|
Books > Arts & Architecture > Art forms, treatments & subjects > Art treatments & subjects > Iconography, subjects depicted in art
"[A] fascinating and indispensable book."-Christopher Knight, Los
Angeles Times Best Books of 2018-The Guardian Gold Medal for
Contribution to Publishing, 2019 California Book Awards Carleton
Watkins (1829-1916) is widely considered the greatest American
photographer of the nineteenth century and arguably the most
influential artist of his era. He is best known for his pictures of
Yosemite Valley and the nearby Mariposa Grove of giant sequoias.
Watkins made his first trip to Yosemite Valley and Mariposa Grove
in 1861 just as the Civil War was beginning. His photographs of
Yosemite were exhibited in New York for the first time in 1862, as
news of the Union's disastrous defeat at Fredericksburg was landing
in newspapers and while the Matthew Brady Studio's horrific
photographs of Antietam were on view. Watkins's work tied the West
to Northern cultural traditions and played a key role in pledging
the once-wavering West to Union. Motivated by Watkins's pictures,
Congress would pass legislation, signed by Abraham Lincoln, that
preserved Yosemite as the prototypical "national park," the first
such act of landscape preservation in the world. Carleton Watkins:
Making the West American includes the first history of the birth of
the national park concept since pioneering environmental historian
Hans Huth's landmark 1948 "Yosemite: The Story of an Idea."
Watkins's photographs helped shape America's idea of the West, and
helped make the West a full participant in the nation. His pictures
of California, Oregon, and Nevada, as well as modern-day
Washington, Utah, and Arizona, not only introduced entire
landscapes to America but were important to the development of
American business, finance, agriculture, government policy, and
science. Watkins's clients, customers, and friends were a veritable
"who's who" of America's Gilded Age, and his connections with
notable figures such as Collis P. Huntington, John and Jessie
Benton Fremont, Eadweard Muybridge, Frederick Billings, John Muir,
Albert Bierstadt, and Asa Gray reveal how the Gilded Age helped
make today's America. Drawing on recent scholarship and fresh
archival discoveries, Tyler Green reveals how an artist didn't just
reflect his time, but acted as an agent of influence. This telling
of Watkins's story will fascinate anyone interested in American
history; the West; and how art and artists impacted the development
of American ideas, industry, landscape, conservation, and politics.
Depicting more than 220 African species, the stunning large-scale
mural African Menagerie is artist Brian Jarvi s masterwork.
Lavishly reproduced in an oversize format with a gatefold, this
book brings this landscape masterpiece to the conservationist,
lover of Africa, and fan of wildlife art. In oversized colour
reproductions, the book African Menagerie offers readers a look at
the finer details of the realist renderings of the animals and
birds across the seven panels and thirty feet. There are also
reproductions of the animal studies Jarvi created in the seventeen
years leading up to the final work. Measuring 28 feet across and a
full one-story tall, and connected via seven interlocking panels,
Brian Jarvi s painting includes more than 200 different African
wildlife species, presented as if they are looking at us, the human
viewers, seemingly challenging us to save this planet. Many of the
species featured in Jarvi s painting are, according to experts,
expected to be extinct in the wild by the middle of this century
unless humankind takes bold action to ensure their continued
existence. In oversized colour reproductions, African Menagerie
brings the masterpiece home in an accessible manner. The studies
offer a glimpse into the work and mind of a creative genius. In
addition, the book tells the story of the work, and tracks the
evolution and unlikely journey of Jarvi from once being a Duck
Stamp artist to becoming one of the most notable wildlife painter
of this generation.
Evil Children in Religion, Literature and Art explores the genesis, development, and religious significance of a literary and iconographic motif, involving a gang of urchins, usually male, who mock or assault a holy or eccentric person, typically an adult. Originating in the biblical tale of Elisha's mockery ( Kings 2.23-24), this motif recurs in literature, hagiography, and art, from antiquity up to our own time, strikingly defying the conventional Judeo-Christian and Romantic image of the child as a symbol of innocence.
Woodland Imagery in Northern Art reconnects us with the woodland
scenery that abounds in Western painting, from Albrecht Durer's
intense studies of verdant trees, to the works of many other
Northern European artists who captured 'the truth of vegetation' in
their work. These incidents of remarkable scenery in the visual
arts have received little attention in the history of art, until
now. Prosperetti brings together a set of essays which are devoted
to the poetics of the woodlands in the work of the great masters,
including Claude Lorrain, Jan van Eyck, Jacob van Ruisdael, Peter
Paul Rubens, Rembrandt and Leonardo da Vinci, amongst others.
Through an examination of aesthetics and eco-poetics, this book
draws attention to the idea of lyrical naturalism as a conceptual
bridge that unites the power of poetry with the allurement of the
natural world. Engagingly written and beautifully illustrated
throughout, Woodland Imagery in Northern Art strives to stimulate
the return of the woodlands to the places where they belong - in
people's minds and close to home.
