Born in Mexico in 1907, Frida Kahlo learned about suffering at an early age. She fell victim to polio at the age of six, and was then seriously hurt in a bus accident at eighteen, resulting in injuries that affected her for the rest of her life. The young and indomitable Frida met Diego Rivera, the great mural painter, when Mexico was at a great cultural and political crossroads. They formed a legendary partnership, with a strong attachment to Mexican folk art, a deep commitment to the Communist struggle and a raging artistic ambition that survived all the trials of their marriage. Admired by the Surrealists and photographed by the greatest, Frida was most renowned for her self-portraits and unusual still lifes. This book traces the extraordinary life of this artist whose unforgettable imagery combined cruelty and wit, honesty and insolence, pain and empowerment.

Part of a series of exciting and luxurious Flame Tree Notebooks. Combining high-quality production with magnificent fine art, the covers are printed on foil in five colours, embossed then foil stamped. And they're powerfully practical: a pocket at the back for receipts and scraps and two bookmarks. These are perfect for personal use and make a dazzling gift. This example is based on Vincent van Gogh's Almond Blossom.

This study develops a theory of Indian art worlds that argues for the need to consider the different discursive formations and related strategic practices of an art world. In so doing, it develops the common notion of "art world" into a plurality of worlds. The author explores the art worlds of the Orisan patta paintings, an Indian art form that has seen a great revival since the early 1950s, due partly to increased national pride after independence and partly to the rise of mass tourism. Locally, the increasing popularity of these paintings has led to, and is reinforced by, a village in the district of Puri being designated a "crafts village" by the states government. Here the author examines the consequences of this increased popularity, paying particular attention to the encompassing local, regional and national discourses involved. In so doing, clashing Indian art worlds demonstrates that, while painters' local discourses are characterized by pragmatism, the discourses of regional and especially national elites are concerned with the exegesis of local paintings and their association with the great Sanskrit tradition. A central theme of the study focuses on the awards given for

Christopher White explains why he chose this title for his new book: 'The often intimate, reflective and personal side to Rembrandt's work in treating subjects from history or the Bible reveals an increasingly more introspective interpretation than his contemporaries.' Rembrandt's sharp eye draws inspiration from the domestic scene, the local street and wherever he went. His subjects include: children, beggars, musicians, dogs, pigs, horses; even elephants and lions. White studies Rembrandt's technique from an aesthetic rather than a scientific point of view; his willingness to experiment whether drawing, painting or etching is a notable feature of his work, and by discussing examples of the three different media side by side, the author demonstrates their interdependence.

Watercolour painting is an absorbing, meditative art-from that many people would like to enjoy but don't attempt to because they believe they can't paint or simply don't know where to begin. An encouraging voice and a clear, easy-to-follow approach is often all that's needed to give people the confidence to get started and keep going. That's exactly what this book provides. Paul Clark, an enthusiastic and accomplished painter who runs his own art school, explains the fundamentals in a friendly and accessible way. He shows readers what they really need in terms of tools and materials - starting with a limited colour palette that can be mixed to create the vast majority of colours required. He then explains and illustrates the basic techniques, before presenting ten of his paintings that put those techniques into action. Each painting is broken down into stages, with clear instructions and photographs for readers to follow, plus plenty of helpful tips. In addition, there are three feature spreads that focus on particular areas of interest for beginners, including special effects, painting trees and painting skies.

This review considers the major Cezanne exhibition at the Tate Gallery London, staged from 8th February until 28th April 1996. Rather than focusing exclusively on the artist's work, the piece attempts to place the exhibition in context, exploring the institutional arena of presentation and the social and economic strata to which the retrospective is mainly addressed. To encompass these multiple levels of attention, the essay is based on a journey through the exhibition, seen at the press view on Tuesday 6th February 1996. The record is intentionally discursive, entwining impressions both of the works and the audience, groups of media professionals moving from room to room in sequence around the show. Further attention is given to the formulation of the catalogue, to gain a reasonably complete picture of the event.

"I always thought I would get into painting, but I got waylaid by rock 'n' roll. Finally, I thought, 'Now's the time.' As soon as I could be alone and paint without any interruptions, I just couldn't stop." – Chrissie Hynde

"These paintings wake me up, show me life, make me want to get up and do something." – Brian Eno

"The fact that Chrissie is a great musician doesn’t undermine her painting; it underpins it…" – Tim Marlow

In 2015, Chrissie Hynde, the singer, songwriter and leader of The Pretenders, produced an oil painting of a ceramic vase. It proved to be the starting point for Chrissie Hynde’s first body of work, nearly 200 canvases in all. These paintings are now shared for the very first time in Adding The Blue.

