Epic Land is a celebration in pictures and words of the arresting beauty of the landscapes of Namibia and of the centrality of land in the culture, history, politics and daily lives of its people. The book seeks to uncover the rare essence that marks the landscape of Namibia apart from all others.

Few countries in the world are richer than Namibia in its canvas of natural beauty. The landscape is one of rich and often harsh contrast with many changing moods. A journey through its landscape is infinitely rewarding. Within this book this progression is depicted. The dramatic scenery of remote deserts, mountains, mystical trees and stormy shores are the equal of any.

Through her captivating photographs and absorbing text, Amy Schoeman shares with the reader the strange beauties of her life’s passion. The superb photographs capture the life of the desert, its forms and colours, and the moods of its ever-changing landscapes.

Artist Chris Pendleton is clearly a passionate lover of animals, having drawn and painted birds and wildlife for as long as he can remember. In this charming mini calendar, you'll find many a beloved garden visitor - from a Blue Tit to a Goldfinch or Great Spotted Woodpecker - represented in striking linocut form. Informative text accompanies each work in this art calendar and the datepad features previous and next month's views.

Water-soluble and oil-based coloured pencils are becoming increasingly popular for botanical painting asthey are easier to use than traditional watercolour and are more forgiving, yet they produce the same stunning effects. They are especially suitable for the accuracy needed to paint in the botanical style of illustration. In this book Ann Swan gives helpful advice on all aspects of working with coloured pencils, including the techniques you will have to master - underpainting, layering and burnishing. She also demonstrates how to mix and build up colour, and how to add those finishing touches that will complete your painting successfully. Several full step-by-step demonstrations are included to show how these techniques are put into practice. The book concludes with a gallery of coloured pencil works by the author, students of botanical painting and other professional botanical painters, providing a wonderful source of reference and inspiration.

Drawn from Paradise is David Attenborough's journey through the cultural history of the birds of paradise, one of the most exquisite and extravagant, colourful and intriguing families of birds. From the moment they were introduced to the European mind in the early sixteenth century, their unique beauty was recognised and commemorated in the first name that they were given - birds so beautiful must be birds from paradise. In this unique exploration of a truly awe-inspiring family of birds which to this day is still shrouded in mystery, David Attenborough and Errol Fuller trace the natural history of these enigmatic birds through their depiction in western works of art throughout the centuries, featuring beautiful illustrations by such luminary artists as Jacques Barraband, William Hart, John Gould, Rubens and Breughel, to name but a few. Experienced ornithologists and general nature and art enthusiasts alike will delight in this journey of discovery of the world's most beautiful and mysterious birds.

An informative and beautifully illustrated celebration of our favourite farmyard animals. Readers of The Country Set and Flying the Nest should dust down their wellingtons once again and come and meet The Farmyard Set. This handsome and lavishly illustrated gift book features 50 of farming's best-loved creatures, brought to life by award-winning artist Hannah Dale. Among them are old favourites, such as the Jersey cow and the Gloucester Old Spot, the Indian Runner duck and the Shetland pony, known for their charm and striking appearance. Descriptions and helpful facts illuminate these evocative paintings.

From London and Brighton, to Norwich and Wales, this calendar features artworks from the Tate's collection that explore the British landscape. Artists include John Constable, Paul Nash, Eric Ravilious and J.M.W. Turner. Informative text accompanies each work and the datepad features previous and next month's views. Created by Flame Tree Studio - The Art of Fine Gifts.

Located at the narrow end of the funnel-shaped Mississippi flyway zone, south Louisiana serves as a seasonal stopover for wintering birds from all across North America as well as for some neotropical birds from Central America. Many other bird species make the region their permanent home. For more than fifty years Charlie Hohorst, an avid outdoorsman, hunted ducks in the marshes of south Louisiana. Now he shoots waterfowl with his camera, and his passion extends to all birds living in or passing through the state's wetland areas. Wings of Paradise, the first book of Hohorst's breathtaking photography, demonstrates the attributes that served him well as a hunter -- an exceptional eye, focus, keen observation, manual dexterity, patience, a sense of oneness with the outdoors.

Brilliant color and clarity, as well as variety and movement, define Hohorst's photographs. Organized by type as shorebirds, raptors, woodland songbirds, and migratory ducks and geese, his images display dozens of different species engaged in their many and fascinating activities: swooping, skimming, plunging, meandering, soaring, pausing, preening, nesting, romancing, arguing, catching prey, drying their wings, and more. Hohorst captures individual features in remarkable detail, and his commentary shows an intimate familiarity with his subjects.

Following Hohorst's photographic feast for the eyes, noted food writer Marcelle Bienvenu reflects on south Louisiana's cherished hunting rituals and shares twenty-four favorite duck and goose recipes from the area. From close-ups to panoramic scenes, Wings of Paradise provides a visual delight for families, birders, naturalists, conservationists, sportsmen, and all who appreciate the natural beauty of south Louisiana.

