This title was first published in 2003. Peter Lanyon stood at the forefront of landscape painting in Europe during the late 1950s and early 60s. A prominent St Ives artist, he was associated with Barbara Hepworth, Ben Nicholson and Naum Gabo; his work also has affinities with abstract expressionism. Lanyon's career started just as the study of drawing was being liberated from 19th-century academic constrictions. His many drawings range from records of trips to the Netherlands and Italy to portrait sketches and abstract studies. Lanyon also used drawings extensively in the development of some of his most important paintings. In this study, Margaret Garlake explores Lanyon's theory and practice of drawing; the contribution of drawings to the evocation of place in paintings; his use of models and the metamorphosis of the human body into landscape images, as well as his use of three-dimensional constructions as equivalents to drawing.

A window provides access to two of life's essentials, light and air, but it is more than just a means to an end. Windows also have symbolic, expressive and architectural qualities that have for centuries inspired some of the world's greatest artists. In this engaging new study, Christopher Masters celebrates the multiple roles of the window in art through five key themes, from the window as a status symbol to its use as a provider of physical and spiritual illumination; from its employment as a literal window on the world outside the confines of a room to its function as a mirror, reflecting the emotions of the artist or the individuals depicted; and finally to the immense architectural variety of windows that animate interior and exterior scenes throughout Western painting. With superb reproductions of 90 works by major artists from Giotto to Banksy, and spirited analysis of the paintings' meanings, this is a remarkable exploration of an important but hitherto neglected subject in art history.

Title first published in 2003. In this detailed study of the landscapes and rural scenes of Britain and France made by artists like George Clausen, Philip Wilson Steer, Augustus John, Laura Knight, J. D. Fergusson and Spencer Gore, Ysanne Holt investigates the imaginary geographies behind the pictures and reconsiders the relationship between national identity, 'Englishness' and the native landscape. Combining close investigation of important works with a broader enquiry into the appeal of the Mediterranean for an age preoccupied with cultural degeneracy and bodily health, Ysanne Holt draws fascinating conclusions about the impact of modernism on the British tradition of landscape painting.

This title was first published in 2001: Paolo Veronese: Piety and Display in an Age of Religious Reform examines the large body of religious paintings with which Veronese (1528 -1588) played a crucial role in shaping Venetian piety. With 117 illustrations (26 in colour) Richard Cocke sets Veronese's work into context, arguing his mastery of narrative has long been neglected, largely as a result of Sir Joshua Reynolds's criticism in his Discourses. The new expressiveness of Veronese's work in his final decade is linked with the decrees of the Council of Trent, which resulted in an enhanced display of paintings in Venetian palaces during the 1570s, matched by the renewed decorative schemes in the city's churches.

'This is botanical illustration at the highest level.' - The Artist Christabel King is the foremost botanical artist at the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew, world leaders in the study and preservation of plant species. Here she shares her passion for depicting plants, both in scientific illustrations and in looser botanical art. This inspiring guide covers everything you need to know: choose a subject and create a vibrant composition; accurately sketch, shade and colour leaves, flowers, cacti and more; finally, press and preserve your own treasured specimens. A chapter on travel drawing gives a flavour of the author's worldwide experience, and there are many of her beautiful plates from the prestigious Curtis's Botanical Magazine. There is a helpful section on suitable subjects for beginners and a glossary of terms, to get you started in the beautiful art of botanical illustration.

The studies in which history of art and theatre are considered together are few, and none to date investigate the evolution of the representation of clouds from the early Renaissance to the Baroque period. This book reconsiders the origin of Italian Renaissance and Baroque cloud compositions while including the theatrical tradition as one of their most important sources. By examining visual sources such as paintings, frescos and stage designs, together with letters, guild-ledgers, descriptions of performances and relevant treatises, a new methodology to approach the development of this early modern visuality is offered. The result is an historical reconstruction where multiple factors are seen as facets of a single process which led to the development of Italy's visual culture. The book also offers new insights into Leonardo da Vinci's theatrical works, Raphael's Disputa, Vasari's Lives, and Pietro da Cortona's fresco paintings. The Spectacle of Clouds, 1439-1650 examines the different ways Heaven has been conceived, imagined and represented from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century, crossing over into the fields of history, religion and philosophy.

