The time is 1887. From any window in Georgia O'Keeffe's Sun Prairie, Wisconsin birthplace home she only saw the Wisconsin prairie with its traces of roads veering around the flat marshlands and a vast sky that lifted her soul. At twelve years of age Georgia had a defining moment when she declared, "I want to be an artist." Years later from her east-facing window in Canyon, Texas she observed the Texas Panhandle sky with its focus points on the plains and a great canyon of earth history colors streaking across the flat land. Georgia's love of the vast, colorful prairie, plains and sky again gave definition to her life when she discovered Ghost Ranch north of Abiquiu, New Mexico. She fell prey to its charms which were not long removed from the echoes of the "Wild West." These views of prairie, plains and sky became Georgia's muses as she embarked on her step-by-step path with her role models--Alon Bement, Arthur Jerome Dow and Wassily Kandinsky. In this two-part biography of which this is Part I covering the period 1887-1945, Nancy Hopkins Reily "walks the Sun Prairie Land," as if in Georgia's day as a prologue to her family's friendship with Georgia in the 1940s and 1950s. Reily chronicles Georgia's defining days within the arenas of landscape, culture, people and the history surrounding each, a discourse level that Georgia would easily recognize. The book includes bibliographical references and indes. NANCY HOPKINS REILY was a classic outdoor color portraitist for more than twenty years and has taught portrait workshops at Angelina College in Lufkin, Texas where she had a one-woman show of her portraits. Her advance studies included an invitational workshop with Ansel Adams. Reily graduated from Southern Methodist University and lives in Lufkin, Texas. She is also the author of "Classic Outdoor Color Portraits" and "Joseph Imhof, Artist of the Pueblos," both from Sunstone Press.

This book explores images of Venice in the written and visual art of the multitalented American writer, painter, lecturer, and engineer Francis Hopkinson Smith (1838-1915). A successful artist and intrepid traveller, F. Hopkinson Smith spent every summer in Venice for almost twenty years: his stays in the Italian city resulted in a large output of watercolours and writings, including his popular travelogue Venice of To-Day (1895), which featured over 200 illustrations by Smith himself. Despite Smith's popularity during his lifetime, his reputation as a writer and painter faded after his death and has occupied only a modest place in the American canon. This is the first scholarly work to examine the life and work of this unique American artist, whose legacy spans two centuries and was grounded in the enduringly popular fin-de-siecle. This book examines Smith's literary and visual perception of Venice while illuminating the life and works of this multifaceted artist, whose works are highly illustrative of the era's mainstream American culture and its perception of foreign spaces.

ABOUT THE BOOK: My Jonah Journey: Developing an Attitude of Gratitude is the true story of Linda M. Brandt's triumphant journey through a series of Job-like catastrophic experiences: the tragic death of her teenaged son, the discovery of a rare brain tumor and the precarious surgery that followed, the horrendous episode of spinal meningitis, and then her own near-death experience. For four minutes and with doctors working frantically, Linda lay heart-stopped and unbreathing on a cold hospital table next to the MRI tunnel where her son, Scottie, had been sent to bring her home. But God had other plans. Now for the first time in book form, Linda M. Brandt shares her three-year "Jonah journey," describing how she replaced fear and despair with an attitude of gratitude as she learned to walk again, to drive, to paint, to undertake normal day-to-day activities, and then finally to do them alone. Of course, Linda is the first to say she never really was alone. Doctors told her, "We never see people like you again. They just go into their houses and go away." But because of God's grace, Linda's was a different journey. My Jonah Journey: Developing an Attitude of Gratitude will inspire even the most skeptic among us and reveal the One who loves us very, very much. **** ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Linda M. Brandt is a Christian, wife, mother, author, and renowned artist with an undeniable love for God and life. Against all odds and medical prognoses, Ms. Brandt not only survived brain surgery, spinal meningitis, and a near-death experience, but she thrived, regaining full physical and mental function, including her remarkable skills as a world-renowned artist whose paintings have been displayed from Paris to London and from New York City to Laguna Beach. In this new book, My Jonah Journey: Developing an Attitude of Gratitude, Ms. Brandt presents her miraculous story along with stunning original artwork she created to illustrate her journey.

