"A Closer Look" is the new series title for the updated and refreshed National Gallery Pocket Guide range. The series has been enhanced with a stronger format, attractive design, new photography, and additional information. It is self-evident that colour is fundamental to painting, but it is not always obvious from looking at pictures what kinds of materials may be used by an artist to make colour. This "Pocket Guide "explains how coloured pigments are combined with a medium to form a paint layer, and how this affects our perception of the appearance of colour. It not only describes the materials of colour but also explains colour theories and examines writings about colour, including painters' treatises.
Through a selection of superb pictures from the National Gallery, London, including works by Piero della Francesca, Leonardo, Titian, Caravaggio, Canaletto, Rembrandt, Velazquez, Monet, and Seurat, the authors demonstrate how painters through the centuries have exploited the characteristics of colour in paint.

Ideal painting in the Renaissance was an art of illusionism that eliminated for the viewer any overt sense of its making. Titian's paintings, in contrast, with their roughly worked and "open" surfaces, unexpected glazes, and thick impasto brushstrokes, made the fact of the paint increasingly visible. Previous scholars have read these paintings as unfinished or the product of lesser studio hands, but in The Muddied Mirror, Jodi Cranston argues that this approach to paint is integral to Titian's later work. Rather than presenting in paint a precise reflection of the visible world, the artist imparted an intrinsic corporeality to his subjects through the varying mass and thickness of the paint. It is precisely the materiality and "disfiguration" of these paintings that offer us the key to understanding their meanings. More important, the subjects of Titian's late paintings are directly related to the materiality of the body--they represent physical changes wrought through violence, metamorphosis, and desire.

Beautifully illustrated, this volume will give readers a clear idea of the history and aesthetics of Chinese painting, as well as the chance to appreciate the depiction of vivid figures, awesome landscapes, exquisite flowers and dainty insects that best represent its achievements. Beginning with the ancient invention of paper and continuing through to the renewal and innovation of modern times, Chinese Painting also covers the six canons of Chinese painting, painting as a vehicle for Confucianism, Buddhism and Daoism and the poetic qualities of Chinese paintings.

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, two bookmarks and a solid magnetic side flap. These are perfect for personal use and make a dazzling gift. This example is based on 'Fairy Story' by Jean and Ron Henry (1985-2014), and printed on silver.

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, two bookmarks and a solid magnetic side flap. These are perfect for personal use and make a dazzling gift. This example features Anne Stokes: Hidden Depths. Anne Stokes is a fantasy artist whose passion for the genre began in her childhood after reading J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit. Her art covers a broad range of themes, from romantic and enchanted forests, to fearsome dragons and the dark underworld of gothic vampires. This work depicts a bewitching siren of the sea, perched atop the bones of mariners she has lured to an unfortunate end.

This best-selling title will be relaunched in September 04 with a fresh new cover design. Written by popular TV artist Alwyn Crawshaw, it is one of the four top-selling titles in the Learn to Paint series, and provides an ideal introduction to this essential skill. Sketching is a vital artistic skill and painters of all standards need to be able to sketch. In this book Alwyn Crawshaw looks at all aspects of sketching on location, explaining how to use sketches either as works of art in their own right or as reference for later drawings or paintings. Contents include: * advice on sketching materials and equipment * using pencil, charcoal, conte pencil, pen & ink and watercolour * guidance on perspective * help with design and composition * sketching in colour In addition, there are numerous practical exercises and several step-by-step demonstrations to encourage readers to put their new skills into practice.

Over forty years Jerry Zeniuk has created an autonomous oeuvre that revolves around colour, with its diverse possibilities of expression. However, colour often advocates for abstract emotion, which only finds its way to objectivity by means of structure and form. Over time, this tension has regularly prompted Zeniuk to express his thoughts on the fundamental questions of painting in lectures and essays. How to Paint brings these reflections together in a single publication. In thirty-seven short chapters, comparable with meditations, the painter sheds light on what characterises a painting in the first place and on what still accounts for its reputation today, since the categories for describing the quality of visual art have become blurred. Our ability to see in a differentiated way has diminished as well. Reading the unmistakable alphabet and the syntax of a painting is no longer a matter of course. The author writes: "I'm interested in seeing properly. Seeing is thinking. Painters are conceptual artists. We see pictorial structures where there is supposedly only surface and material." In simple diction and with comprehensible observations, Zeniuk circles around this major topic and in doing so touches on several central questions - in particular: How does art, a cognitive fact, arise at all from the seemingly simple act of applying oil pigment to a surface? For Zeniuk, this question has not changed over the centuries. His text is accompanied by selected illustrations from works on the history of painting, from Titian to Velazquez, to Cezanne and Mondrian.

