Indian art, increasingly popular in the west, cannot be fully appreciated without some knowledge of the religious and philosophical background. This book, first published in 1985, covers all aspects of Hindu iconography, and explains that its roots lie far back in the style of prehistoric art. The dictionary demonstrates the rich profusion of cults, divinities, symbols, sects and philosophical views encompassed by the Hindu religious tradition.

Each year many well-used and well-loved Christmas trees are discarded at the end of the holiday season and are too quickly forgotten. By carving next year's Christmas ornaments from the trunk and limbs of this tree, you can save some very special memories for you and your family! Using parts of the trunk, you can carve elves, Santas, angels and more. Incorporating the branches sticking out from the trunk, you can carve angels blowing heavenly trumpets, elves with long noses, and good-natured Santas with drooping hats. In this book, Al and Trinka Chapman will show you how to cut your tree into usable parts, sketch out various figures that fit well into your wooden segments, cut, carve, and sand your figure, and finish it with paint and hanging hooks. They have provided step-by-step instructions for two projects - a Santa, which was carved entirely with hand tools, and a herald angel blowing a trumpet, which was carved using power tools.

Nancy Holt: Inside/Outside takes a journey through the artist's key experiments in visual art presenting works never seen before, commissioning new critical thinking, and amplifying knowledge of an artist whose ideas are fundamental to how we define art today. Over the course of fifty years, Nancy Holt's rich output spanned concrete poetry, audio, film and video, photography, drawings, room-sized installations, earthworks, and public sculpture. Nancy Holt: Inside/Outside details her unique and significant contributions, situating an important female voice within the narratives of land art and conceptual art. Initiating her art practice in 1966 with concrete poetry, she soon expanded her ideas into other media and the landscape. Through each of the mediums she worked in, Holt explored how we understand our place in the world by investigating perception and site within and outside of traditional museum contexts. In the mid-1970s Holt completed her most influential earthwork, Sun Tunnels, an artwork central to the definition of land art. Rigorous documentation of Holt's work, as well as contributions by key scholars, previously unseen photoworks and drawings, and a revealing, never-before-published "self-interview" by the artist bring her work into far fuller context. Developed in close consultation with Holt/Smithson Foundation, an artist endowed organization dedicated to preserving and extending the work of Nancy Holt and her husband Robert Smithson, this expansive publication will serve as a major contribution to the critical ongoing research into the art of our time. This new book is published to coincide with an exhibition anchored at Bildmuseet in Umea, Sweden, and traveling to MACBA Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona and further internationally.

Working in full-size is a daunting prospect for most carvers. But, fortunately, some creatures are made small enough to be manageable. So it is with elves. These delightful mischievous characters of myth are traditionally very small, and have a liveliness about them that make them perfect subjects for carving. Kelley Stadelman takes the carver step-by-step through the process of creating a life sized elf. After years of teaching, Kelley makes carving easy and enjoyable. She begins with the blank and ends with decorative painting. The result is a wonderful creature in the primitive style that will adorn your home or shop. Each step is illustrated with a color photograph and descriptive caption. Patterns are included for the main project and several similar projects that are shown in the gallery. This is a great project for the beginning or intermediate carver!

Born near the Tuscan province of Lucca in 1815, Domenico Brucciani became the most important and prolific maker of plaster casts in nineteenth-century Britain. This first substantive study shows how he and his business used public exhibitions, emerging museum culture and the nationalisation of art education to monopolise the market for reproductions of classical and contemporary sculpture. Based in Covent Garden in London, Brucciani built a network of fellow Italian emigre formatori and collaborated with other makers of facsimiles-including Elkington the electrotype manufacturers, Copeland the makers of Parian ware and Benjamin Cheverton with his sculpture reducing machine-to bring sculpture into the spaces of learning and leisure for as broad a public as possible. Brucciani's plaster casts survive in collections from North America to New Zealand, but the extraordinary breadth of his practice-making death masks of the famous and infamous, producing pioneering casts of anatomical, botanical and fossil specimens and decorating dance halls and theatres across Britain-is revealed here for the first time. By making unprecedented use of the nineteenth-century periodical press and dispersed archival sources, Domenico Brucciani and the Formatori of Nineteenth-Century Britain establishes the significance of Brucciani's sculptural practice to the visual and material cultures of Victorian Britain and beyond.

