The central contention of Christian faith is that in the incarnation the eternal Word or Logos of God himself has taken flesh, so becoming for us the image of the invisible God. Our humanity itself is lived out in a constant to-ing and fro-ing between materiality and immateriality. Imagination, language and literature each have a vital part to play in brokering this hypostatic union of matter and meaning within the human creature. Approaching different aspects of two distinct movements between the image and the word, in the incarnation and in the dynamics of human existence itself, Trevor Hart presents a clearer understanding of each and explores the juxtapositions with the other. Hart concludes that within the Trinitarian economy of creation and redemption these two occasions of 'flesh-taking' are inseparable and indivisible.

Learn to paint beautiful watercolor flowers in simple steps with this free and easy approach to watercolor painting for beginners. Marie Boudon's beautifully presented creative course will give you a good grounding in this new-to-you medium and teach you all you need to know to get started with painting flowers in watercolor. Find out about paper, brushes and paints, color mixing, wet and dry techniques, blending and gradients, contrast and even how to digitize your work. Then learn to paint roses, peonies, carnations, dahlias, anemones, poppies, leaves, details and textures and how to bring all of these together into beautiful compositions which make lovely art pieces, journal pages, handmade stationery and greetings cards, inspirational quote frames, personalized gifts and more.

In Crosses of Many Cultures: Designs for Applique, Joyce Mori provides historical explanations along with easy-to-understand instructions and line drawings for twenty international cross designs for applique.

Adorable, sexy, and sure -- a wee bit naughty! This would fairly sum up a style of illustration that Elias Chatzoudis has been able to develop, earning him a world-wide following for his perky pin-up girls! In this second volume devoted to his voluptuous vixens, Elias is in top form with his sense of humour and eye for the ladies in top form! All new art!

The study of the creation of canine breeds in early modern Europe, especially Spain, illustrates the different constructs against which notions of human identity were forged. This book is the first comprehensive history of early modern Spanish dogs and it evaluates how two of Spain's most celebrated and canonical cultural figures of this period, the artist Diego VelA!zquez and the author Miguel de Cervantes, radically question humankind's sixteenth-century anthropocentric self-fashioning. In general, this study illuminates how Animal Studies can offer new perspectives to understanding Hispanism, giving readers a fresh approach to the historical, literary and artistic complexity of early modern Spain.

Representations of Renaissance monarchy analyses the portraits and personal imagery of Francis I, one of the most frequently portrayed rulers of sixteenth-century Europe. The distinctive likeness of the Valois king was widely disseminated and perceived by his French subjects, and Tudor and Habsburg rivals abroad. Complementing studies on the representation of Henry VIII, this book makes a dynamic contribution to scholarship on the enterprise of royal image-making in early-modern Europe. The discussion not only highlights the inventiveness of the visual arts in Renaissance France but also alludes to the enduring politics of physical appearance and seductive power of the face and body in modern visual culture. Coinciding with the five hundredth anniversary of Francis I's accession, this book will appeal to scholars and students of medieval and Renaissance art, the history of portraiture or anyone interested in images of monarchy and the history of France. -- .

Relax and dive into the ultimate guide to creating watercolor paintings of your favorite flowers! From bright red roses to deep green cacti, this gorgeous, easy-to-follow book will show how anyone can paint luminous watercolor flowers and botanicals. Noted artist and instructor Rachel Eskandari details how anyone can paint a garden of bold, creative watercolor images. Featuring colorful step-by-step images, this book shows how to master the basics of watercolors and then expand your color palette to create boldly unconventional floral artwork. Watercolor Botanical Garden features everything you need to know, including: *Color theory and mixing for unique shades *Utilizing the skills of blending, gradients, and shading *Lesson for creating 25+ different plants and flowers including roses, cacti, peonies, nigella, agave, anemones, queen of the night, leaves, and more *How to incorporate multiple botanical images for a gorgeous landscape painting

