected euergetism and paideia, which would inform the Roman audience about who had power over the sea.

From the Schuylkill to the Hudson delves into the important and under-explored tradition of landscape painting in Philadelphia from the early American Republic (1775) to the Centennial International Exposition (1876), and how that corpus shaped the better-known Hudson River School. Examining for the first time Philadelphia's role in the development of American landscape painting, the book considers the landscape genre across multiple mediums, including paintings, watercolors, prints, miniatures and ceramics. Focusing on the shifting symbolism of local waterways and rivers, the publication explores how these sites became emblematic of the young nation's values and narratives. Featuring works drawn from the collection of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, including paintings by luminaries such as Thomas Cole, Thomas Doughty and William Russell Birch, this volume narrates landscape's trajectory from a contextual tool in American portraiture to a subject in its own right.

Connecting Renaissance humanism to the variety of "critical posthumanisms" in twenty-first-century literary and cultural theory, Renaissance Posthumanism reconsiders traditional languages of humanism and the human, not by nostalgically enshrining or triumphantly superseding humanisms past but rather by revisiting and interrogating them. What if today's "critical posthumanisms," even as they distance themselves from the iconic representations of the Renaissance, are in fact moving ever closer to ideas in works from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century? What if "the human" is at once embedded and embodied in, evolving with, and de-centered amid a weird tangle of animals, environments, and vital materiality? Seeking those patterns of thought and practice, contributors to this collection focus on moments wherein Renaissance humanism looks retrospectively like an uncanny "contemporary"-and ally-of twenty-first-century critical posthumanism.

Since the Renaissance, art in Belgium and the Netherlands has been known for its innovations in realistic representation and its fluency in symbolism. New market forces and artistic concerns fueled the development of landscape as an independent genre in Belgium in the sixteenth century, and landscape emerged as a major focus for nineteenth-century realist and symbolist artists. Nature's Mirror, and the exhibition it accompanies, traces these landmark developments with a rich array of seldom-seen works. Nature's Mirror presents its collection of prints and drawings in chronological order, exploring the evolving dialogue between subjective experience and the external world from the Renaissance through the First World War. Essays by American and Belgian specialists examine artists within the regional, political, and industrial contexts that strongly influenced them. Featuring more than one hundred works, many from the leading private collection of Belgian art in America, the Hearn Family Trust, Nature's Mirror explores the evolution of Belgian art in this fruitful period with remarkable lucidity and detail.