The face of John Wesley (1703-91), the Methodist leader, became one of the most familiar images in the English-speaking and transatlantic worlds through the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. After the dozen or so painted portraits made during his lifetime came numbers of posthumous portraits and moralising 'scene paintings', and hundreds of variations of prints. It was calculated that six million copies were produced of one print alone - an 1827 portrait by John Jackson R.A. as frontispiece for a hymn book. Illustrated by nearly one hundred images, many in colour, with a comprehensive appendix listing known Wesley images, this book offers a much-needed comprehensive and critical survey of one of the most influential religious and public figures of eighteenth-century Britain. Besides chapters on portraits from the life and after, scene paintings and prints, it explores aspects of Wesley's (and Methodism's) attitudes to art, and the personality cult which gathered around Wesley as Methodism expanded globally. It will be of interest to art historians as a treatment of an individual sitter and subject, as well as to scholars engaged in Wesley and Methodist studies. It is also significant for the field of material studies, given the spread and use of the image, on artefacts as well as on paper.

"The heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact." --C. S. Lewis In From Achilles to Christ, Louis Markos introduces readers to the great narratives of classical mythology from a Christian perspective. From the battles of Achilles and the adventures of Odysseus to the feats of Hercules and the trials of Aeneas, Markos shows how the characters, themes and symbols within these myths both foreshadow and find their fulfillment in the story of Jesus Christ--the "myth made fact." Along the way, he dispels misplaced fears about the dangers of reading classical literature, and offers a Christian approach to the interpretation and appropriation of these great literary works. This engaging and eminently readable book is an excellent resource for Christian students, teachers and readers of classical literature.

Peter Paul Rubens and the Crisis of the Beati Moderni takes up the question of the issues involved in the formation of recent saints - or Beati moderni (modern Blesseds) as they were called - by the Jesuits and Oratorians in the new environment of increased strictures and censorship that developed after the Council of Trent with respect to legal canonization procedures and cultic devotion to the saints. Ruth Noyes focuses particularly on how the new regulations pertained to the creation of emerging cults of those not yet canonized, the so-called Beati moderni, such as Jesuit founders Francis Xavier and Ignatius Loyola, and Filippo Neri, founder of the Oratorians. Centrally involved in the book is the question of the fate and meaning of the two altarpiece paintings commissioned by the Oratorians from Peter Paul Rubens. The Congregation rejected his first altarpiece because it too specifically identified Filippo Neri as a cult figure to be venerated (before his actual canonization) and thus was caught up in the politics of cult formation and the papacy's desire to control such pre-canonization cults. The book demonstrates that Rubens' second altarpiece, although less overtly depicting Neri as a saint, was if anything more radical in the claims it made for him. Peter Paul Rubens and the Crisis of the Beati Moderni offers the first comparative study of Jesuit and Oratorian images of their respective would-be saints, and the controversy they ignited across Church hierarchies. It is also the first work to examine provocative Philippine imagery and demonstrate how its bold promotion specifically triggered the first wave of curial censure in 1602.