Making beautiful porcelain bead jewelry has never been simpler. Using over 100 color photos and straightforward instructions, readers are guided through all the steps necessary to create magnificent layered beads, beads with inclusions, millefiori beads, bead necklaces, earrings, and buttons. Techniques are provided for mixing colored porcelain slips, handcrafting beads and buttons, glazing and firing the completed projects, smoothing fired items with a rock tumbler, and assembling fired pieces into eye-catching jewelry. A useful list of necessary equipment and suppliers is also provided. This book is an essential reference and inspiration for all who work with clay.

Songbird Carving is a unique book that can be appreciated on two levels: first, as a step-by-step set of instructions, with exquisite photographs and hand-drawn illustrations covering techniques of carving, texturing, painting and mounting of five songbird projects; second, as a work of art unto itself. The five songbird projects featured are the Black-capped Chickadee, Tufted titmouse, American Goldfinch, House Wren, and Catbird. To complement the instructions there are chapters on tools and supplies, the basics of carving song birds, and the birds habitats. The carefully organized text and clear step-by-step illustrations provided an unsurpassed guide to this form of carving.

Baby birds are some of the cutest creatures on this earth!" So begins Rosalyn Daisey's latest adventure into fine carving. In this new book she leads the carver through the creating of the chicks of five birds: the Carolina Chickadee, the Eastern Bluebird, the Bobwhite Quail, the Killdeer, and the Wood Duckling. Each step in the process is illustrated with a clear color photograph and a concise explanation from the author about what the step involves and how to do it correctly. In addition there are reference drawings, color palettes, and photographs of study skins. As always Rosalyn share the anecdotes and insights of a wildlife lover, and it is easy to see why her work seems to reflect a reverence for her subjects. This is Rosalyn's fifth carving book. She is nationally respected as one of the country's leading wildlife artists. Her work has won numerous awards, and the interest in her seminars speaks well of her ability to teach the art to others. This is the same skill she brings to this book. Enjoy.

With 250 clear color photos and concise text, Jose Valencia takes readers through all the steps necessary to create unique carvings on rifle or shotgun stocks. Learn to create and apply patterns, remove factory checkering, and use a high speed power pen and accompanying bits to create elaborate scroll, basket weave, and maple leaf patterns, along with realistic wildlife carvings. Adapting patterns to curved surfaces, sanding, and finishing techniques are also shown and explained. Seven patterns are provided for each of the carvings. A color photo gallery is also provided for further inspiration. Once readers have mastered the techniques for carving and finishing these patterns, they will be able to transform standard gunstocks into works of art that will be appreciated for generations.

The first biography of Anne Damer since 1908, The Life of Anne Damer: Portrait of a Regency Artist, by Jonathan Gross, draws on Damer s notebooks and previously unpublished letters to explore the life and legacy of England s first significant female sculptor. Best known for her portraits of dogs and other animals, Damer also created busts of England s most important political heroes, sometimes within days or hours of their historical accomplishments. This in-depth biography traces her life during the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the Peace of Amiens and the Hundred Days. Damer was convinced that art could have significant political influence, sending her bust of Nelson to the King of Tanjore to encourage trade with India. Her art stands at the transition between neoclassicism and romanticism and provides a wealth of insight into 19th century British sculpture. In the last twenty years, there has been a strong revival of interest in Damer s life, particularly in gay and lesbian studies due to her famous relationship with author Mary Berry. This text serves as a deeper investigation of this fascinating and important figure of British art history. The emotional menage a trois of Anne Damer, Mary Berry, and Horace Walpole forms the heart of this new biography. Gross contends that all three individuals, had they led more conventional lives, would never have given the world the literary and artistic gifts they bestowed in the form of Strawberry Hill, Belmour, and Fashionable Friends. The struggles they faced will encourage modern readers to appreciate anew the fluidity of sexual identity and passionate friendship, as well as the restraints put in place by society to control them. Anne Damer s life has much to teach a new generation concerned with the complex relationship between love, art, and politics. The Life of Anne Damer will interest historians of Georgian England, and readers in the fine arts, literature, and history.

