Still Life Photography reveals the aesthetic characteristics of what everyday people see, use and eat. It is a stark and relentless display of normality, embracing the unappreciated or negative. All aspects of ordinary life are re-discovered and re-illustrated via the camera lens. This book illuminates the unexpected potential of the objects surrounding us, and at the core of each photo lays an invitation to take a fresh look at life.

Sunflowers, roses, succulents, ferns, wildflowers - this rich bouquet of postcards features one hundred botanical postcards from ten celebrated artists from around the world. The colorful cards, in our popular postcard box format, are ideal for correspondence or display. A booklet about the artists highlights their creative processes, influences, and favorite houseplants.

A book that debunks the popular myth that William Wordsworth was, first and foremost, a poet of daffodils, Wordsworth's Gardens and Flowers: The Spirit of Paradise provides a vivid account of Wordsworth as a gardening poet who not only wrote about gardens and flowers but also designed - and physically worked in - his gardens. Wordsworth's Gardens and Flowers: The Spirit of Paradise is a book of two halves. The first section focuses on the gardens that Wordsworth made at Grasmere and Rydal in the English Lake District, and also in Leicestershire, at Coleorton. The gardens are explored via his poetry and prose and the journals of his sister, Dorothy Wordsworth. In the second half of the book, the reader learns more of Wordsworth's use of flowers in his poetry, exploring the vital importance of British flowers and other 'unassuming things' to his work, as well as their wider cultural, religious and political meaning. Throughout, the engaging, accessible text is woven around illustrations that bring Wordsworth's gardens and flowers to life, including rare botanical prints, many reproduced here for the first time in several decades.

In this second book in a series covering elements of the landscape, renowned watercolourist, David Bellamy shows how to paint skies, light and atmosphere and how choices involving these three key elements can affect a painting. Starting with skies, David Bellamy covers basic techniques, composition, clouds, special effects like silver linings, sunsets and shafts of light, and much more, then there is a step by step dramatic sky demonstration. Next comes light, with plenty of advice including warm and cool light, using glazes, cast shadows, light from different directions, painting the sun and reflected light, followed by a step by step demonstration featuring strong light and shadow. The atmosphere section covers haze and mist, fog, mountains in cloud, smoke and steam, rain, storms and tranquil moods, and is followed by an atmospheric step by step painting of a waterfall. David Bellamy's extensive travels and much admired painting style ensure that there are plenty of beautiful, inspiring paintings of skies, light and atmosphere throughout the book.

A compendium of step-by-step drawing exercises from the best-selling Draw 50 series that features easy-to-follow lessons for rendering animals including cats, dogs, horses, prehistoric creatures, and more. With exercises taken from the animal drawing instruction titles in Lee J. Ames's beloved Draw 50 series, Draw 200 Animals brings you the best of Draw 50 Animals, Draw 50 Cats, Draw 50 Dogs, Draw 50 Horses, and Draw 50 Dinosaurs and Other Prehistoric Animals in a must-have collection of easy-to-follow, step-by-step visual lessons on sketching and rendering all kinds of furry, feathered, and finned critters. These classic lessons show you how to draw everything from pets to wild animals, including birds, insects, elephants, tigers, and more, in styles ranging from realistic to cartoony.

In 1865, the American landscape painter Frederic Edwin Church and his wife, Isabel, traveled to Jamaica on a sojourn of recovery after the tragic deaths of their two young children Herbert and Emma. A time to mourn and escape from the constant reminders found at their home, Olana, the Churches' trip to Jamaica also provided ample inspiration for Frederic.

The Olana Collection includes eight oil sketches, an ink drawing, and a pencil drawing Church made in Jamaica. Five of these oil sketches on paper Church chose to mount to canvas and frame for his and Isabel's enjoyment; over the years they have hung in different rooms at Olana. From these works, and others held by the Cooper-Hewitt, Church created two major studio oils, The Vale of St. Thomas, Jamaica, 1867 (the Wadsworth Atheneum) and The After Glow, 1867 (the Olana Collection). Within Church's oeuvre the studies of Jamaican sunsets, mountains, and foliage are particularly lovely. Church wrote of Jamaica: "The scenery is superb. . . . I have accomplished a great amount of work but there is so much to do that I am at a loss to decide day by day what to paint."

