Find inner calm and happiness in this beautiful, meditative and earthy watercolour instruction book from nature lover, teacher and artist Inga Buividavice. Art therapy and the act of painting is widely acknowledged to bringpositive mental health benefits, as it helps us centre ourselves, focus our intentions and engage creatively with the world around us. This beautiful guided watercolour book combines these aspects with the healing powers of nature to take you on a journey toward peace and tranquility. Even if you have no experience with watercolours or painting, Painting Calm’s accessible and easy-to-follow prompts will allow you to express yourself and create with ease and joy. Gather inspiration from artist Inga Buivadavice’s beautiful illustrations, designed to capture an emotional connection with the natural world through texture and colour, as you explore:   An overview of watercolour painting supplies and how to use them Basic watercolour techniques and colour theory Exercises for finding inspiration in nature Seasonal projects that include painting trees, leaves, flowers, natural light and patterns found in nature Tips for building a creative practice Discover your inner artist – and forge a new and powerful relationship to nature – in this calming project book, as you watercolour your way to mindful wellbeing.

"The Landscape Series" of 2002 to 2006 was made in quantities of thirty to one hundred 1' square panels, each of the thirty sets generally taking three weeks to complete. The panels were worked on flat, painting eighteen at a time in fifteen minute bursts. They were laid out on an old framed 6' x 3' piece which also served as a container for the pools of colour washed over the textured surface. Two inch square wooden cubes were used to stack the paintings in small towers to dry out. Various factors steered the series development: there was reference to an initial colour plan, thoughts about the load-bearing pressures on a place, tracks and crossing points, airflow, water, spaces and intervals, the nature of settlement in the land. For a city: light and shadows on buildings, streets, side alleys and hidden courtyards, people, stores, traffic, noise, incidents and interruptions. Titles were assigned later to photographs of the line of production. The identity of a place was achieved not by literal description but as an equivalent found by coincidence in the passage of an abstract process.

Published to coincide with the exhibition at the Foundling Museum in London, this fascinating book will re-introduce Joseph Highmore (1692-1780), an artist of status and substance in his day, who is now largely unknown. It takes as its focus Highmore's small oil painting known as The Angel of Mercy (1746, Yale), one of the most shocking and controversial images in 18th-century British art. The painting depicts a woman in fashionable mid-18th-century dress strangling the infant lying on her lap. A cloaked, barefooted fi gure cowers to the right as an angel intervenes, pointing towards the Foundling Hospital, the recently built refuge for abandoned infants, in the distance. The image attempts to address one of the most disturbing aspects of the Foundling Hospital story - certainly a subject that many (now as then) would consider beyond depiction. But if any artist of the period had attempted such a subject it would surely be William Hogarth, not the portrait painter Joseph Highmore? In fact, the painting was attributed to Hogarth for almost two centuries, until its reattribution in the 1990s. Even so, it is surprising that despite the wealth of scholarship associated with Hogarth and the `modern moral subject' of the 1730s and 1740s, The Angel of Mercy has received little attention until now. The book (and exhibition) seeks to address this, while encouraging greater interest in, and appreciation for, this signifi cant British artist. Highmore expert, Jacqueline Riding, will set this extraordinary painting within the context of the artist's life and work, as well as broader historical and artistic contexts. This will include exploration of superb examples of Highmore's portraiture, such as his complex, monumental group portrait The Family of Sir Eldred Lancelot Lee and the exquisite small-scale `conversations' The Vigor Family and The Artist and his Family, juxtaposed with analysis of key subject paintings, including the Foundling Museum's Hagar and Ishmael and Highmore's `Pamela' series, inspired by Samuel Richardson's bestselling novel. Collectively they tackle relevant and highly contentious issues around the status and care of women and children, master/servant relations, motherhood, abuse, abandonment, infant death and murder.

Sunday Times Art Book of the Year 2018 'If you are interested in modern British art, the book is unputdownable. If you are not, read it.' - Grey Gowrie, Financial Times 'All the good stories, and more, are here ... this is a genuinely encyclopaedic work, unlike anything else I have come across on the topic, informed by a deep love and understanding of modern painting. Everybody interested in the subject should read it.' - Andrew Marr, Sunday Times A masterfully narrated account of painting in London from the Second World War to the 1970s, illustrated throughout with documentary photographs and works of art The development of painting in London from the Second World War to the 1970s is the story of interlinking friendships, shared experiences and artistic concerns among a number of acclaimed artists, including Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach, David Hockney, Bridget Riley, Gillian Ayres, Frank Bowling and Howard Hodgkin. Drawing on extensive first-hand interviews, many previously unpublished, with important witnesses and participants, the art critic Martin Gayford teases out the thread connecting these individual lives, and demonstrates how painting thrived in London against the backdrop of Soho bohemia in the 1940s and 1950s and 'Swinging London' in the 1960s. He shows how, influenced by such different teachers as David Bomberg and William Coldstream, and aware of the work of contemporaries such as Jackson Pollock as well as the traditions of Western art from Piero della Francesca to Picasso and Matisse, the postwar painters were allied in their confidence that this ancient medium, in opposition to photography and other media, could do fresh and marvellous things. They asked the question 'what can painting do?' and explored in their diverse ways, but with equal passion, the possibilities of paint.

This essay takes as its focus two paintings by Johannes Vermeer (1632-75), The Milkmaid c.1661-62 and Woman Holding a Balance c.1662-65, and considers critical approaches to the artist by four historians: Edward A.Snow, Lawrence Gowing, John Michael Montias, and Martin Pops. Its aim is not solely to describe Vermeer's art, but by a process of comparative analysis to discern the various standpoints of his biographers, and to clarify their methodologies in research.

The dominant form of Ottoman pictorial art until the eighteenth century, miniatures have traditionally been studied as reflecting the socio-historical contexts, aesthetic concerns and artistic tastes of the era within which they were produced. Begum Ozden Fyrat proposes instead a radical re-reading of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century miniatures in the light of contemporary critical theory, highlighting the viewer's encounter with the image. Encounters with the Ottoman Miniature employs contemporary concepts such as the gaze, frame/framing, reading and re-reading, drawing on thinkers such as Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes and Gilles Deleuze to establish the vibrant cultural agency of miniature paintings. With analysis that illuminates both the social and political situations in which these miniatures were painted as well as emphasising the miniature's contemporary relevance, Firat presents an important new re-imagining of this art form.

-- Stunning watercolour paintings by one of Sweden's best-loved artists -- Fascinating insight into Swedish rural and artistic life in the late nineteenth century -- Accompanied by an explanatory text giving more detail about his life and techniques Carl Larsson is one of Sweden's best-loved artists. His stunning watercolours of his home and family from the end of the nineteenth century are acclaimed as one of the richest records of life at that time. The paintings in this book are a combined collection which depict Larsson's family -- his wife Karin and their eight children -- his home in the village of Sundborn, and his farm, Spadarvet. The accompanying text provides a fascinating insight into Larsson family and farm life, and his painting techniques. Today, over 60,000 tourists a year visit Sundborn to admire Larsson's home and work. Also published as three separate volumes: A Home, A Family, and A Farm.