Explores expressionlessness, inscrutability, and emotional withholding in Black cultural production Arguing that inexpression is a gesture that acquires distinctive meanings in concert with blackness, Deadpan tracks instances and meanings of deadpan—a vaudeville term meaning “dead face”—across literature, theater, visual and performance art, and the performance of self in everyday life. Tina Post reveals that the performance of purposeful withholding is a critical tool in the work of black culture makers, intervening in the persistent framing of African American aesthetics as colorful, loud, humorous, and excessive. Beginning with the expressionless faces of mid-twentieth-century documentary photography and proceeding to early twenty-first-century drama, this project examines performances of blackness’s deadpan aesthetic within and beyond black embodiments, including Young Jean Lee’s The Shipment and Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s Neighbors, as well as Buster Keaton’s signature character and Steve McQueen’s restitution of the former’s legacy within the continuum of Black cultural production. Through this varied archive, Post reveals how deadpan aesthetics function in and between opacity and fugitivity, minimalism and saturation, excess and insensibility.

LAND ART: A COMPLETE GUIDE TO LANDSCAPE, ENVIRONMENTAL, EARTHWORKS, NATURE, SCULPTURE AND INSTALLATION ART

A fully illustrated guide to land and environmental art. A newly updated and revised edition of our best-selling book.

For the land artist, the whole planet is an artist's studio. The land artist ranges over the whole globe. A desert, a beach, a field, a forest becomes a studio, a place of creative activity. This means the very texture and colour and shape and dampness and springiness and strength and size of moss, for instance. Or a stone. Or a crevice in a rock formation. The way the light falls on a patch of grass, the little bits of dead, yellowish grass on top of the newer, green grass. Pine cones, closed-up. Flowers turning sunward in the late afternoon. These are the things land artists deal with in making art. These are the actualities that artists employ when they create artworks.

This book explores all of the major land, environmental and earthwork artists of the past 40 years, including James Turrell and his vast volcano site Hans Haacke's Conceptual art Michael Heizer's Mid-West earthworks Robert Smithson and his giant spiral, entropic earthworks Christo's wrapped buildings and islands, Robert Morris's environments Walter de Maria's Romantic Lightning Field David Nash's stoves, stones, trees and North Wales environments Hamish Fulton's walks and words Dennis Oppenheim's concentric snow circles Richard Long and his art of walking Andy Goldsworthy's natural, spontaneous, eco-friendly sculptures Alice Aycock's mysterious underground mazes Mary Miss's sunken pools and pavilions Wolfgang Laib's delicate, luminous pollen spreads Nancy Holt and her observation sculptures and the enigmatic floor sculptures of Carl Andre.

William Malpas has written books on Richard Long and land art, as well as three books on Andy Goldsworthy, including the forthcoming Andy Goldsworthy In America. Malpas's books on Richard Long and Andy Goldsworthy are the only full-length studies of these artists available.

Includes new illustrations, bibliography, notes. 380 pages. ISBN 9781861714008. www.crmoon.com

Though she has not knowingly seen Angels, Kelley Stadelman has received their help in times of crisis. She has felt their presence. These joyful little soldiers of God seem to have a childlike presence. Their personalities are uninhibited. They go about their duties energetically. Yet they are wise, committed to their tasks and reverent to their boss. The whimsy of angels is captured in the designs of this book. Kelley leads the carver step-by-step through the angel carving project, beginning with the blank and finishing with a beautifully painted heavenly being. With concise descriptions and clear color photographs, Kelley's experience as a teacher will lead carvers of every ability to beautiful results.