Animal characters abound in graphic narratives ranging from Krazy Kat and Maus to WE3 and Terra Formars. Exploring these and other multispecies storyworlds presented in words and images, Animal Comics draws together work in comics studies, narrative theory, and cross-disciplinary research on animal environments and human-animal relationships to shed new light on comics and graphic novels in which animal agents play a significant role. At the same time, the volume's international team of contributors show how the distinctive structures and affordances of graphic narratives foreground key questions about trans-species entanglements in a more-than-human world. The writers/artists covered in the book include: Nick Abadzis, Adolpho Avril, Jeffrey Brown, Sue Coe, Matt Dembicki, Olivier Deprez, J. J. Grandville, George Herriman, Adam Hines, William Hogarth, Grant Morrison, Osamu Tezuka, Frank Quitely, Yu Sasuga, Charles M. Schultz, Art Spiegelman, Fiona Staples, Ken'ichi Tachibana, Brian K. Vaughan, and others.

Explore the national parks in this relaxing coloring book for nature lovers Featuring 34 of the most popular and scenic parks and recreation sites across the country including the Everglades, the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone, Zion, the Badlands and more, Coloring the National Parks provides hours of coloring fun and relaxation for creatives who love the outdoors. Add your creative touch to nature scenes as diverse as the parks themselves, from mountains to caves to glaciers, Saguaros, redwoods, elk, bears, and many more.

Bernini and Pallavicino, the artist and the Jesuit cardinal, are closely related figures at the papal courts of Urban VIII and Alexander VII, at which Bernini was the principal artist. The analysis of Pallavicino's writings offers a new perspective on Bernini's art and artistry and allow us to understand the visual arts in papal Rome as a 'making manifest' of the fundamental truths of faith. Pallavicino's views on art and its effects differ fundamentally from the perspective developed in Bernini's biographies offering a perspective on the tension between artist and patron, work and message. In Pallavicino's writings the visual arts emerge as being intrinsically bound up with the very core of religion involving questions of idolatry, mimesis and illusionism that would prove central to the aesthetic debates of the eighteenth century.

Botanical Art Techniques is a beautifully illustrated and comprehensive guide to one of the most delicate art forms. From the experts at the American Society of Botanical Artists, this essential reference features how-to tutorials for all the major techniques: pen and ink, watercolor, coloured pencil, egg tempera, oil, acrylic, gouache, silverpoint, and etching. The tutorials move from basic and introductory to advanced, so the reader can build on their skills as they progress. Additional information includes a detailed overview of the necessary materials, basic information about the principles of composition, and advice on how to develop a personal style. Filled with 900 photographs, Botanical Art Techniques is a must-have for creative people everywhere.

In 1788, nearly fifteen-hundred people on eleven sailing ships came ashore at Port Jackson in Australia after a gruelling eight month journey from England. This collection of vessels later became known as the First Fleet, and those who sailed in them were the community who established the first European colony in Australia. The Art of the First Fleet depicts the natural history of this extraordinary land, the people and culture of the local indigenous population and the events that marked these initial formative years. The collection, now housed in the Natural History Museum, provides an invaluable record of the wildlife and environment, people and events, as seen through the eyes of the colonists who laid the foundations for the European settlement of Australia. The artists' drawings of the people and culture of the Eora people, the local indigenous population of the area, provide the only lasting visual record of their lives. While images of plants and animals were not always technically accurate, they made a significant contribution to the development of science, allowing experts in Britain to be able to identify and name a large number of new species. They remain an invaluable record of the artists' attempts to make sense and order of this new land.