Drawing Masterclass explores the act of vision of the world's great artists, describing how their work was created to allow you to weave some of their magic into your own paintings. With detailed analyses and instructive creative tips sections, you can learn how to convey movement like Degas, apply acrylic like Twombly, and command colour like Matisse. The book is organized into seven chapters covering important genres: nudes, figures, landscapes, still life, heads, fantasy and abstraction. Each chapter selects a cross section of artists and examines their practice in detail, using key paintings. Each artist is described through one of 100 selected masterpieces, plus a biographical profile and a practical look at the way the painting was made: the materials and technique, an examination of the ideas and inspiration behind its making and how the artist's life might reflect their concerns. Light and shade, rhythm, form, space, contour and composition are all covered in detail. The book covers a broad historical and geographic sweep, and includes many of the most celebrated male and female artists.

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, two bookmarks and a solid magnetic side flap. These are perfect for personal use and make a dazzling gift. This example features National Gallery: A Vase of Flowers by Paul Gauguin. This painting was produced in Tahiti after Paul Gauguin's final move there from France. It was sold by his friend Daniel de Monfreid in 1898 to Edgar Degas, who was an early admirer of Gauguin's art. Flower paintings were common among the painters of this period Degas and Van Gogh are among the greatest exponents of the type.

New Zealand-born Frances Hodgkins (1869-1947) arrived in London in 1901 and, by the 1920s, had become a leading British modernist, exhibiting frequently with avant-garde artists such as Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore. This book explores Hodgkins as a traveller across cultures and landscapes - teaching and discovering the cubists in Paris, absorbing the landscape and light of Ibiza and Morocco, and exhibiting with the progressive Seven & Five Society in London. Complete with a rich visual chronology of the artist's encounters abroad, alongside over one hundred of Hodgkins' key paintings and drawings, the book is an illuminating journey that moves us from place to place through the writings of a number of distinguished national and international art historians, curators and critics: Frances Spalding (University of Cambridge, England), Alexa Johnston (Auckland-based writer and curator), Elena Taylor (University of New South Wales, Australia), Antoni Ribas Tur (Ara newspaper, Spain), and Julia Waite, Sarah Hillary, Catherine Hammond and Mary Kisler (Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki, New Zealand).

Drawing and Painting Beauitful Faces is an inspiring, mixed media workbook on how to draw and paint beautiful, fashion illustration-style faces. Author Jane Davenport is a beloved artist, and popular international workshop instructor known by her thousands of students and fans for her over-the-top, enthusiastic, happy and encouraging style. In this book, she guides you step-by-step through the foundations of drawing a face, developing successful features, creating skintones, playing with bright colors, shading, highlighting and much more as you learn to create amazing mixed media portraits. Master a variety of techniques that employ pencil, marker, pen, watercolor, acrylic paint, ink, pastel, and ephemera as you happily dance your way through the exercises in this brilliant guide.

Best-selling author, instructor and TV show host, Jerry Yarnell delivers his latest offering with all new lessons and step-by-step projects. Featuring detailed materials lists along with instruction on how to set up a useful painting area, how to find the best brushes and paints, and how to set up a palette, this book will teach readers the methods they need to achieve the painting effects they desire. Includes helpful tips on color-mixing as well as lessons on composition, using negative space, values, and one- and two-point perspective. Readers will also learn techniques for painting rivers, trees, tropical settings, deserts, flowers, birds, rabbits, horses, deer and more. With his signature, easy to follow style, Yarnell provides the instruction needed to help beginners and more experienced painters alike learn to bring life and beauty to their acrylic animal and landscape paintings.