The 2010 exhibit at Olana will help explain Church's working process by showing Sunset Jamaica and the resulting studio work The After Glow together; it will include five works never before exhibited and reveal Church's interesting use of his photography collection both as an aide-memoire and as substrate for sketching. Fern Hunting among Picturesque Mountains includes forty-eight color illustrations, as well as essays by Elizabeth Mankin Kornhauser (on Church's Jamaica work) and Katherine Manthorne (about Church's friends and fellow artists who also traveled to Jamaica to paint)."

This book, published to coincide with a major exhibition at the National Maritime Museum, explores and celebrates Turner's lifelong fascination with the sea. It also sets his work within the context of marine painting in the 19th century. Each chapter has an introductory text followed by discussion of specific paintings. Four of the chapters conclude with a feature essay on a specific topic.

Samuel Palmer (1805-1881) was one of the leading British landscape painters of the 19th century. Inspired by his mentor, the artist and poet William Blake, Palmer brought a new spiritual intensity to his interpretation of nature, producing works of unprecedented boldness and fervency. Pre-eminent scholar William Vaughan-who organized the Palmer retrospective at the British Museum and The Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2005-draws on unpublished diaries and letters, offering a fresh interpretation of one of the most attractive and sympathetic, yet idiosyncratic, figures of the 19th century. Far from being a recluse, as he is often presented, Palmer was actively engaged in Victorian cultural life and sought to exert a moral power through his artwork. Beautifully illustrated with Palmer's visionary and enchanted landscapes, the book contains rich studies of his work, influences, and resources. Vaughan also shows how later, enthralled by the Pre-Raphaelite movement, Palmer manipulated his own artistic image to harmonize with it. Little appreciated in his lifetime, Palmer is now hailed as a precursor of modernism in the 20th century.

Over the past three decades, artist Christian Peltenburg-Brechneff has travelled around the world to visit some of the most glorious private gardens to paint en plein air. He has created a luscious visual record of 28 of them in this charming gift-sized book of watercolours and gouaches. With contacts among the international elite, the author has gained permission to enter some of the most exquisite and heretofore unrecorded gardens from Sri Lanka to Italy. With introductory texts by the distinguished art critic Donald Kuspit and the ever-influential interior architecture and garden designer Bunny Williams, Into the Garden chronicles this long-term pilgrimage of a visionary painter, opening the exquisite private gardens to the public for the very first time.

Bernad creates projects to express his keen eye and spirit. Despite his having explored American spaces and cities in Japan and Europe, Bernad has always maintained his focus on Spain, attentive to the evolution of its landscape and the dcor of its interiors that is linked to very different worlds. He casts an amusing look at the details that only he is able to see and makes them distinct. His images turn reality into a theatre set. The boundaries between the real and the unlikely become blurred. Beyond Bernad's vision of the superficial world and his form of satire, one is given a glimpse of his inspired personality on this guided tour of the 20th-century playwrights who have brought the senseless and the ridiculous to the stage, even the grotesque, as embodied in the writings of Cervantes and the paintings of Goya. And behind this cumulus of symbols, there is the depiction of absurdity.

Look inside: http://issuu.com/actar/docs/wellcome/

How the nature illustrations of a Renaissance polymath reflect his turbulent age This pathbreaking and stunningly illustrated book recovers the intersections between natural history, politics, art, and philosophy in the late sixteenth-century Low Countries. Insect Artifice explores the moment when the seismic forces of the Dutch Revolt wreaked havoc on the region (TM)s creative and intellectual community, compelling its members to seek solace in intimate exchanges of art and knowledge. At its center is a neglected treasure of the late Renaissance: the Four Elements manuscripts of Joris Hoefnagel (1542 "1600), a learned Netherlandish merchant, miniaturist, and itinerant draftsman who turned to the study of nature in this era of political and spiritual upheaval. Presented here for the first time are more than eighty pages in color facsimile of Hoefnagel (TM)s encyclopedic masterwork, which showcase both the splendor and eccentricity of its meticulously painted animals, insects, and botanical specimens. Marisa Anne Bass unfolds the circumstances that drove the creation of the Four Elements by delving into Hoefnagel (TM)s writings and larger oeuvre, the works of his friends, and the rich world of classical learning and empirical inquiry in which he participated. Bass reveals how Hoefnagel and his colleagues engaged with natural philosophy as a means to reflect on their experiences of war and exile, and found refuge from the threats of iconoclasm and inquisition in the manuscript medium itself. This is a book about how destruction and violence can lead to cultural renewal, and about the transformation of Netherlandish identity on the eve of the Dutch Golden Age.