This veritable marine treasure trove of a book is richly illustrated by the author, with fifty of the most beautiful, easily encountered, and sometimes astonishing marine organisms found on British coasts, from seemingly exotic seahorses and starfish, to peculiar sea-potatoes and sea lemons. Together, these characterful critters paint a colourful picture of life between the tides: starfish that, upon losing an arm, can grow a new one; baby sharks hatching from their fancifully named `mermaid' purses'; ethereal moon jellyfish pulsating in the current and, on some seabeds, even coral. Beachcombing, overturning a boulder or simply parting the strands of seaweed in a rock pool offer a glimpse into a thriving underwater world of curious creatures. Inspired by the Oxford University of Natural History's exceptionally rich zoology collections, which contain millions of specimens amassed from centuries of expeditions, this book tells the story of life on the seashore.

From the Zoroastrian sculpture of a 100-kilo mastiff to the portrait of a coiffured lap dog, Dogs in Art presents humanity's best friend like never before. Through a wide range of genres, fashions and cultures, from Roman mosaics to pop art, video, impressionism and photography, this book brings together more than 200 breathtaking canine images to tell the story of dogs in art from ancient times to the present. Susie Green considers the artist's often very personal motives behind their work, the vastly different cultural raison d'etres, and the reasons why these sentient, emotional beings are loved and trusted by hundreds of millions of people, including artists such as Hogarth, William Wegman and Lucien Freud. The perfect gift for the many dog lovers around the world, this beautifully illustrated volume offers a dynamic new perspective on our relationship with this much cherished animal.

**A BEAUTIFUL NEW SERIES FOR NATURE LOVERS** This lavish book displays and describes the characteristics of more than 50 varieties of flower. Exquisite botanical illustrations accompany a lyrical text by nature writer and botanist Michael Scott. Press-out sections enable you to reveal the outlines of the flowers and transform your book into a work of art.

Award-winning artist Harriet de Winton shows you how to create contemporary watercolour artworks to treasure and share. Through more than 30 step-by-step projects, discover how to paint individual flowers and foliage, as well as beautiful botanical compositions. Use your new skills to make art for your wall, unique cards, invitations, or simply paint for pleasure.

Less than thirty years after Lewis and Clark completed their epic journey, Prince Maximilian of Wied--a German naturalist--and his entourage set off on their own daring expedition across North America. Accompanying the prince on this 1832-34 voyage was Swiss artist Karl Bodmer, whose drawings and watercolors--designed to illustrate Maximilian's journals--now rank among the great treasures of nineteenth-century American art. This lavishly illustrated book juxtaposes Bodmer's landscape images with modern-day photographs of the same views, allowing readers to see what has changed, and what seems unchanged, since the time Maximilian and Bodmer made their storied trip up the Missouri River.

To discover how the areas Bodmer depicted have changed over time, photographer Robert M. Lindholm and anthropologist W. Raymond Wood made several trips over a period of years, from 1985 to 2002, to locate and record the same sites--all the way from Boston Harbor, where Maximilian and Bodmer began their journey, to Fort McKenzie, in modern-day western Montana. Pairing sixty-seven Bodmer works side by side with Lindholm's photographs of the same sites, this volume uses the comparison of old and new images to reveal alterations through time--and the encroachment of a built environment--across diverse landscapes.

"Karl Bodmer's America""Revisited" is at once a tribute to the artistic achievements of a premier landscape artist and a photographer who followed in his footsteps, and a valuable record of America's ever-changing environment.

Following the award-winning Seeds: Time Capsules of Life, Wolfgang Stuppy and Rob Kesseler explore the fascinating world of fruits through a unique presentation of extraordinary images from around the world accompanied by a lively explanatory text. Fruit. The word itself conjures up mouthwatering memories of crunchy apples, luscious strawberries, sweet bananas, succulent melons and juicy pineapples, to which we can add the splendid tropical fruits on our supermarket shelves. They are one of nature's most wonderful gifts but providing us with a healthy source of food is not the reason that plants produce such delicious fruits. It is therefore quite legitimate to ask what fruits are, and why they exist. As will be revealed, the true nature of fruits is concealed in what is buried in their core: their seeds. The key role that both play in the survival of each species explains the manifold strategies and ruses that plants have developed for the dispersal of their seeds. Whether these involve wind, water, humans, animals or the plant's own explosive triggers, they are reflected in the many colours, shapes and sizes of the fruits that protect the seeds and in the extraordinary way that some fruits have adapted to the animals that disperse their seeds, and the animals to the fruits they relish. In this pioneering collaboration, visual artist Rob Kesseler and seed morphologist Wolfgang Stuppy use scanning electronmicroscopy to obtain astonishing images of a variety of fruits and the seeds they protect. Razor-sharp cross-sections reveal intricate interiors, nuts and other examples of botanical architecture and reproductive ingenuity. The black and white microscope images have been sumptuously coloured by Rob Kesseler highlighting the structure and functioning of the minuscule fruit and seeds some almost invisible to the naked eye and in so doing creating a work of art. Larger fruits, flowers and seeds have been especially photographed. The formation, development and demise of the fruits are described, their vital role in the preservation of the biodiversity of our planet explained. Fruits are the keepers of the precious seeds that ensure our future; some are edible, others inedible and many, quite simply, incredible.