Beginning with still life studies and culminating in vibrant abstract compositions, Adding The Blue is a beautiful book of paintings that reveals Chrissie Hynde as an artist as passionate about her painting as her music.

With forewords by visionary musician and artist, Brian Eno, and The Royal Academy’s Artistic Director, Tim Marlow, Adding The Blue is captioned throughout with Chrissie Hynde’s thoughts, anecdotes and reflections.

Published in hardback the front cover features the work,'Tuesday Self-Portrait'

Secret Knowledge created an international sensation when it was published in 2001. Now, Hockney takes his controversial thesis - that some of the masterpieces of Western art were created using optical devices - even further in light of new and exciting discoveries. In 32 new pages, he demonstrates how Renaissance artists used mirrors and lenses to help them develop chiaroscuro, perspective, and the arts of depicting three-dimensional space and forms. Stunning in its presentation and wide-ranging in its implications, Secret Knowledge remains the art book sensation of the new century.

This is the illustrated story of New York artist Chris Daze Ellis's successful transition from the subways to international studios and galleries. Follow his 30+ year career from his days as a teenage graffiti writer to his current life as a professional painter, mentor, and family man. This book, with more than 250 photographs, is a journey tracking the seminal moments in Daze's life that shaped his art. View his aesthetic evolution, from "Graffiti High" (New York's High School of Art and Design) and an "unsanctioned" street art phase to exhibitions with Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Train photos from the 1970s and '80s, a broad representation of Daze's studio and mural works, and personal photos guide the reader through an artistic portfolio spanning five decades. Contributions by graffiti writer Jay "J.SON" Edlin and essayist Claire Schwartz, and a foreword by graffiti historian and chronicler Sacha Jenkins, complete this volume.

Joan Eardley (1921-1963) is one of Scotland's most admired artists. During a career that lasted barely fifteen years, she concentrated on two very distinct themes: children in the Townhead area of central Glasgow, and the fishing village of Catterline, just south of Aberdeen, with its leaden skies and wild sea. The contrast between this urban and rural subject matter is self-evident, but the two are not, at heart, so very different. Townhead and Catterline were home to tight-knit communities, living under extreme pressure: Townhead suffered from overcrowding and poverty, and Catterline from depopulation brought about by the declining fishing industry. Eardley was inspired by the humanity she found in both places. These two intertwining strands are the focus of this book, which looks in detail at Eardley's working processes. Her method can be traced from rough sketches and photographs through to pastel drawings and large oil paintings. Identifying many of Eardley's subjects and drawing on unpublished letters, archival records and interviews, the authors provide a new and remarkably detailed account of Eardley's life and art.

First published in 1996. The art of the extraordinary French artist, Henri Matisse (1869- 1954), has provided visual pleasures and intellectual challenges to its viewers for the last hundred years. This is collection of gathered, summarized, and evaluated major literature on the artist primarily from France, the United States, Germany, and the Scandinavian countries, where major Matisse collections bear witness to early and intense interest in the artist's work.

Concerned with the idea that Wyndham Lewis was a mass of unbound impulses released from the rationalizing censorship of a respectable consciousness, this text argues for a more nuanced and historically aware view of Lewis and his work. The eight contributors consider Lewis's career from its inception to his final novels within a major focus on World War I and the inter-war period. Their essays examine Lewis's art, his post-war politics and aesthetics, the new turn his painting and thought took in the 1930s, and the connections between modernism, war and aggression. Overall, the collection offers a reassessment of the conventional view of Lewis as the uncontrolled aggressor of British modernism.

Johannes Vermeer, one of the greatest Dutch painters and for some the single greatest painter of all, produced a remarkably small corpus of work. In Vermeer's Family Secrets, Benjamin Binstock revolutionizes how we think about Vermeer's work and life. Vermeer, The Sphinx of Delft, is famously a mystery in art: despite the common claim that little is known of his biography, there is actually an abundance of fascinating information about Vermeer's life that Binstock brings to bear on Vermeer's art for the first time; he also offers new interpretations of several key documents pertaining to Vermeer that have been misunderstood. Lavishly illustrated with more than 180 black and white images and more than sixty color plates, the book also includes a remarkable color two-page spread that presents the entirety of Vermeer's oeuvre arranged in chronological order in 1/20 scale, demonstrating his gradual formal and conceptual development. No book on Vermeer has ever done this kind of visual comparison of his complete output. Like Poe's purloined letter, Vermeer's secrets are sometimes out in the open where everyone can see them. Benjamin Binstock shows us where to look. Piecing together evidence, the tools of art history, and his own intuitive skills, he gives us for the first time a history of Vermeer's work in light of Vermeer's life. On almost every page of Vermeer's Family Secrets, there is a perception or an adjustment that rethinks what we know about Vermeer, his oeuvre, Dutch painting, and Western Art. Perhaps the most arresting revelation of Vermeer's Family Secrets is the final one: in response to inconsistencies in technique, materials, and artistic level, Binstock posits that several of the paintings accepted as canonical works by Vermeer, are in fact not by Vermeer at all but by his eldest daughter, Maria. How he argues this is one of the book's many pleasures.

