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Author: Nancy Boas
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Published: 2012-03-17
Total Pages: 368
ISBN-13: 0520268415
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →In this beautifully illustrated biography, compiled from comprehensive and sweeping interviews, Nancy Boas traces Parks resolute search for a new kind of figuration, one that would penetrate abstract expressionisms thickly layered surfaces and infuse them with human presence.
Author: K. B. Dixon
Publisher:
Published: 2020-03-09
Total Pages: 152
ISBN-13: 9781734675924
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →K. B. Dixon's work has been described as original, clever, pithy, lyrical, insightful, gonzo, and laugh-out-loud funny. His new novel, A Painter's Life, is a characteristically mischievous oddity. A mix of biographical scraps, journal entries, review excerpts, and interviews, it is an intimate and introspective tour of the art world-a portrait of the sometimes portraitist Christopher Freeze. Focusing in part on Freeze's friends, family, and fellow artists-as well as his relationship with his frazzled dealer and his would-be monographer-it is an inventive, seriocomic look at one peculiar man's ceaseless struggle to make something beautiful.
Author: Elizabeth Lunday
Publisher: Quirk Books
Published: 2014-03-25
Total Pages: 292
ISBN-13: 1594747458
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Take a tour through the wilder side of art history, and discover true tales of murder, forgery, and trickery—featuring jaw-dropping profiles over 30 iconic artists like Leonardo Da Vinci and Salvadori Dalí. With outrageous anecdotes about everyone from Leonardo Da Vinci to Caravaggio to Edward Hopper, Secret Lives of Great Artists recounts the seamy, steamy and gritty history behind the great masters of international art. Here, you’ll learn that Michelangelo’s body odor was so bad, his assistants couldn’t stand working for him; that Vincent van Gogh sometimes ate paint directly from the tube; and Georgia O’Keeffe loved to paint in the nude. This is one art history lesson you’ll never forget!
Author: Sara Woster
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2022-07-19
Total Pages: 305
ISBN-13: 0593329945
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Artist and founder of The Painting School Sara Woster invites readers into the vibrant world of painting as a creative practice powerful enough to transform our lives. Sara Woster is a painter, teacher, and art evangelist. She believes in art as a form of mindfulness, a ritual for healing, and an outlet for self-expression. In Painting Can Save Your Life, Woster welcomes readers into this transformative art form, inviting them to pick up a brush and discover how painting can help you see the world in a whole new way. Weaving soup-to-nuts instruction on how to paint—from choosing the right materials to painting the human body—with her own story of discovering a passion for painting, this book includes: simple and easy techniques for painters of all skill levels playful and challenging painting exercises tips on how to build a creative community using art insights on how to use painting to cultivate a sense of calm in a stressful world Part how-to-paint, part sheer inspiration, Painting Can Save Your Life is a wise and inspiring guide to the power of painting.
Author: Todd M. Casey
Publisher: The Monacelli Press, LLC
Published: 2020-02-18
Total Pages: 321
ISBN-13: 1580935486
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →A must-have reference book for today's artists and art students. Every artist needs to learn and master the still life. Written by a well-known artist and expert instructor, The Art of Still Life offers a comprehensive, contemporary approach to the subject that instructs artists on the foundation basics and advanced techniques they need for successful drawing and painting. In addition to Casey's stunning paintings, the work of over fifty past and present masters is included, so that the book will do double duty as a hardworking how-to manual and a visual treasure trove of some of the finest still life art throughout history and being created today.