Girl With Two Fingers is an edited day to day account of life as a subject of eight portraits by Lucian Freud. '...diaries and letters are a form of time travel. They transport the future reader back to the moment the words were written.' In 1999, a young woman writer returns to London from living in Paris, having been hit by a bus. The accident is a wake-up call: what should she do with her life, how to continue writing? Having known Lucian Freud over a decade, and having previously declined to have a portrait painted by him, she writes asking if he still needs someone to work from Something to do while thinking what to do next. Writer and painter meet for dinner and an after hours visit to the National Gallery, and agree to start painting the following week. The studio in Holland Park is unchanged, except everyone's ten years older. The puppy, Pluto, is an old girl now. The writer has travelled, written, grown up.'Now I look for the adult in me, instead of the child.' She keeps a diary, as she always has, until it becomes too much of a chore. After a few weeks, she begins to write to an imaginary confidante instead. 'Every thing, be it glamorous or mundane, has a particularity of its own. Seeing and recording that particularity is what a writer does. And it's a form of protest. Because it's the loudest voice that tells you how to see, and the smallest voice that sees and hears the most.' As an act of independence she rejects the offered chair and stands for her picture, standing up to the artist. She records, 'For now, my place on the planet is in this studio, my small space the shapes of my feet carved into the floor.' The writer's under no illusion that the picture will be flattering. 'I'm simply a body for him to paint, one of many bodies. And a face. Another one of many.' She won't connect to the finished image.'I'm not going to recognise myself, or connect with this image. It'll just be a work of art.' But writer and painter do connect. This becomes a painting relationship, one picture leads to seven more. Leading to night time phone calls and the painter saying 'I'm beginning to depend on you.' 'It feels a bit like Shakespeare's The Tempest up here. The studio our island. Lucian as Prospero, with 'art to enchant'. The shopper as Ariel, and me as a stand-in Miranda.' But not everybody's happy with this painting relationship. And it's proving too much for the subject herself. Despite being committed to the painter's work, she's keen to regain her freedom. 'I think he knows I'm starting to want to break free. That's a kind of magnetic energy for him.' Face to face: writer and painter, woman and man, the seer and the seen. And the unseen. Because that's the joy of writing: it's seeing what can't be depicted in paint. On a trip to New York May 2000, standing unnoticed in a gallery between two of the portraits of herself, the writer looks in to the pictures she's - depicted as - looking out from, and asks if the images are more about the painter than the painted: '...his view, his space, his paint, his colours, his brushes, his language, his desire to control and portray. His feelings. His life events. And the distortions, the freuding, are his signature. They are autobiographical naked portraits of Lucian. Hiding in plain sight.' 'The stories that bring a fixed portrait into being are much more fun than the finished thing itself.' 'What's lovely about (a friend),' says Lucian 'and you do it too, is you describe people by what they say.' 'What do you mean?' 'Well you repeat what it was they said.' Beautifully written, poignant and evocative, testament to the world of the studio, witness to the act of portraiture. 'Historically, men make images of women. Men tell us how to see and understand those images. They narrate them. And then they market what they have made. So the images of women are about men.' Girl With Two Fingers is the female gaze, a detailed subject's account of the making of eight works of art.

Secrets to Painting Beautiful Landscapes Painting the landscape can be fun and rewarding--if you make the right decisions as you paint. After all, it is the artist's greatest challenge to somehow capture a sense of it all--the grandness, the majesty, the splendor of nature--with just a few strokes of paint on a canvas. Popular art instructor Johannes Vloothuis makes the process a whole lot easier with the essential techniques, key concepts and expert advice he shares in this book. Learn straightforward strategies to make your paintings more interesting and dramatic, such as simplifying the foreground, composing with abstract shapes and harmonizing colors. Discover speci?c techniques for painting landscape elements including mountains, water, foliage, snow and more. 9 step-by-step demonstrations walk you through all the techniques necessary to create successful landscape paintings. Landscape Painting Essentials is packed with practical information. You'll make the critical shift from painting what you see to painting as an artist sees. You'll learn to strategically edit shapes, rearrange elements and enhance color. You'll gain a better understanding of what to include in your painting, what to change and what to leave out. Most importantly, you'll gain the skills necessary to turn nature's bounty of inspiration into original, stunning landscape paintings.

The visual images of Queen Elizabeth I displayed in contemporary portraits and perpetuated and developed in more recent media, such as film and television, make her one of the most familiar and popular of all British monarchs.This collection of essays examines the diversity of the queen's extensive iconographical repertoire, focusing on both visual and textual representations of Elizabeth, not only in portraiture and literature, but also in contemporary sermons, speeches and alchemical treatises. The collection broadens current critical thinking about Elizabeth, as each of the essays contributes to the debate about the ways in which the queen's developing iconicity was not simply a celebratory mode, but also encoded criticism of her. Each of these essays explains the ways in which the varied representations of Elizabeth reflect the political and cultural anxieties of her subjects.