Due to the huge success of her graphic memoir Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic in 2006 and its subsequent Tony Award-winning musical adaptation in 2009, Alison Bechdel (b. 1960) has recently become a household name. However, Bechdel, who has won numerous awards including a MacArthur Fellowship, has been writing and drawing comics since the early 1980s. Her comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For (DTWOF) stood out as one of the first to depict lesbians in popular culture and is widely hailed as an essential LGBTQ resource. It is also from this comic strip that the wildly popular Bechdel Test-a test to gauge positive female representation in film-obtained its name. While DTWOF secured Bechdel's role in the comics world and queer community long before her mainstream success, Bechdel now experiences notoriety that few comics artists ever achieve and that women cartoonists have never attained. Spanning from 1990 to 2017, Alison Bechdel: Conversations collects ten interviews that illustrate how Bechdel uses her own life, relationships, and contemporary events to expose the world to what she has referred to as the ""fringes of acceptability""-the comics genre as well as queer culture and identity. These interviews reveal her intentionality in the use of characters, plots, structure, and cartooning to draw her readers toward disrupting the status quo. Starting with her earliest interviews on public access television and in little-known comics and queer presses, Rachel R. Martin traces Bechdel's career from her days with DTWOF to her popularity with Fun Home and Are You My Mother? This volume includes her ""one-off"" DTWOF strips from November 2016 and March 2017 (not anthologized anywhere else) and in-depth discussions of her laborious creative process as well as upcoming projects.

Rachel Owen's hauntingly beautiful illustrations for Dante's Inferno take a radically new approach to representing the world of Dante's famous poem. The images combine the artist's deep cultural and historical understanding of 'The Divine Comedy' and its artistic legacy with her unique talent for collage and printmaking. These illustrations, casting the viewer as a first-person pilgrim through the underworld, prompt us to rethink Dante's poem through their novel perspective and visual language. Owen's work, held in the Bodleian Library and published here for the first time, illustrates the complete cycle of thirty-four cantos of the Inferno with one image per canto. The illustrations are accompanied by essays contextualising Owen's work and supplemented by six illustrations intended for the unfinished Purgatorio series. Fiona Whitehouse provides details of the techniques employed by the artist, Peter Hainsworth situates Owen's work in the field of modern Dante illustration and David Bowe offers a commentary on the illustrations as gateways to Dante's poem. Jamie McKendrick and Bernard O'Donoghue's translations of episodes from the 'Inferno' provide complementary artistic interpretations of Dante's poem, while reflections from colleagues and friends commemorate Owen's life and work as an artist, scholar and teacher. This stunning collection is an important contribution to both Dante scholarship and illustration.

Andre Kertesz is one of four new titles being published in Autumn 2007 in Thames & Hudson's acclaimed 'Photofile' series. Each book brings together the best work of the world's greatest photographers in an attractive format and at an easily affordable price. Handsome and collectable, the books are printed to the highest standards. Each one contains some sixty full-page reproductions printed in superb duotone, together with a critical introduction and a full bibliography.

Francine Prose's life of Caravaggio evokes the genius of this great artist through a brilliant reading of his paintings. Caravaggio defied the aesthetic conventions of his time; his use of ordinary people, realistically portrayed-street boys, prostitutes, the poor, the aged-was a profound and revolutionary innovation that left its mark on generations of artists. His insistence on painting from nature, on rendering the emotional truth of experience, whether religious or secular, makes him an artist who speaks across the centuries to our own time. In "Caravaggio", Francine Prose presents the brief but tumultuous life of one of the greatest of all painters with passion and acute sensitivity.