At the start of the March 2020 lockdown, Ian Beck would walk his greyhound Gracie through the early morning streets of Isleworth in west London, revelling in the light and the silence that the restrictions had brought. The familiar became charged with new meaning, inspiring Ian to paint the scenes around him for their own sake, something that he hadn't done since his student days in the sixties. Suburban streets, trees, fences, shrubs and overgrown alleyways - all are transformed in the quiet intensity of Ian's lockdown paintings. He painted interiors too: the moon shining through a bedroom window, objects on mantelpieces, the eeriness of back gardens at dusk. As the year progressed, the crisp light of spring gave way to the haze of summer and the gloom of autumn fogs. The Light in Suburbia collects sixty of Ian's paintings from this period: a remarkable record of his year spent trying to capture the beauty of the unprepossessing everyday.

Provincial towns in Britain grew in size and importance in the eighteenth century. Ports such as Glasgow and Liverpool greatly expanded, while industrial centres such as Birmingham and Manchester flourished. Market towns outside London developed as commercial centres or as destinations offering spa treatments as in Bath, horse racing in Newmarket or naval services in Portsmouth. Containing over 100 images of towns in England, Wales and Scotland, this book draws on the extensive Gough collection in the Bodleian Library. Contemporary prints and drawings provide a powerful visual record of the development of the town in this period, and finely drawn prospects and maps - made with greater accuracy than ever before - reveal their early development. This book also includes perceptive observations from the journals and letters of collector Richard Gough (1735-1809), who travelled throughout the country on the cusp of the industrial age.

Extractivism has increasingly become the ground on which activists and scholars in Latin America frame the dynamics of ecological devastation, accumulation of wealth, and erosion of rights. These maladies are the direct consequences of long-standing extraction-oriented economies, and more recently from the expansion of the extractive frontier and the implementation of new technologies in the extraction of fossil fuels, mining, and agriculture. But the fields of sociology, political ecology, anthropology, and geography have largely ignored the role of art and cultural practices in studies of extractivism and post-extractivism. The field of art theory, on the other hand, has offered a number of texts that put forward insightful analyses of artwork addressing extraction, environmental devastation, and the climate crisis. However, an art theory perspective that does not engage firsthand and in depth with collective action remains limited and fails to provide an account of the role, processes, and politics of art in anti- and post-extractivist movements. Creating Worlds Otherwise examines the narratives that subaltern groups generate around extractivism, and how they develop, communicate, and mobilize these narratives through art and cultural practices. It reports on a six-year project on creative resistance to extractivism in Argentina and builds on long-term engagement working on environmental justice projects and campaigns in Argentina and the UK. It is an innovative contribution to the fields of Latin American studies, political ecology, cultural studies, and art theory, and addresses pressing questions regarding what post-extractivist worlds might look like as well as how such visions are put into practice.

This practical and inspirational book will help artists successfully capture the beauty and detail of urban landscapes and individual buildings in drawing media as well as watercolour. Drawing & Painting Buildings offers practical advice to artists seeking to render the urban landscape. This is a comprehensive guide to the subject, packed with practical advice, from simple exercises for perspective and colour mixing for man-made materials to choosing your composition and capturing and editing detail. This is an essential resource for painting and drawing buildings of all sorts, from town houses to public buildings, each accompanied by stunning finished artworks and annotated with indispensable tips and techniques.

The Birmingham Art Book is a tribute to a unique city whose visionary scientists and inventors made it famous as a manufacturing powerhouse. From heavy metal industry - here is where the first steam trains were built- to heavy metal music - Black Sabbath made their mark here, this is a place with a proud heritage. Its handsome university is the original of the 'Redbrick' universities, founded by a farsighted mayor in 1900 as a civic place of learning, open to all, now with many world famous alumni and staff, 10 of whom have won Nobel prizes. Local artists convey the architectural glory of Victoria Square and the city centre Museum and Art Gallery (which holds a sumptuous collection of Pre-Raphaelite art). In their drawings, they echo the modern vibrancy of buildings such as the iconic Selfridges department store and the REP theatre. Collages and sketches depict a city buzzing with vitality -from the world-renowned Hippodrome theatre, to the shopping centres and legendary nightlife that are national attractions. Quirky nooks like the Jewellery Quarter, the Electric Cinema or the tranquil Botanic gardens hidden so close to the centre are reflected in this lovely book. The green city with 8000 acres of public parks and many miles of canal paths dating from its heyday in the Industrial Revolution is lovingly drawn and painted by its artists. The Birmingham Art Book is where local artists shine a light on the grand and the humdrum with equal affection. Their love for the modern city is evident and their pride in its heritage comes to the fore in this lovely book.