Painting in Latin America, 1550-1820: From Conquest to Independence surveys the diverse styles, subjects, and iconography of painting in Latin America between the 16th and 19th centuries. While European art forms were widely disseminated, copied, and adapted throughout Latin America, colonial painting is not a derivative extension of Europe. The ongoing debate over what to call it-mestizo, hybrid, creole, indo-hispanic, tequitqui-testifies to a fundamental yet unresolved question of identity. Comparing and contrasting the Viceroyalties of New Spain, with its center in modern-day Mexico, and Peru, the authors explore the very different ways the two regions responded to the influence of the Europeans and their art. A wide range of art and artists are considered, some for the first time. Rich with new photography and primary research, this book delivers a wealth of new insight into the history of images and the history of art.

Born in Berlin in 1931 to Jewish parents, the eight-year-old Auerbach was sent to England in 1939 to escape the Nazi regime. His parents stayed behind and died in a concentration camp in 1943. Now in his eighties, Auerbach is still producing his distinctly sculptural paintings of friends, family and surroundings in north London, where he has made his home since the war. The art historian and curator Catherine Lampert has had unique access to the artist since 1978 when she first became one of his sitters. With an emphasis on Auerbach's own words, culled from her conversations with him and archival interviews, she provides a rare insight into his professional life, working methods and philosophy. Auerbach also reflects on the places, people and inspirations that have shaped his life. These include his experiences as a refugee child, finding his way in the London art world of the 1950s and 1960s, his friendships with Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon and Leon Kossoff, among many others, and his approaches to looking and painting throughout his career. For anyone interested in how an artist approaches his craft or his method of capturing reality this is essential reading.

Painters have always drawn on the classics to find myths and symbols which will answer to contemporary problems. In Black Light , Francis Gooding examines four modern paintings in the light of ancient themes, and illuminates the permanence and power of the mythic imagination. Opening a new dialogue between modern and ancient, Black Light explores living myth in modern paintings Examines four paintings from the Modern tradition in the light of episodes from antique mythology As the myths illuminate the paintings, and paintings throw light on the myths, Gooding shows that themes from ancient sources can be seen to resonate in modern representations Traces unexpected thematic correspondences across two millennia of literature and art, and finds that wherever meaning is sought through interpretation, myth becomes an indispensable tool of analysis In the work of classical authors such as Sophocles and Ovid, Gooding finds mythic elements which are also present in paintings by Manet, Matisse, Richards and Warhol

From grasping perspective to balancing your composition to mixing colours and learning how to create new effects, Drawing and Painting Step-by-Step is an accessible guide through practical lessons for the budding artist. Beginning with a section on the equipment needed, the book covers the different drawing and painting tools from pastels to acrylics to oils and water, the papers and brushes used, how colours can be combined and mixed. More advanced techniques include painting without a brush, painting on glass and curved surfaces, while other skills include how to capture movement, how to paint reflected light and understanding tone. After all the lessons, there are also tips and hints on breaking the rules. Each lesson is packed with colour photographs and artworks, with helpful tips as well as step-by-step guides keeping you clearly on track. Including instructive examples of classic works by artists such as Pieter Brueghel the Elder, David Hockney, Jackson Pollock, Vincent Van Gogh and Alfred Sisley, Drawing and Painting Step-by-Step is an expert companion for the home artist.

Between 1777 and 1784, the Irish artist James Barry (1741-1806) executed six murals for the Great Room of the [Royal] Society of Arts in London. Although his works form the most impressive series of history paintings in Great Britain, they remain one of the British art world's best kept secrets, having attracted little attention from critics or the general public. James Barry's Murals at the Royal Society of Arts is the first to offer an in-depth analysis of these remarkable paintings and the first to demonstrate that the artist was pioneering a new approach to public art in terms of the novelty of the patronage and the highly personal nature of his content. Barry insisted on, and received, complete control over his subject matter, the first time in the history of Western art that the patron of a large, impressive interior agreed to such a demand. The artist required autonomy in order to present his personal vision, which encompasses a rich and complex surface narrative as well as a hidden meaning that has gone unperceived for 230 years. The artist disguised his deeper message due to its inflammatory nature. Were his meaning readily apparent, the Society would have thrown out him and his murals. Ultimately, as this book seeks to show, the artist intended his paintings to engage the public in a dialogue that would utterly transform British society in terms of its culture, politics, and religion. In making this case, the book brings this neglected series into the mainstream of discussions of British art of the Romantic period, revealing the intellectual profundity invested in the genre of history painting and re-evaluating the role Christianity played in Enlightenment thought.