A FLAME TREE NOTEBOOK. Beautiful and luxurious the journals combine high-quality production with magnificent art. Perfect as a gift, and an essential personal choice for writers, notetakers, travellers, students, poets and diarists. Features a wide range of well-known and modern artists, with new artworks published throughout the year. BEAUTIFULLY DESIGNED. The highly crafted covers are printed on foil paper, embossed then foil stamped, complemented by the luxury binding and rose red end-papers. The covers are created by our artists and designers who spend many hours transforming original artwork into gorgeous 3d masterpieces that feel good in the hand, and look wonderful on a desk or table. PRACTICAL, EASY TO USE. Flame Tree Notebooks come with practical features too: a pocket at the back for scraps and receipts; two ribbon markers to help keep track of more than just a to-do list; robust ivory text paper, printed with lines; and when you need to collect other notes or scraps of paper the magnetic side flap keeps everything neat and tidy. THE ARTIST. Sandro Botticelli, was one of the most esteemed artists of the Florentine Renaissance. His Birth of the Venus depicts the goddess Venus arriving at the shore after her birth, when she had emerged from the sea fully-grown. The painting is in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Italy. THE FINAL WORD. As William Morris said, "Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful."

Award-winning artist Nita Engle's breakthrough approach to watercolor shows readers how to combine spontaneity and control to produce glowing, realistic paintings. Her method begins with action-filled exercises that demonstrate how to play with paint, following no rules. Subsequent step-by-step projects add planning to the mix, demonstrating how to turn loose washes into light-filled watercolors with textural effects achieved by spraying, sprinkling, pouring, squirting, or stamping paint. Engle's approach, and her results, are dramatic and dynamic; now watercolor artists can create their own exciting paintings with help from "How to Make a Watercolor Paint Itself."

The Bible contains some of the greatest stories and teachings of all time. It is also the inspiration for some of the greatest pictures ever painted. Sister Wendy's Bible Treasury captures some of the Bible's most dramatic scenes and memorable characters, as depicted by artists such as Botticelli, Caravaggio, Degas, Duccio, Durer, El Greco, Giotto, Leonardo, Raphael, Rembrandt, Rubens Rublev, Titian and Van Gogh. From the majesty of Genesis to the mystery of Revelation, Sister Wendy invites you to share her delight in the way these painters have interpreted and depicted the Bible over two thousand years. This beautifully presented volume includes 55 illustrations.

The extraordinarily revealing interviews with Francis Bacon conducted over a period of 25 years by the distinguished art critic David Sylvester amount to a unique statement by Bacon on his art and on art in general. In the book, a classic of its kind, Bacon considers the problems of realism and sheds new light on aspects of his life. With a rare and brilliant use of language, Bacon talks about his aims as a painter and ways in which he works, responding always with vivacity and candour to Sylvester's searching questions. Bacon's obsessive effort to record and re-create the human form, his practice of making variation on old masters' painting and on photographs, his dependence on chance, and his views about the way in which his work has been interpreted are only some of the many subjects discussed and investigated in depth during these historic encounters.

The walls of medieval churches were brightly painted with religious imagery and colourful patterns, and although often shadows of their former selves, these paintings are among the most enigmatic art to survive the Middle Ages. This beautifully illustrated book is an ideal introduction to this fascinating subject. It tells the stories behind the paintings and explains their purpose, the subjects they showed, how they were made and by whom, and what happened to these works of art during and after the enormous upheavals of the Reformation. It also compares and contrasts religious and domestic wall paintings and explores modern approaches to their conservation and care. A comprehensive gazetteer provides an invaluable guide to where the best British examples can be seen. Roger Rosewell is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries and a leading expert on medieval wall paintings. He is also the Features Editor of Vidimus, the online magazine about medieval stained glass and a professional lecturer and photographer. Educated at St Edmund Hall, Oxford University, he has also written Stained Glass and The Medieval Monastery for Shire.