Edinburgh: An Architectural Portrait features an inspiring portfolio of imagery created over a ten-year period by the photographer and visual artist James Reid. Documenting the City of Edinburgh using digital, analogue and polaroid formats, the book captures the city's main conservation areas, with an emphasis on key architects, listed buildings and distinct aspects of the cityscape. Presented as a beautiful collection of black-and-white images, along with a handful of colour works, the book's digital images are a mixture of full-frame capture and large-scale composite pieces, along with a selection of 35mm analogue single-frame photography. These include panoramic views as well as more intimate perspectives, made possible by Reid's unique access to the city's various buildings and structures of note. The book also features essays by five established Edinburgh-based artists - Aly Gordon (painter), Bruce Hare (artist and architect), Marianne Magnin (artist and curator), Merlin Ramos (painter) and Henry Stevens (artist and architect) - each of whom offers a personally informed response to the city and how its architecture, art and history inform, influence and impact on them. The resulting publication is a unique visual mapping of the city's most architecturally significant areas that will appeal to not only architects, artists and academics, but also residence of and visitors to one of the world's most architecturally rich capitals of culture.

Representations of political power play an important role in Western art history from the late Middle Ages up to modern times. This volume by leading experts is a wide-ranging survey of significant trends in the development of political imagery.

The Art of Building has captured the interest of artists from the Roman period to today. The process of construction appears in western art in all its details, trades, and operations. Michael Tutton investigates the representation of building processes and materials through an examination of paintings, illuminated manuscripts, watercolours, prints, drawings and sculpture. Technical terms are explained and detailed interpretations of each work are provided, with insights into the artists' inspiration and themes. Even paintings not wholly or principally devoted to construction sites may give tantalising glimpses of building activity. How do these images convey meaning? How much is imagined; how much is authentic? Fully referenced endnotes, bibliography, and glossary complement the text and captions, informing not only the architectural and construction historian, but also those simply interested in art.

"Car Fetish "presents the automobile as a source of inspiration for the art of the last hundred years. Starting with the Futurists, who saw in its beastly roar and thrilling, dangerous speed a new ideal of beauty, the book provides an overview of the most beautiful and inspiring artworks we owe to this tin muse. Among them are examples of Pop Art and creations by the Nouveaux Realistes, with Jean Tinguely as biggest Formula 1 fan. The extensive catalog places the automobile in the context of cultural history as a key cultural artifact of the twentieth century.

Among the included artists are Kenneth Anger, Giacomo Balla, Edward Burtynsky, Andrew Bush, Cesar, John Chamberlain, Liz Cohen, Stephen Dean, Jan Dibbets, Don Eddy, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Sylvie Fleury, Franz Gertsch, Allan Kaprow, Peter Keetman, Edward Kienholz, Konrad Klapheck, Annika Larsson, Jacques-Henri Lartigue, Zilla Leutenegger, Arnold Odermatt, Ahmet Ogut, Julian Opie, Mel Ramos, Robert Rauschenberg, Pipilotti Rist, Peter Roehr, Mimmo Rotella, Bruno Rousseaud, Luigi Russolo, Franck Scurti, Roman Signer, Stefan Sous, Peter Stampfli, Anton Stankowski, Superflex, Andy Warhol, Patrick Weidmann, Virgil Widrich, and Dale Yudelman.

Award-winning urban sketcher and best-selling author Stephanie Bower presents a spectacular, all-new collection of sketchers and their art from 39 countries in a city-to-city tour around the world. The remarkable work of the vibrant, international urban sketching community was first documented in The Art of Urban Sketching by Gabriel Campanario. In the ten years since its release, sketching on location has grown into nothing less than a worldwide phenomenon. A visual feast of more than 700 images from over 150 sketchers, The World of Urban Sketching unveils the latest developments and innovations in the creative and rewarding pursuit of on-location drawing and painting. New Artwork. Discover the stunning and informative work of both established and emerging urban sketchers, from Seattle to Santiago, from Singapore to Sydney. New Techniques. Consider new styles and approaches in color and linework, including digital, through artists' tips and step-by-step demonstrations. New Stories. Learn what inspires sketchers, even during a pandemic, and get invaluable insights into creating artwork on location through artists' observations and advice. Whether you draw during your travels or in your own backyard, the beautiful work in The World of Urban Sketching will expand your skills and inspire you to pick up a pencil and sketch your world!