How can we pack so much big booty into such a tiny and inexpensive package? Sorry, but it's a trade secret we can't divulge, except to say that shoehorns and spandex were involved. The original Big Butt Book featured a great cross section of delectable rears from the 1950s to the present day. Here, since life is such an ironic deal, we decided to pare the original content down to just the biggest and the best, in-your-face phatties to which the great Sir Mix-a-Lot alluded when penning, "My anaconda don't want none, unless you've got buns, hun." Then we added in about 30 new photos, just to be generous. Now in these 150 plus photos you'll see the big and the bountiful, then the bigger and more bountiful, in black and white and in color. The models may be largely anonymous, but their curves are legendary, and now that they're collected in a discrete little package affordable by all in these financially trying times, why hold back? Your badonkadonk is calling.

In the last decade of his life, Anthony van Dyck (1599-1641) undertook a printmaking project that changed the conventions of portraiture. In a series later named the Iconography, he portrayed artists alongside kings, courtiers, and diplomats-a radical departure from preexisting conventions. He also depicted his subjects in novel ways, focusing on their facial features often to the exclusion of symbolic costumes or props. In addition to illustrating approximately 60 works by Van Dyck and other artists from his era-particularly Rembrandt-this catalogue traces the artist's influence over hundreds of years. Showcasing both 17th century portraits in a variety of media and portrait prints by a wide range of artists spanning the 16th through the 20th centuries-including Albrecht Durer, Hendrick Goltzius, Francisco de Goya, Edgar Degas, and Jim Dine-the book demonstrates the indelible mark that Van Dyck left on the genre. Distributed for the Art Institute of Chicago Exhibition Schedule: Art Institute of Chicago (03/05/16-08/07/16)

A fun how-to sketchbook for drawing portraits and selfies! Sketch Your Best Self is a quirky guide to drawing all kinds of faces - starting with your own! The book is split into four sections, covering the basics, how to draw faces, building bodies and selfie style. This comprises how to draw features, how to create different expressions, drawing bodies and limbs and lots of fun stuff including how to create a selfie in pop art style, full colour, monochrome and retro classics style. So pucker up for creating lips, decide if today is a good or bad hair day, practise some photobooth-style expressions, build your friends limb by limb, add some attitude, then try out the fun and whimsical drawing challenges with super fun pages based around Snapchat style filters. Don't be left out - this beautiful book is fully inclusive and can be enjoyed by everyone!

With his first collection of amazing illustrations Heavenly Bodies, digital wizard Bruce Colero created other-worldly beauties with an inspired mixture of talent and technology. The reaction was, to say the least, overwhelming! Colero's approach to fantasy artwork heralded a new master to the realm! Now, in a more "adults-only" addendum, Bruce let's his mojo loose and breathes life and fire into some pretty hot babes! Here is a collection of women far out of anyone's league, but sure to haunt your wildest daydreams! These ladies are scorching, state-of-the-art super-heated eye-candy! If you're over 18 and ready to have the back of your head explode (always fun!), then Skin Deep will be on your must-have list for June! The book is produced in an oversized 9x12 inch format.

In the view of Hegel and others, pagan art is the art of the beautiful and Christian art is the art of the sublime. Roger Homan provides a comprehensive and informative account of the course of Christian art, encompassing a re-evaluation of conventional aesthetics and its application to religious art. Homan argues that taste and aesthetics are fashioned by morality and belief, and that Christian art must be assessed not in terms of its place in the history of art but of its place in Christian faith. The narrative basis of Christian art is documented but religious art is also explored as the expression of the devout and as an element in the trappings of collective expression and personal quest. Sections in the book explore pilgrimage art, puritan art, the tension of Gothic and Classical, church architecture and the language of worship. Current areas of debate, including the relationship of ethics to the appreciation of art, are also discussed. An extensive range of examples of painting, architecture and decoration, most of which are of European origin, are discussed throughout, with a number of striking illustrations included within the text.

