KURT JACKSON

A new book about the British landscape painter Kurt Jackson (b. 1961).

This new hardback edition includes many new illustrations. including photographs taken for this new edition. The text has been completely updated.

EXTRACT FROM CHAPTER 4:

One of Kurt Jackson s appealing concepts is that the ocean is one of the last true wildernesses left on the planet. It s an idea that I found very interesting when he explained it to me when we first met in St Just. I took it that he meant a spiritual as well as an ecological or natural wilderness. Jackson s art can thus be seen as an art that is the border region between humanity and nature, between culture and nature, as well as literally tackling that area the coast which is neither land nor sea.

Note that Kurt Jackson is always facing outwards from the land, and looking towards the ocean, not painting with his back to the sea, and looking towards the land (and notice that the many boats and ships and helicopters and such in this area are left out of the paintings, too).

So Jackson s Porth series, about Priest Cove, and all of his sea paintings, are very important in his art in articulating this idea of the ocean as the last wilderness. Have you ever wondered what s out there? is a question that Kurt Jackson asks (it s the title of one of his major paintings, too the centrepiece of the Porth series).

Jackson has repeated the question over a number of related works: the title of two 2004 pieces is The Last Wilderness In Western Europe? This was painted on Jura (in Scotland), and both pictures are consciously emptied of human marks just empty moorland and a delicate blue sky. An earlier picture, part of the Cape series, was entitled Do You Ever Wonder What s Out There? (1999) an unusual composition in the Jackson oeuvre which puts the horizon very high, and focusses on the dark blue ocean flecked with white spray.

Kurt Jackson isn t that interested in many of the connotations of the ocean the moon, time, goddesses, rebirth (though moons do appear in his art from time to time). He s not really interested in religious or pagan or magical symbols in that way. And he s not that interested in shipping, fishing, and all things maritime, like J.M.W. Turner was.

But when Jackson asks a question like have you ever wondered what s out there?, and considers the sea as one of the last wildernesses, that alters the interpretation of his sea paintings. It doesn t apply to all of them, though: in plenty of paintings (and not only the smaller or more modest ones), Jackson is not thinking in terms of big themes. But when he titles a painting Have You Ever Wondered What s Out There? (and writes the title in big letters across the painting), it s clearly intended to resonate in the viewer at a deeper level.

Van Eyck is now seen as the artist who bridged the gap between the medieval and the modern. His story is the story of modern art - the turbulent clash of ideologies, the shifting and making of taste, the perfect timing of historical event and technological change, the politics of the art world and the cult of celebrity. The Enlightenment had quietly placed van Eyck in the Gothic tradition. Then Napoleon looted panels of his masterwork, the Ghent Altar-piece, and took them back to the Louvre. With his work centre stage in the greatest art gallery of the time, interest in van Eyck exploded across Europe. The nineteenth century saw the arrival of van Eyck mania, with ever-more fanciful tales in the art press of his life as inventor of oil painting, monkish painter, even arsonist and murderer; with scenes from his life, cheap colour prints and van Eyck carpets and mirrors vying for popular consumption; and with the claiming of van Eyck as the first Pre-Raphaelite. Today, van Eyck is regarded as the first realist painter, with popular and scholarly attention shifted from the Ghent Altar-piece - also looted by Hitler and stored in an Austrian salt-mine during the Second World War - to the riddle of his celebrated Arnolfini Portrait. Inventing van Eyck tells the extraordinary story of the making of an artist for the modern age.

For many people the greatest artist, and the quintessential Renaissance man, Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) was a painter, architect, theatre designer, engineer, sculptor, anatomist, geometer, naturalist, poet and musician. His Last Supper in Milan has been called the greatest painting in Western art. Illegitimate, left-handed and homosexual, Leonardo never made a straightforward career. But from his earliest apprenticeship with the Florentine painter and sculptor Andrea Verrochio, his astonishing gifts were recognised. His life led him from Florence to militaristic Milan and back, to Rome and eventually to France, where he died in the arms of the King, Francis I. As one of the greatest exponents of painting of his time, Leonardo was celebrated by his fellow Florentine Vasari (who was nevertheless responsible for covering over the great fresco of the Battle of Anghiari with his own painting). Vasari's carefully researched life of Leonardo remains one of the main sources of our knowledge, and is printed here together with the three other early biographies, and the major account by his French editor Du Fresne. Personal reminiscences by the novelist Bandello, and humanist Saba di Castiglione, round out the picture, and for the first time the extremely revealing imagined dialogue between Leonardo and the Greek sculptor Phidias, by the painter and theorist Lomazzo, is published in English. An introduction by the scholar Charles Robertson places these writings and the career of Leonardo in context. Approximately 50 pages of colour illustrations, including the major paintings and many of the astonishing drawings, give a rich overview of Leonardo's work and mind.