Featuring the delightful and informative illustrations of artist
Oana Befort and the inspiring expertise of conservation educator
Maggie Reinbold, Drawing Wild Animals guides artists at all skill
levels as they learn to draw-and learn about-a diverse array of
mammals, amphibians, and reptiles from around the world. To feed
your curiosity, you'll learn the characteristics, behaviors, and
habitats of animals from categories like predators, burrowers,
grazers, marsupials, frogs and toads, and lizards and snakes. To
nurture the artist, you'll get more than 25 step-by-step
instructions that show how to develop each animal from simple
shapes into richly detailed drawings. Armed with a deeper
understanding of animals, you'll be better able to capture their
stunning beauty and enchanting attributes in your artwork. Some of
the intriguing animals you'll encounter: Bengal tiger Yellow
mongoose African bush elephant European hedgehog Black flying fox
Ring-tailed lemur Blue poison frog Gold dust day gecko Russian
tortoise With Drawing Wild Animals, you'll learn to see-and
draw-animals in a whole new light!
|
Christo and Jeanne-Claude
(Hardcover)
Jacob Baal-Teshuva; Artworks by Taschen, Christo And Jeanne-Claude; Photographs by Wolfgang Volz
|
R487
R403
Discovery Miles 4 030
Save R84 (17%)
|
Ships in 9 - 15 working days
|
|
The work of the artist couple Christo (1935-2020) and Jeanne-Claude
(1935-2009) resists categorization. It is a hybrid of art, urban
planning, architecture, and engineering, but above all an aesthetic
uniquely their own: surreal and ethereal environmental
interventions that have graced monuments, public parks, and centers
of power alike. This compact book spans the complete career of the
couple who were born on the very same day, met in Paris, fell in
love, and became a creative team like no other. With rich
illustration, it spans Christo and Jeanne-Claude's earliest
projects in the 1950s right through to The Floating Piers,
installed at Lake Iseo, Italy, in 2016. The book celebrates all of
the couple's most famous environmental interventions, such as The
Gates in New York's Central Park and the Wrapped Reichstag in
Berlin, while also featuring early drawings and family photos
unknown to the wider public. About the series Born back in 1985,
the Basic Art Series has evolved into the best-selling art book
collection ever published. Each book in TASCHEN's Basic Art series
features: a detailed chronological summary of the life and oeuvre
of the artist, covering his or her cultural and historical
importance a concise biography approximately 100 illustrations with
explanatory captions
The contributors to this 1992 book examine various aspects of the
relationship among Christianity and the visual arts, architecture
and music in Russia. Within this broad area the book concentrates
on specific topics rather than attempting a broad survey.
Nonetheless, the range of material extends from the earliest stages
of the introduction of Byzantine art forms in Kievan Russia to the
relation between Christian and folk decorative/iconographic motifs
to the use of religious imagery in the work of contemporary
filmmaker Andrei Tarkovskii. The related interests of the
contributors create a concentration of topics in certain periods
such as the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Some of
the chapters are academically specialized, others are easily
accessible to a general audience; but all are based on thorough and
careful scholarship. Christianity and the Arts in Russia is based
on, but not limited to, a symposium held at the Library of Congress
in 1988 to mark the millennium of Russian Christianity.
The northern Chinese mountain range of Mount Wutai has been a
preeminent site of international pilgrimage for over a millennium.
Home to more than one hundred temples, the entire range is
considered a Buddhist paradise on earth, and has received visitors
ranging from emperors to monastic and lay devotees. Mount Wutai
explores how Qing Buddhist rulers and clerics from Inner Asia,
including Manchus, Tibetans, and Mongols, reimagined the mountain
as their own during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Wen-Shing Chou examines a wealth of original source materials in
multiple languages and media--many never before published or
translated-such as temple replicas, pilgrimage guides, hagiographic
representations, and panoramic maps. She shows how literary,
artistic, and architectural depictions of the mountain permanently
transformed the site's religious landscape and redefined Inner
Asia's relations with China. Chou addresses the pivotal but
previously unacknowledged history of artistic and intellectual
exchange between the varying religious, linguistic, and cultural
traditions of the region. The reimagining of Mount Wutai was a
fluid endeavor that proved central to the cosmopolitanism of the
Qing Empire, and the mountain range became a unique site of shared
diplomacy, trade, and religious devotion between different
constituents, as well as a spiritual bridge between China and
Tibet. A compelling exploration of the changing meaning and
significance of one of the world's great religious sites, Mount
Wutai offers an important new framework for understanding Buddhist
sacred geography.
While much has been written about how photography serves
architecture, this book looks at how fine-art photographers frame
constructed space - from cities to single anonymous rooms. It
analyses various techniques used and reveals resonances and rhythms
found in the photographs as they occur at different scales, times
and settings. Photographs become vehicles for thinking about the
co-existence between individuals and social groups and their
surroundings spaces and settings in the city and the landscape. By
considering questions of technique and practice on the one hand,
and the formal and aesthetic qualities of photographs on the other,
the book opens up new ways of looking at and thinking about
architecture and how we relate to our environment.
|
Cavegirl Monologue
(Paperback)
Heather Benjamin; Foreword by Reba Maybury
|
R912
R741
Discovery Miles 7 410
Save R171 (19%)
|
Ships in 10 - 15 working days
|
|
The subjects of her recent art are a logical continuation of the
larger narrative of Benjamin's body of work: She works to excavate
the female human experience as she knows it. Benjamin muses on
intimacy, sexuality, self-perception, body dysmorphia, and trauma
through her avatars. Her work is diaristic, approaching her
subjects through the lens of her own personal experience; each
piece can easily feel like a self-portrait. Her women are
simultaneously self-assured and crumbled, standing defiantly on
their own two hairy legs, yet seeking the shoulder of an empathetic
viewer to cry on. Benjamin uses her art to sort through her own
trauma and self-analysis, and seeks to give faces, bodies, and
narratives to the different facets of her own womanhood.