Look Again is a new series of short books from Tate Publishing, opening up the conversation about British art over the last 500 years, and exploring what art has to tell us about our lives today. Written by leading voices from the worlds of literature, art and culture, each book sheds new light on some of the most well-known, best-loved and thought-provoking artworks in the national collection, and asks us to look again. Author Philip Hoare takes us on an exploration of the sea and the way it has provided a deep source of inspiration for artists featured in the Tate collection, from William Blake to Maggi Hambling. Artists have always seen the sea as a mirror of their anxieties and desires; an endless resource for their creativity and their dreams. Under our human sway, the sea has shifted in meaning, from creation myth to economic wealth, from mystic wonder to modern exploitation. Look Again: The Sea dives into the breadth of historical and contemporary works in Britain's national collection of art, as well as the beloved literature they have inspired. By reframing them within a social and political perspective rather than a chronological or art-historical one, prize-winning author Philip Hoare shows how art has continually borne witness to the power and allure of the sea.

A few selected cases of visions and apparitions are detected and analyzed, including personal interviews with some of the witnesses. Of special interest is the final third of the book: the transposition of medieval and early modern representations of the relations between humans and the divine into the modern art of photography. Christian presents a pictorial examination of the phenomenon, commenting a large number of images, including commercial postcards and family photographs from the first half of past century Europe.

This book examines how African-American writers and visual artists interweave icon and inscription in order to re-present the black female body, traditionally rendered alien and inarticulate within Western discursive and visual systems. Brown considers how the writings of Toni Morrison, Gayl Jones, Paule Marshall, Edwidge Danticat, Jamaica Kincaid, Andrea Lee, Gloria Naylor, and Martha Southgate are bound to such contemporary, postmodern visual artists as Lorna Simpson, Carrie Mae Weems, Kara Walker, Betye Saar, and Faith Ringgold. While the artists and authors rely on radically different media photos, collage, video, and assembled objects, as opposed to words and rhythm both sets of intellectual activists insist on the primacy of the black aesthetic. Both assert artistic agency and cultural continuity in the face of the oppression, social transformation, and cultural multiplicity of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. This book examines how African-American performative practices mediate the tension between the ostensibly de-racialized body politic and the hyper-racialized black, female body, reimagining the cultural and political ground that guides various articulations of American national belonging. Brown shows how and why black women writers and artists matter as agents of change, how and why the form and content of their works must be recognized and reconsidered in the increasingly frenzied arena of cultural production and political debate.

*One of The Times Best Art Books of the Year* 'Looking to Sea is a remarkable and compelling book... I loved it.' Edmund de Waal 'In her first, transporting book, Lily Le Brun sweeps the beaches of the past century of British art, collecting treasures from sea, shingle and shore... A book to pack in your picnic basket for shivering dips, heatwave day trips and ice-cream Sundays' The Times An alternative history of modern Britain, Looking to Sea is an exquisite work of cultural, artistic and philosophical storytelling. Looking to Sea considers ten pivotal artworks, from Vanessa Bell's Studland Beach, one of the first modernist paintings in Britain, to Paul Nash's work bearing the scars of his experience in the trenches and Martin Parr's photographs of seaside resorts in the 1980s, which raised controversial questions of class. Each of the startlingly different pieces, created between 1912 and 2015, opens a window onto big ideas, from modernism and the sublime, the impact of the world wars and colonialism, to issues crucial to our world today like the environment and nationhood. In this astonishingly perceptive portrait of the twentieth century, art critic Lily Le Brun brings a fresh eye to a vast idea, offering readers an imaginative new way of seeing our island nation. 'Le Brun's writing is at once bold and delicate, far-reaching and fine-tuned. Her book explores the inexhaustible variety of human perception.' Alexandra Harris 'A smart and clear-eyed set of meditations on marine gaze, made with a painterly touch worthy of the chosen artists. Empathy and intelligence lift memoir into cultural history.' Iain Sinclair