Finalist, 2021 Writers' League of Texas Book Award Regarded as both a legend and a villain, the critic Dave Hickey has inspired generations of artists, art critics, musicians, and writers. His 1993 book The Invisible Dragon became a cult hit for its potent and provocative critique of the art establishment and its call to reconsider the role of beauty in art. His next book, 1997's Air Guitar, introduced a new kind of cultural criticism-simultaneously insightful, complicated, vulnerable, and down-to-earth-that propelled Hickey to fame as an iconoclastic thinker, loved and loathed in equal measure, whose influence extended beyond the art world. Far from Respectable is a focused, evocative exploration of Hickey's work, his impact on the field of art criticism, and the man himself, from his Huck Finn childhood to his drug-fueled periods as both a New York gallerist and Nashville songwriter to, finally, his anointment as a tenured professor and MacArthur Fellow. Drawing on in-person interviews with Hickey, his friends and family, and art world comrades and critics, Daniel Oppenheimer examines the controversial writer's distinctive takes on a broad range of subjects, including Norman Rockwell, Robert Mapplethorpe, academia, Las Vegas, basketball, country music, and considers how Hickey and his vision of an "ethical, cosmopolitan paganism" built around a generous definition of art is more urgently needed than ever before.

American artist, Joan Jonas' experimental projects in the late sixties and early seventies were essential to the development of contemporary performance, video, and conceptual art. Born in New York in 1936, she is regarded as a pioneer of video art and performance. Her work fuses video, dance, theatre, sculpture, drawing. Her projects have included collaborations with dancers like Trisha Brown and Yvonne Rainer and composers like Alvin Lucier. She investigates space, perception and time, ritual gestures, symbolic objects and stereotypes (especially female cliches), and the magical role of the narrator who conveys a drama in each action.

CONSTANTIN BRANCUSI

Constantin Brancusi is one of the greatest of all sculptors, and a key sculptor of the modern era, with Auguste Rodin and Pablo Picasso. Brancusi's influence can be seen in a wide range of Western sculptors, including Donald Judd, Carl Andre, Henry Moore, Jean Arp, Barbara Hepworth, Minimalists and land artists.

This new book studies the religious and mythical dimensions of Constantin Brancusi's distinctive scultpural forms, the 'eggs', 'fishes', 'heads' and 'columns'. His central quest was for the 'essence of things', which resulted in purifying a form until only the essence was left.

It was Constantin Brancusi's project to strip away the detritus that had accumulated around sculpture, Henry Moore said, and to offer the pure, simple shape. What Brancusi did was 'to concentrate on very simple shapes, to keep his sculpture, as it were, one-cylindered, to refine and polish a single shape to a degree almost too precious.'

As well as being a sculptor, Constantin Brancusi was also an accomplished photographer. Quite a few artists (not all of them sculptors) have expressed for Brancusi's photographs, and the way he would set up his sculptures inhis studio and photograph them at particular times of the day, when the lightingwas just right. They are early examples of installation art (and some of the best, too). Andy Goldsworthy said he admired how Brancusi created the right conditions in his studio so that his work 'comes alive at a particular time of the day as the light momentarily touches it'. For Goldsworthy, Brancusi's works were at their best when they were arranged by the sculptor in his studio and photographed. Somehow, it wasn't quite the same when they were displayed in modern art museums (such as the Pompidou Centre in Paris or the Museum of Modern Art in Gotham, which have important Brancusi pieces).

Fully illustrated, including many photos of Brancusi's studio in Paris, and the art of his contemporaries.