A new collection of never-before-published paintings by renowned
artist Pablo Amaringo
- With written contributions by Graham Hancock, Jeremy Narby,
Robert Venosa, Dennis McKenna, Stephan Beyer, and Jan Kounen
- Contains 47 color plates of Amaringo's latest works, with
detailed narratives of the rich Amazonian mythology underlying each
painting
- Shares Amaringo's personal stories behind the artistic visions
Recognized as one of the world's great visionary artists, Pablo
Amaringo was renowned for his intricate, colorful paintings
inspired by his shamanic visions. A master communicator of the
ayahuasca experience--where snakes, jaguars, subterranean beings,
celestial palaces, aliens, and spacecraft all converge--Amaringo's
art presents a doorway to the transcendent worlds of ayahuasca
intended for contemplation, meditation, and inspiration.
Illustrating the evolution of his intricate and colorful art, this
book contains 47 full-color reproductions of Amaringo's latest
works with detailed explorations of the rich Amazonian mythology
underlying each painting. Through their longstanding relationship
with Amaringo, coauthors Charing and Cloudsley are able to share
the personal stories behind his visions and experiences with
Amazonian people and folklore, capturing Amaringo's powerful
ecological and spiritual message through his art and words. With
contributions by Graham Hancock, Jeremy Narby, Robert Venosa,
Dennis McKenna, Stephan Beyer, and Jan Kounen, this book brings the
ayahuasca experience to life as we travel on Amaringo's visionary
brush and palette.
Rich in symbolism and metaphor, and blessed with its own varied and
dramatic palette, the garden has proved to be an extremely fertile
source of artistic inspiration. In The Garden in Art, acclaimed art
historian Debra N. Mancoff reveals the many different ways in which
artists from all periods of history - from ancient Egypt to the
present day - have employed the motif of the garden. Featuring more
than 200 illustrations of both renowned and lesser-known works, the
book approaches its subject thematically, exploring such topics as
working gardens, the garden through the seasons and artists'
gardens. Complete with a detailed timeline and a suggested list of
gardens to visit, The Garden in Art is an absorbing and highly
rewarding examination of the meaning and significance of the
depiction of the garden.
Should Christians even bother with the modern wing at the art
museum? After all, modern art and artists are often caricatured as
rabidly opposed to God, the church-indeed, to faith of any kind.
But is that all there is to the story? In this Studies in Theology
and the Arts volume, coeditors Cameron J. Anderson and G. Walter
Hansen gather the reflections of artists, art historians, and
theologians who collectively offer a more complicated narrative of
the history of modern art and its place in the Christian life.
Here, readers will find insights on the work and faith of artists
including Marc Chagall, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Andy Warhol,
and more. For those willing to look with eyes of faith, they may
just find that God is present in the modern wing too. The Studies
in Theology and the Arts series encourages Christians to
thoughtfully engage with the relationship between their faith and
artistic expression, with contributions from both theologians and
artists on a range of artistic media including visual art, music,
poetry, literature, film, and more.
The fifteenth-century Italian artist Piero della Francesca painted
a familiar world. Roads wind through hilly landscapes, run past
farms, sheds, barns, and villages. This is the world in which Piero
lived. At the same time, Piero's paintings depict a world that is
distant. The subjects of his pictures are often Christian and that
means that their setting is the Holy Land, a place Piero had never
visited. The Realism of Piero della Francesca studies this
paradoxical aspect of Piero's art. It tells the story of an artist
who could think of the local churches, palaces, and landscapes in
and around his hometown of Sansepolcro as miraculously built
replicas of the monuments of Jerusalem. Piero's application of
perspective, to which he devoted a long treatise, was meant to
convince his contemporaries that his paintings report on things
that Piero actually observed. Piero's methodical way of painting
seems to have offered no room for his own fantasy. His art looks
deliberately styleless. This book uncovers a world in which
painting needed to validate itself by cultivating the illusion that
it reported on things observed instead of things imagined by the
artist. Piero's painting claimed truth in a world of increasing
uncertainties.
This is a comparative study of the national significance of the
classical revival which marked English and French art during the
second half of the nineteenth century. It argues that the main
focus of artists' interest in classical Greece, was the body of the
Greek athlete. It explains this interest, first, by artists'
contact with the art of Pheidias and Polycletus which portrayed it;
and second, by the claim, made by physical anthropologists, that
the classical body typified the race of the European nations.
|
|