Wild and Precious documents the road trips that American photographer Jesse Burke (born 1972) takes with his daughter to explore the natural world. Burke's landscapes and portraits investigate the complex relationship humans have with nature, as well as a father's love for his child.

`Art is the flower, life is the green leaf' - Charles Rennie Mackintosh Haphazard bunches, formal bouquets, chance arrangements, quiet and thoughtful rural encounters - The Book of the Flower is a sylvan collection of beautiful depictions of flowers by artists, photographers and illustrators. Interspersed through the illustrations are short texts about the artists and their interest in particular flowers, from Georgia O'Keeffe's sumptuous close-ups of Jimson Weed and cactus flowers to Matisse's roses, Keika Hasegawa's chrysanthemums and Albert York's close study of zinnias. A wonderful collection for art-lovers, gardeners and flower-fanciers.

Rod Giblett came to live by Forrestdale Lake in southwestern Australia in 1986. Based in part on a nature journal he kept for several years, "Black Swan Lake" traces the life of the plants and animals of the surrounding area through the seasons. Presenting a wetlands calendar that charts the yearly cycle of the rising, falling, and drying waters of this internationally significant wetland, this book is a modern-day "Walden." The first book to provide a cultural and natural history of this place--taking into account the indigenous people's concept of the seasons (six instead of four)--"Black Swan Lake" will be enjoyed by conservationists, as well as others seeking connection with place, plants, and animals in their own bioregion.

Across cultures and centuries, the forest has occupied a unique place in our collective imagination. Sylvania, by Brooklyn-based photographer Anna Beeke (born 1984), explores the intersection of nature, imagination and myth in the American woodlands, from Washington to Vermont to Louisiana.

The Concept of Nature in Early Modern English Literature traces a genealogy of ecology in seventeenth-century literature and natural philosophy through the development of the protoecological concept of 'the oeconomy of nature'. Founded in 1644 by Kenelm Digby, this concept was subsequently employed by a number of theologians, physicians, and natural philosophers to conceptualize nature as an interdependent system. Focusing on the middle decades of the seventeenth century, Peter Remien examines how Samuel Gott, Walter Charleton, Robert Boyle, Samuel Collins, and Thomas Burnet formed the oeconomy of nature. Remien also shows how literary authors Ben Jonson, George Herbert, Andrew Marvell, Margaret Cavendish, and John Milton use the discourse of oeconomy to explore the contours of humankind's relationship with the natural world. This book participates in an intellectual history of the science of ecology while prompting a re-evaluation of how we understand the relationship between literature and ecology in the early modern period.

Claire is not your everyday practitioner of "urbex," the modern underground passion for "urban exploration" that lures 21st-century adventurers into the hidden labyrinths and decaying chambers of disused buildings and urban spaces. Claire is, you see, a bull terrier. And with her photographer companion, Alice Van Kempen, she has created the canine expression of the art . . . "furbex." Furbex is a dazzling photographic record of Claire's adventures among the abandoned spaces of Europe. It captures her ghostly presence in ruined hotels and grand houses; crumbling castles and palaces; forgotten theaters and cinemas. Fascinated by shadows and light, past and present, and the mysterious, dark worlds of abandoned places, Alice van Kempen uses thrift shop props and long exposures to create photographs with the air of Old Master paintings; while Claire's tragi-comic presence imbues every image with the pathos and comedy of a silent movie. The result is a haunting and hilarious gift book of unique photographs, which will appeal to urban explorers, dog lovers (most particularly the cult following of the bull terrier breed), and all lovers of the Gothic, the mysterious and the absurd.

From the artist behind the popular Pigeon Letters website, an easy, no-skills-necessary guide to drawing flowers, leaves, and cacti with 200 step-by-step prompts.

Line drawing is an easy-to-master art form featuring illustrative, doodle-like designs. It's used widely among artists of many types with both fine and bold lines, creating different variations. Botanical Line Drawing teaches you how to start with the simplest doodles, building into more elaborate, delicate illustrations. This book focuses on the extremely popular subject matter of the natural world and includes flowers, leaves, succulents, houseplants, trees, branches, mushrooms, and more. These simple line drawings will allow you to branch out and have fun with your own personal style, as well as inspire you to add flourishes to other projects.