Celebrated for his use of expressive brush marks, which filled his paintings with dynamism, light and colour in a way not seen before in Renaissance art, Tiziano Veccellio became the greatest painter 16th-century Venice had ever known. In the first half of her beautiful new book, Susie Hodge explores Titian's fascinating life through his family, friends, patrons and commissions. Starting out as a young apprentice in the great city of Venice, Titian grew up surrounded with spectacular works of art, architecture and sculpture. His early influences and remarkable achievements are explained clearly with informative and attractive illustrations throughout. The second half of the book contains a comprehensive gallery of over 300 of Titian's major works. of art, each of which is accompanied by a thorough analysis of the artwork and its significance within the context of Titian's life, his rapidly changing technique and his body of work as a whole.

Take a fresh look at the world through the lens of a self-confessed nature-obsessed artist. Asuka Hishiki possesses not only a sense of profound awe and wonder at the intricacies of the natural world, but also the talent to communicate it through her paintings. Recalling the Wunderkammer (literally, 'wonder rooms') of 16th and 17th century European collectors, Asuka Hishiki's Botaniphoria: A Cabinet of Botanical Curiosities encompasses subjects as diverse as rotting vegetables, endangered species, mundane weeds and backyard insects - all treasures to her and transformed into objects of intense and fragile beauty through her skill with watercolour. Her work is held in prestigious collections such as The Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens, California, the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew and the Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation, Pennsylvania. One of the first people to appreciate her work said about it, 'your work is not to hang upon a wall in a bright living room, but to put in a drawer in the study. Then, alone in the middle of the night, to take out and ponder upon.' In the best traditions of Wunderkammer, this book is an artfully arranged collection intended to be pondered upon. From the interactions of the objects within the paintings, to the quirky choice of subjects and the realism with which they are portrayed, they will bear revisiting again and again. As Asuka admits, painting is her language. She is an extremely adept communicator in it.

THE ART OF ANDY GOLDSWORTHY

This is the most comprehensive and detailed study of British artist Andy Goldsworthy, and is the only full-length exploration of Goldsworthy and his art available anywhere.

Fully illustrated, with a revised text. Bibliography and notes.

EXTRACT FROM THE CHAPTER ON GOLDSWORTHY S LEAFWORKS

It is the leafworks that are the most colourful of Andy Goldsworthy s sculptures. What the leaf sculptures show is how beautiful the colours of nature are: Goldsworthy shows the viewer these subtle colours by contrasting one leaf with another. Maple patch grouped the red/ orange/ yellow of Japanese maple leaves together; Poppy leaves contrasted the red poppy leaves against the mid-green of an elderberry bush; a Stone Wood sculpture of 1992 consisted of poppy leaves wrapped around a hazel branch, the red constrasting vividly with the wet green leaves; Dock Leaves interwove red leaves in green grass stalks. Two sycamore leafworks of 1980 and 1981 are very simple: a leaf black from cow shit is placed against pale Autumn leaves; another leaf, bleached white, is set down on a bed of dark leaves. He pins together two colours of sycamore leaves (sycamore is a favourite Goldsworthy medium) in Sycamore leaf sections (1988), and hangs the line of leaves from a tree. Shot with the sun behind them, the photograph of the leaves shows them glowing green and gold, the two classic colours of poetry and alchemy. The Autumnal colours of course connote nostalgia, decadence, sensuality, Romanticism, time passing, the decay of the year, and so on, all those things John Keats wrote about in his Ode: To Autumn, and in a billion other poets art. Goldsworthy s aim in the leaf pieces, though, draws attention to the fragility and delicacy of leaves, as well as their strength and function. A leaf, after all, is a complex biological factory, so the natural scientists say. There is a whole world in a single leaf, remarked Goldsworthy. Goldsworthy s leafworks do not have a scientific agenda. Rather, they celebrate the presence of leaves, the being-in-the-world of leaves, so to speak.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

William Malpas has written books on Richard Long and land art, as well as three books on Andy Goldsworthy, including the forthcoming Andy Goldsworthy In America. Malpas s books on Richard Long and Andy Goldsworthy are the only full-length studies of these artists available.