Do you recognise these ingredients? 35 recipes as you've never seen them before. A gorgeous gift book as well as a cookery title, Dinner Deconstructed features 35 recipes as you've never seen them before, broken down into their individual ingredients and photographed in stylish still-life arrangements. Serried rows of vegetables and small heaps of flour turn into a comforting cauliflower bake, the ingredients of steak bernaise boil down to meat, peppercorns, eggs, butter and herbs, and key lime pie looks mesmerising before the ingredients are magically melded together in the kitchen. And after you've feasted your eyes on the dishes in their natural and aesthetically pleasing state, simply turn to the back of the book to get the recipes themselves, so you can turn the raw ingredients into the delicious dishes they were destined to be. Word count: 7,000

Rob Kesseler works in the liminal space between fine art, design, craft and science. He moves easily between disciplines to engage fully with the art and science of the world around us. From ceramics to furniture and drawing to photography, Up Close presents his most thought-provoking and beautiful works in a creative collage, arranged thematically, mixing images and texts that have inspired him, especially the exotic forms and luscious colours of the plant world.

This visually stunning survey provides an in-depth look at Eileen Hogan's (b. 1946) working methods. Covering her entire career, it focuses particularly on two dominant themes in the artist's oeuvre-enclosed gardens and portraiture. Her depictions of gardens range from London's well-known Kew Gardens and Chelsea Physic Garden to Little Sparta, Ian Hamilton Finlay's garden in the Pentland Hills near Edinburgh. Her portraits include expressive sketches and paintings of veterans of the Second World War, and of HRH The Prince of Wales and HRH The Duchess of Cornwall. The book includes images from Hogan's sketchbooks, her studies, and finished paintings, accompanied by striking photographs of the artist at work. Essays by scholars and Hogan herself trace the artist's career from her student days at Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts through the present. This volume provides an unprecedented, intimate look at the life and work of one of the most interesting and evocative artists working today.

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Whether as a reaction to our technological present or as a manifestation of fears concerning our environmental future, depictions of the natural world in painting have never seemed more pertinent or urgent. Some of the most ambitious, crucial and intellectually vibrant paintings being created in this century involve the landscape - from a more traditional, perceptual based approach for rendering vistas to a looser, topography-inspired gestural abstraction that blurs the line between form and space, to many other modes in between. Surprisingly, there has not been an ambitious and wide-reaching publication on the subject - until now. The result of several years' worth of research, Landscape Painting Now is the first book to explore the very best contemporary landscape painting. Featuring artists from nearly twenty-five countries born over seven decades, it includes some of the brightest stars of the contemporary art world. It is introduced by an essay from Barry Schwabsky, who discusses the history of landscape painting, exploring how the genre developed through the 20th century to today, and how it has become increasingly relevant to art now. He also explores the notion of what is actually called a landscape painting today, and looks to expand beyond commonly held preconceptions concerning the genre.

India's Punjab is the land of the five rivers, five (Punj) rivers (Aab) - Ravi, Satluj, Chenab, Beas and Jhelum. It is also the birthplace of Max Kandhola's family, who historically were landowners, with connections to farming, agriculture and also to the military. Max Kandhola decided to go back to Punjab after completing his project "Illustration of Life" (2002) in which he documented his father's last moments of life, and reflected on issues within Sikh ritual, immortality and death. Over the last four years, he has visited the region as part of a continuing project to map family history through an odyssey of ancestral narratives, exploring memory, diaspora and identity. For him it is a land which is unfamiliar, yet it provides both a context and a beginning. Kandhola's journey began in Nurmahal, in the district of Jalandhar, from which most of his family originally came. Using this as a starting point he travelled from the centre of Punjab outwards.

Since he first dreamed of a career in photography, Guy Gillette has traveled regularly to his wife's family's ranch, located outside the small town of Crockett, Texas. When Gillette first came to the Porter Place, as the ranch has always been known, he began to photograph the Porter family and their land. Thanks to Gillette's sense of composition, these wonderful black-and-white photographs, dating from the 1940s, led to his career as a magazine photographer. Collected here for the first time, they document small-town life in East Texas, where Guy Gillette's sons, the musical duo the Gillette Brothers, still run cattle. "A Family of the Land" offers a portrait of a community over a half century during which remarkably little has changed.
Midway between Dallas and Houston, the Porter Place is where the South meets the West. The pastures began as cotton fields carved out of piney woods, and the cowboys use southern curs to control the cattle. One of the photographs presented here, of a boy and his dog at the veterinarian's office, is said to have moved Museum of Modern Art curator Edward Steichen to tears. Gillette also captures cowboys at work and at play, branding and marketing their animals, enjoying a game of dominoes, driving trucks with "2-50" air conditioning--two windows down, fifty miles an hour.
"Though photography is often called art," says Gillette, "I have wanted to be artless: to be a documentarian, not an artist. . . . Telling a story was always the attraction of photography for me." The story ends with the outdoor wedding of Guy Porter, one of the Gillette Brothers, at the Porter Place. Family, labor, and land remain, inseparable.