The Church needs the arts, as they are a way to access the soul. As Augustine says, one who sings, prays twice. Recent popes have given the impression that the Church is again interested in the way the arts draw us into ourselves, where we are able to contact the mystery that is God. Art for Church is a personal and professional expression of how that renewed interest plays itself out. This text takes its name from the "cloth of gold," an image related to centuries of experimentation by the medieval and Renaissance worlds as they sought an alchemical solution to worship. There previously existed a centuries-long search for how to make golden cloth that would praise God; this pursuit distinctly resembles the quest of the artist to produce the perfect product. Pope Paul VI (1897-1978) and his papal fraternity had set the tone, too often a confining one, for such an alchemical quest in the Church. Unfortunately, the music in the artist's heart is not always the same as that in the heart of the pastor. Pope Paul VI eventually did apologize for the "cloak of lead" he imposed upon artists creating works in the name of the Church. He also came to admit that artistic freedom is a necessary part of the process when the Church seeks the works of artists. In this book, McNally offers insights on how much freedom is necessary for art to flourish in the service of the Church and just what is at stake if that freedom is curtailed. Art for Church contains over 120 original paintings and 30 original poems by the author.

With just under a thousand portraits of Queen Elizabeth II, the National Portrait Gallery boasts some of the most treasured and famous official portraits of the Queen captured at key historic moments, as well as day-to-day images of the monarch at home and with family, following her journey from childhood, to princess and Queen, mother and grandmother. This publication highlights the most important portraits of Elizabeth II from the Gallery's Collection. Paintings and photographs from the birth of Elizabeth II to the present will take readers on a visual journey through the life of Britain's foremost icon. The book will reflect on the Queen's life, presenting family photographs alongside important formal portraits to explore how, as her reign became record-breaking, she became an iconic figure in modern British culture and history. The publication features works by key artists depicting the Queen from 1926 to the present day, including Baron, Cecil Beaton, Dorothy Wilding, Patrick Lichfield, Andy Warhol, Annie Leibovitz and David Bailey. This book features an introductory essay by Alexandra Shulman, exploring how the collected portraits depict the Queen throughout her life and reign, and a timeline of key historical events and moments from Elizabeth II's life.

Susan Herbert's delightful feline reimaginings of famous scenes from art, theatre, opera, ballet and film have won her a devoted following. This unprecedented new compilation of her best paintings provides an irresistible introduction to her feline world. An array of cat characters take the starring roles in a variety of instantly recognizable settings. The masterpieces of Western art retain their distinctive styles while being cleverly filled with furry faces and pussycat tails. Cats then take to the stage in Shakespearean dramas and lavishly staged opera productions. The final stop is Hollywood, where cats are cast in everything from big-budget epics to cult classics, emulating the timeless glamour of the golden age of cinema. From Botticelli's Birth of Venus through Puccini's Tosca to James Dean and Lawrence of Arabia, Susan Herbert's brilliantly observed feline dramatis personae are a joy to discover.

Though ferociously private, Lucian Freud spoke every week for decades to his close confidante and collaborator William Feaver – about painting and the art world, but also about his life and loves. The result is this a unique, electrifying biography, shot through with Freud's own words.

In Youth, the first of two volumes, Feaver conjures Freud's early childhood: Sigmund Freud's grandson, born into a middle-class Jewish family in Weimar Berlin, escaping Nazi Germany in 1934 before being dropped into successive English public schools. Following Freud through art school, his time in the Navy during the war, his post-war adventures in Paris and Greece, and his return to Soho – consorting with duchesses and violent criminals, out on the town with Greta Garbo and Princess Margaret – Feaver traces a brilliant, difficult young man's coming of age.

An account of a century told through one of its most important artists, The Lives of Lucian Freud is a landmark in the story its subject and in the art of biography itself.

In the history of art, animals were the very first subject, as evidenced by the nearly 20,000 year old cave paintings at Lascaux. The human impulse to depict and capture the essence of animals underscores the importance of animals to human lives. For some artists, the evolutionary link between humans and other mammals is most compelling, and their choice of mammals as subject speaks to each artist's personal concerns. From traditional works to the fantastical, from sporting art to kitsch, the nearly 100 U.S. and international artists included hope to combine their own magic with the natural spirit of animals in their work. Over 500 of their pieces are represented here in stunning, full-color photographs. This elegant collection honors the artistic connection and age-old totemic relationship between animal and human. Herein lies the conversation between the spirit of the animal and the mind of the maker.