Author: Virginia Woolf
Publisher: David Zwirner Books
Published: 2021-11-30
Total Pages: 144
ISBN-13: 9781644230589
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Virginia Woolf’s collection of writings on visual arts offer a whole new perspective on the revolutionary author. Despite wide interest in Woolf’s writings, and in the artists and art critics in her Bloomsbury Group circle, there is no accessible edition or selection of essays dedicated to her writings on art. This newest edition in David Zwirner Books’s ekphrasis series collects her longest essay on painting, “Walter Sickert: A Conversation” (1934), alongside shorter essays and reviews, including “Pictures” (1925), and “Pictures and Portraits” (1920). These formally inventive texts reveal the centrality of the visual arts to Woolf’s writing and vision. They show her engaging with contemporary debates about modern art and are innovative in their treatment of ideas about color and form, including in response to the work of her sister, the painter Vanessa Bell, who designed many of her book cover jackets. In these essays and reviews, Woolf illuminates the complex and interdependent relationship between the artist and society, and reveals her own shifting perspectives during decades of social and political change. She also provides sharp and astute commentary on specific works of art and on the relationship between art and writing. An introduction by Claudia Tobin situates the essays within their cultural contexts.
Author: Giorgio Vasari
Publisher: Penguin UK
Published: 2003-07-31
Total Pages: 480
ISBN-13: 0141919973
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Beginning with Cimabue and Giotto in the thirteenth century, Vasari traces the development of Italian art across three centuries to the golden epoch of Leonardo and Michelangelo. Great men, and their immortal works, are brought vividly to life, as Vasari depicts the young Giotto scratching his first drawings on stone; Donatello gazing at Brunelleschi's crucifix; and Michelangelo's painstaking work on the Sistine Chapel, harassed by the impatient Pope Julius II. The Lives also convey much about Vasari himself and his outstanding abilities as a critic inspired by his passion for art.
Author: César Aira
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
Published: 2006-05-25
Total Pages: 97
ISBN-13: 0811219801
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →An astounding novel from Argentina that is a meditation on the beautiful and the grotesque in nature, the art of landscape painting, and one experience in a man's life that became a lightning rod for inspiration. An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter is the story of a moment in the life of the German artist Johan Moritz Rugendas (1802-1858). Greatly admired as a master landscape painter, he was advised by Alexander von Humboldt to travel West from Europe to record the spectacular landscapes of Chile, Argentina, and Mexico. Rugendas did in fact become one of the best of the nineteenth-century European painters to venture into Latin America. However this is not a biography of Rugendas. This work of fiction weaves an almost surreal history around the secret objective behind Rugendas' trips to America: to visit Argentina in order to achieve in art the "physiognomic totality" of von Humboldt's scientific vision of the whole. Rugendas is convinced that only in the mysterious vastness of the immense plains will he find true inspiration. A brief and dramatic visit to Mendosa gives him the chance to fulfill his dream. From there he travels straight out onto the pampas, praying for that impossible moment, which would come only at an immense pricean almost monstrously exorbitant price that would ultimately challenge his drawing and force him to create a new way of making art. A strange episode that he could not avoid absorbing savagely into his own body interrupts the trip and irreversibly and explosively marks him for life.
Author: Elizabeth Johns
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 1991-01-01
Total Pages: 292
ISBN-13: 9780300057546
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →American genre painting flourished in the thirty years before the Civil War, a period of rapid social change that followed the election of President Andrew Jackson. It has long been assumed that these paintings--of farmers, western boatmen and trappers, blacks both slave and free, middle-class women, urban urchins, and other everyday folk--served as records of an innocent age, reflecting a Jacksonian optimism and faith in the common man. In this enlightening book Elizabeth Johns presents a different interpretation--arguing that genre paintings had a social function that related in a more significant and less idealistic way to the political and cultural life of the time. Analyzing works by William Sidney Mount, George Caleb Bingham, David Gilmore Blythe, Lilly Martin Spencer, and others, Johns reveals the humor and cynicism in the paintings and places them in the context of stories about the American character that appeared in sources ranging from almanacs and newspapers to joke books and political caricature. She compares the productions of American painters with those of earlier Dutch, English, and French genre artists, showing the distinctive interests of American viewers. Arguing that art is socially constructed to meet the interests of its patrons and viewers, she demonstrates that the audience for American genre paintings consisted of New Yorkers with a highly developed ambition for political and social leadership, who enjoyed setting up citizens of the new democracy as targets of satire or condescension to satisfy their need for superiority. It was this network of social hierarchies and prejudices--and not a blissful celebration of American democracy--that informed the look and the richly ambiguous content of genre painting.