"This beautifully produced book will be inspiring to botanical artists and all those who are captivated by the orchid." -Leisure Painter Orchids have long held a place of esteem and fascination in the horticultural world. In the 19th century, orchid collecting reached new fanatical heights, with explorers dispatched to every corner of the globe in search of new varieties that could be auctioned at extravagant prices, and orchids are still one of the most popular flowers to breed and buy to this day. These beautiful, diverse flowers are one of the two largest families of flowering plants, with over 30,000 species and over 181,500 hybrids and cultivars. The RHS Orchid Committee have commissioned watercolours of over 7,000 award-winning hybrids that demonstrate particular value in their fabulous array of colours, patterns, sizes and shapes. Through these paintings, stories of high stakes orchid breeding and exhibiting are explored, with a cast of characters who helped shape the horticultural world we know today, alongside the dedicated artists who still support their endeavours.

The spry and devilishly creative pin-up elder-statesman Archie Dickens is back with a new compendium of cuties to delight an appreciative public. A contemporary of such artistic greats as Elvgren and Vargas, Mr. Dickens is still kicking, still making naughty portraits of young ladies in various states of undress - all with a sly smile and an innocent demeanor. Each illustration features a delightful damsel doing something perfectly ordinary, but in such an extraordinary way! Whether on the phone, on the beach, or on the prowl, Dickens makes these girls shine!

Lucian Freud (1922-2011) was interested in the telling of truths. Always operating outside the main currents of 20th-century art, the esteemed portrait painter observed his subjects with the regimen and precision of a laboratory scientist. He recorded not only the blotches, bruises, and swellings of the living body, but also, beneath the flaws and folds of flesh, the microscopic details of what lies within: the sensation, the emotion, the intelligence, the bloom, and the inevitable, unstoppable decay. Despite rejecting parallels between him and his renowned grandfather, the correlation between Lucian Freud's sitting process for portraiture and Sigmund Freud's psychotherapy sessions is a fascinating element to this figurative oeuvre. Despite the thickness of the impasto surfaces, Freud's portraits of subjects as varied as the Queen, Kate Moss, and an obese job center supervisor penetrate the physicality of the body with a direct and often disarming insight. The result is as much a psychological interrogation as it is an uneasy examination of the relationship between artist and model. This book brings together some of Freud's most outstanding and unapologetic portraits, to introduce an artist widely considered one of the finest masters of the human form. 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

An important resource for scholars of contemporary art and architecture, this volume considers contemporary art that takes architecture as its subject. Concentrated on works made since 1990, Contemporary Art About Architecture: A Strange Utility is the first to take up this topic in a sustained and explicit manner and the first to advance the idea that contemporary art functions as a form of architectural history, theory, and analysis. Over the course of fourteen essays by both emerging and established scholars, this volume examines a diverse group of artists in conjunction with the vernacular, canonical, and fantastical structures engaged by their work. Inigo Manglano-Ovalle, Matthew Barney, Monika Sosnowska, Pipo Nguyen-duy, and Paul Pfeiffer are among those considered, as are the compelling questions of architecture's relationship to photography, the evolving legacy of Mies van der Rohe, the notion of an architectural unconscious, and the provocative concepts of the unbuilt and the unbuildable. Through a rigorous investigation of these issues, Contemporary Art About Architecture calls attention to the fact that art is now a vital form of architectural discourse. Indeed, this phenomenon is both pervasive and, in its individual incarnations, compelling - a reason to think again about the entangled histories of architecture and art.

Offering original analysis of the convergence between 'sacred' and 'secular' in medieval works of art and architecture, this collection explores both the usefulness and limitations of these terms for describing medieval attitudes. The modern concepts of 'sacred' and 'secular' are shown to be effective as scholarly tools, but also to risk imposing false dichotomies. The authors consider medieval material culture from a broad perspective, addressing works of art and architecture from England to Japan, and from the seventh to the fifteenth century. Although the essays take a variety of methodological approaches they are unified in their emphasis on the continuing and necessary dialectic between sacred and secular. The contributors consciously frame their interpretations in terms and perspectives derived from the Middle Ages, thereby demonstrating how the present art-historical terminology and conceptual frameworks can obscure the complexity of medieval life and material culture. The resonance among essays opens possibilities for productive cross-cultural study of an issue that is relevant to a diversity of cultures and sub-periods. Introducing an innovative approach to the literature of the field, this volume complicates and enriches our understanding of social realities across a broad spectrum of medieval worlds.