This sumptuous book is not a reference work, nor it is simply a collection of beautiful flowers. It is the product of a longstanding collaboration between renowned flower artist Makoto and botanical photographer Shunsuke Shiinoki. Working together, they have selected hundreds of plant species and arranged them in striking combinations that could never exist in the natural world, so creating a unique floral aesthetic. The result is a series of dense, luxuriant images, rich in colour and texture, in which nature and artifice are skilfully mingled. The four chapters are themed according to the cycle of the seasons: the freshness and new life of spring, the exuberance and abundance of summer, the fading grandeur of autumn and the deepening shadows of winter. Recalling the opulent still-life paintings of the 17th century, the photographs not only capture the surface beauty of the flowers, but suggest the burgeoning life brimming within them as well as its transience. From the sensuality of opening petals to the unfurling elegance of fern fronds, these gorgeous displays are vividly preserved in a meditative and inspirational book that will enchant all lovers of nature and art.

The man behind the paintings: the extraordinary life of J. M. W Turner, one of Britain's most admired, misunderstood and celebrated artists J. M. W. Turner is Britain's most famous landscape painter. Yet beyond his artistic achievements, little is known of the man himself and the events of his life: the tragic committal of his mother to a lunatic asylum, the personal sacrifices he made to effect his stratospheric rise, and the bizarre double life he chose to lead in the last years of his life. A near mythical figure in his own lifetime, Franny Moyle tells the story of the man who was considered visionary at best and ludicrous at worst. A resolute adventurer, he found new ways of revealing Britain to the British, astounding his audience with his invention and intelligence. Set against the backdrop of the finest homes in Britain, the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution, this is an astonishing portrait of one of the most important figures in Western art and a vivid evocation of Britain and Europe in flux.

A collection of the award-winning architect's travel sketches, showing inspirational buildings across the globe. Includes Sydney Opera House, St Paul's Cathedral and the Tokyo skyline. Chris Wilkinson, the founder of the architectural practice WilkinsonEyre, is responsible for beautiful buildings and structures in London and beyond, including the Gasholders at King's Cross, the redevelopment of Battersea Power Station, and the Gateshead Millennium Bridge. In this appealing publication, Wilkinson presents the sketches he makes while travelling for business and leisure, usually focusing on inspirational buildings or urban cityscapes. His travels have taken him as far afield as the West Indies, Russia, Egypt, Australia and Japan. Wherever he goes, he finds an hour or two to sit and sketch - whether in a hotel room with a view or on a cafe terrace with a cappuccino. From the medieval Tuscan town of Lucca to ancient Egyptian architecture, the Sydney Opera House and the skylines of London, Tokyo and New York, Wilkinson introduces each sketch and ruminates on his work, his travels, and the cities and buildings that have most inspired him.

Believing that artistic expression "can and does" play an important role in changing the way we perceive our relation to the world we live in, art critic John Grande takes an in-depth look at the work of some very unusual environmental artists in the United States, Canada, and -Europe.

Dealing with everything from materials to the politics of curatorship, from the permanence of art works to the artist's role as cultural critic, "Balance Art and Nature" takes theory into action as it critically examines the works of Anish Kapoor, Antony Gormley, Armand Vaillancourt, Bill Reid, Carl Beam, Kevin Kelly, Ana Mendieta, James Carl, Patrick Dougherty, Keith Haring, and others. What emerges is a viable socio-environmental framework for evaluating contemporary art and insights into art's actual and potential roles.

"Grande's commentaries represent an important contribution to the theory of art."--Claude Levi-Strauss

"A call to reawaken creativity in this time of alienation."--Antony Gormley

"Encourages us to rethink what it means to be an artist in a time of global eco-crisis."--Suzi Gablik, "The Re-enchantment of Art"

"Makes unexpected connections giving new insights into contemporary art."--"Public Art Review"

"Grande's book contains a lot of ideas, all of which are thought-provoking."--"Globe and Mail"

"Details makes this book convincing."--"Books In Canada"

"Grande's ideas and style are fresh, sincere, intuitive, lively and compelling."--"Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics"

"Offers interesting parallels between different aspects of public art."--"Espace Sculptur"

Writer and art critic John Grande's reviews and feature -articles have been published in art magazines and catalogues internationally. He is author of "Intertwining: Landscape, Technology, Issues, Artists" (Black Rose Books), "Nils-Udo: Art with Nature" (Wienand Verlag), and "Art Nature Dialogues" (SUNY Press).