As human and machine agency become increasingly intermingled and digital media is overlaid onto the urban landscape, The machinic city argues that performance art can help us to understand contemporary urban living. Dias analyses several performance art interventions from artists such as Blast Theory, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer and Rimini Protokoll, which draw from a rich history of avant-garde art movements to create spaces for deliberation and reflection on urban life and to speculate on its future. While cities are increasingly controlled by autonomous processes mediated by technical machines, Dias analyses the performative potential of the aesthetic machine, as it assembles with media, capitalist, human and urban machines. The aesthetic machine of performance art in urban space is examined through its different components - design, city and technology actants. This unveils the unpredictable nature and emerging potential of performance art as it unfolds in the machinic city, which consists of assemblages of efficient and not-so-efficient machines. -- .

Delving into a hitherto unexplored aspect of Irish art history, Painting Dublin, 1886-1949 examines the depiction of Dublin by artists from the late-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. Artists' representations of the city have long been markers of civic pride and identity, yet in Ireland such artworks have been overlooked in favour of the rural and pastoral. Framed by the shift from city of empire to capital of an independent republic, this book examines artworks by Walter Osborne, Rose Barton, Jack B. Yeats, Harry Kernoff, Estella Solomons and Flora Mitchell, encompassing a variety of urban views and artistic themes. While Dublin is already renowned for its representation in literature, this book will demonstrate the many attractions it held for Ireland's artists, offering a vivid visualisation of the city's streets and inhabitants at a crucial time in its history. -- .

'There's no place like home'; 'safe as houses'; 'home is where the heart is': ideas of the house and home are rich in cultural cliches and contradictory meanings. Playing at Home explores the different ways in which artists have engaged with this popular everyday theme - from 'broken homes' to haunted houses, doll's houses, mobile homes and greenhouses. The book considers how issues of gender, identity, class and place can overlap and interact in our relationships with 'home', and how certain artworks disturb our comfortable ideas of what it means to be 'at home'. While other books have touched on examples of the 'uncanny' and surreal presentation of houses in art, this one argues that an understanding of the role of irony and play, and the critical potential of the 'everyday', are equally important in our interpretations of these intriguing works. The author draws on the work of philosophers, cultural theorists and art critics to enrich our understanding of this genre. Covering the work of well-known artists, including Tracey Emin, Gordon Matta-Clark, Rachel Whiteread, Cornelia Parker, Vito Acconci, Michael Landy, Richard Wilson, Mike Kelley and Louise Bourgeois, the book also looks at artists who travel across continents, for whom home is a shifting notion, such as Do-Ho Suh and Pascale Marthine Tayou. Discussing a wide range of media, including installation and film, and richly illustrated, Playing at Home is a compelling survey of one of contemporary art's popular themes.

'I have been ill and frightfully bored and the one thing I have wanted is a big album of your absurd beautiful drawings to turn over. You give me a peculiar pleasure of the mind like nothing else in the world.' - H. G. Wells to W. Heath Robinson (1914) This book takes a nostalgic look back to the imaginative and often frivolous world of William Heath Robinson, one of the few artists to have given his name to the English language. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the expression Heath Robinson is used to describe 'any absurdly ingenious and impracticable device of the kind illustrated by this artist'. Yet his elaborate drawings of contraptions are not the only thing to make this book very Heath Robinson. Full of quirky images from Romans wearing polka dots to balding men seducing mermaids, Very Heath Robinson presents an unconventional history of the world in which technology and its social setting get equal billing.

Delving into a hitherto unexplored aspect of Irish art history, Painting Dublin, 1886-1949 examines the depiction of Dublin by artists from the late-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. Artists' representations of the city have long been markers of civic pride and identity, yet in Ireland such artworks have been overlooked in favour of the rural and pastoral. Framed by the shift from city of empire to capital of an independent republic, this book examines artworks by Walter Osborne, Rose Barton, Jack B. Yeats, Harry Kernoff, Estella Solomons and Flora Mitchell, encompassing a variety of urban views and artistic themes. While Dublin is already renowned for its representation in literature, this book will demonstrate the many attractions it held for Ireland's artists, offering a vivid visualisation of the city's streets and inhabitants at a crucial time in its history. -- .

During the 18th century, the arts of industry encompassed both liberal and mechanical realms--not simply the representation of work in the fine art of painting, but the skills involved in the processes of industry itself. Drawing on a wealth of primary sources, Celina Fox argues that mechanics and artisans used four principal means to describe and rationalize their work: drawing, model-making, societies, and publications. These four channels, which form the four central themes of this engrossing book, provided the basis for experimentation and invention, for explanation and classification, for validation and authorization, and for promotion and celebration, thus bringing them into the public domain and achieving progress as a true part of the Enlightenment.

A timely new edition featuring the brilliant work from among the most inventive minds in illustration and cartoon wizardry. Heath Robinson was one of Britain's most successful graphic artists. His work has had a huge influence on comic art in this country, but also on the image and self-image of the British. As the champion of pragmatic man, Heath Robinson presented a vision of the British as an unflappable, ingenious and slightly demented breed of inventors that persists to the present day. The British are still a nation of garage-haunting amateur engineers who will recognise the inhabitants of Heath Robinson's world, with their pot bellies and pots of tea, archaic faces and sturdily commonsensical approach to the problems of existence. How to hunt tigers by elephant, how to get an even tan, rise with the sun or put out a chimney fire, these and many more pressing questions are answered in the pages of Contraptions. With illustrations salvaged from the family archives and commentary by Heath Robinson expert, Geoffrey Beare, Contraptions is the best possible introduction to the work of one of Britain's great comic talents.

This is the first full-length study about the British artist Roy Ascott, one of the first cybernetic artists, with a career spanning seven decades to date. The book focuses on his early career, exploring the evolution of his early interests in communication in the context of the rich overlaps between art, science and engineering in Britain during the 1950s and 1960s. The first part of the book looks at Ascott's training and early work. The second park looks solely at Groundcourse, Ascott's extraordinary pedagogical model for visual arts and cybernetics which used an integrative and systems-based model, drawing in behaviourism, analogue machines, performance and games. Using hitherto unpublished photographs and documents, this book will establish a more prominent place for cybernetics in post-war British art.

Money Matters in European Artworks and Literature, c. 1400-1750 focuses on coins as material artefacts and agents of meaning in early modern arts. The precious metals, double-sided form, and emblematic character of coins had deep resonance in European culture and cultural encounters. Coins embodied Europe's power and the labour, increasingly located in colonised regions, of extracting gold and silver. Their efficacy depended on faith in their inherent value and the authority perceived to be imprinted into them, guaranteed through the institution of the Mint. Yet they could speak eloquently of illusion, debasement and counterfeiting. A substantial introduction precedes essays by interdisciplinary scholars on five themes: power and authority in the Mint; currency and the anxieties of global trade; coins and persons; coins in and out of circulation; credit and risk. An Afterword on a contemporary artist demonstrates the continuing expressive and symbolic power of numismatic forms.

High above the pleasure palaces of the French Riviera is the Alpine Extension of the Maginot Line. These little-known bunkers were built in the 1930s to protect against Mussolini. But things didn't quite turn out at the French expected . . . Now, they are marooned and crumbling in some of the most beautiful, remote parts of the Alps. They are disappearing into the landscapes they once commanded, stray facts from a future passed, still waiting for an onslaught that never came. Bunker Research is for adventurers, architects, historians, mountain lovers and urban explorers. Follow this disquieting journey, told in stunning photos and prose, up peaks, along ridges and down valleys, searching for the hidden history of modernism in the mountains. The second edition follows the long-sold-out limited first printing, which won 'Best Self-Published Book' at the British Book Design & Production Awards 2016. If features 10 pages of new photos.

Others and Outcasts in Early Modern Europe is the first book to focus directly on the visual representation of marginal and outcast people in early modern Europe. The volume offers a comprehensive and groundbreaking analysis of a wide range of images featuring Jews and Turks, roguish beggars, syphilitics and plague victims, the 'deserving poor', toothpullers, beggar philosophers, black slaves, itinerant actors and street hawkers. Its broad geographical and chronological scope allows the reader to build a wider picture of visual strategies and conventions for the depiction of the poor and the marginal as they developed in countries such as Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, Spain, Britain and Ireland. While such types had often been depicted in earlier centuries, the essays show that they came to play a newly significant and formative role in European art between 1500 and 1750. Marking a clear departure from much previous scholarship on the subject - which has tended to view representations of poverty as passive by-products of non-visual forces - these essays place the image itself at the centre of the investigation. The studies show that many depictions of socially marginal people operated in essentially hegemonic fashion, as a way of controlling or fixing the social and moral identity of those living on the edge. At the same time, they also reveal the inventiveness and originality of many early modern artists in dealing with this subject matter, showing how the sophisticated visuality of their representations could render meaning ambiguous in relation to such controlling discourses.

The Impressionists are world renowned for their vibrant depictions of the atmospheric effects and shimmering beauty of the French countryside. These paintings, often produced in Paris, found an enthusiastic market in the city. The inhabitants of that hub of modernity had an apparently paradoxical interest in the mythologies of rural living. As the city became more and more the motive force of social change so the country was understood as the anchor of changelessness and nostalgia. The essayists in this volume examine the complex relationship between country and city. Their work draws widely on the contemporary culture exploring folklore and children's literature, anarchism and urbanism, and offers significant new insights into the work of major artists and writers including Courbet, Millet, Monet, Van Gogh and Zola.