Whether as a reaction to our technological present or as a manifestation of fears concerning our environmental future, depictions of the natural world in painting have never seemed more pertinent or urgent. Some of the most ambitious, crucial and intellectually vibrant paintings being created in this century involve the landscape - from a more traditional, perceptual based approach for rendering vistas to a looser, topography-inspired gestural abstraction that blurs the line between form and space, to many other modes in between. Surprisingly, there has not been an ambitious and wide-reaching publication on the subject - until now. The result of several years' worth of research, Landscape Painting Now is the first book to explore the very best contemporary landscape painting. Featuring artists from nearly twenty-five countries born over seven decades, it includes some of the brightest stars of the contemporary art world. It is introduced by an essay from Barry Schwabsky, who discusses the history of landscape painting, exploring how the genre developed through the 20th century to today, and how it has become increasingly relevant to art now. He also explores the notion of what is actually called a landscape painting today, and looks to expand beyond commonly held preconceptions concerning the genre.

In Odd Man Out, Carol Armstrong offers an important study of Edgar Degas's work and reputation. Armstrong grapples with contradictory portrayals of Degas as "odd man out" within the modernist canon: he was a realist whom realists rejected; a storyteller in pictures who did not satisfy novelist-critics; a painter of modern life who was not a modernist; a member of the impressionist group who was no impressionist. Armstrong confronts these and other paradoxes by analyzing the critical vocabularies used to describe Degas's work. By reading several groups of the artist's images through the lens of a sequence of critical texts, Armstrong shows how our critical and popular expectations of Degas are overturned and subverted.
This is a reprint of the book first published by the University of Chicago Press in 1991.

Dramatic shifts from foreboding dark to probing light, with minimal gradation in between; a realism that exposes all the flaws and folds of human flesh, eschewing Michelangelo's idealized bodies; a surgical explication of almost unbearably tense emotion; and the poised depiction of crucial moments at the very lip of their unfolding: these were among the innovations of Michelangelo Merisi, known as Caravaggio. Without them, as the great Italian art writer Roberto Longhi once noted, "Ribera, Vermeer, La Tour and Rembrandt could never have existed... and the art of Delacroix, Courbet and Manet would have been utterly different." It was Longhi who rescued Caravaggio's painting for the twentieth century, prior to which it had lain dormant since the painter's mysterious death in 1610. During Caravaggio's lifetime, however, his work was enormously influential and controversial. Each of his innovations in some way upset the prevailing tendencies of the day--not least when his insistence on physical realism led him to paint Saint Matthew as a bald peasant with dirty legs (attended upon by an irreverently intimate boy angel). Nonetheless, Caravaggio was never short of commissions or patrons, and left to posterity around 80 masterpieces. This monograph is published on the fourth centenary of Caravaggio's death, and documents his complete paintings in high-quality reproductions. Authored by renowned scholar Rossella Vodret, it is the must-have monograph on the artist.
Michelangelo Merisi, known as Caravaggio, was born in 1571 and made his debut in 1600 with two public commissions on the theme of Saint Matthew. He soon became notorious for his temper, and killed a young man in 1606; two further contretemps in Malta and Naples are recorded--the latter, in 1609, involving an attempt on his life--and by 1610 he was dead, after a brief but extraordinary career.

With essays by Valerie Bajou, Philippe Bordes, Thomas Crow, Michael Fried, Tom Gretton, Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, Stephane Guegan, Daniel Harkett, Godehard Janzing, Dorothy Johnson, Mehdi Korchane, Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, Issa Lampe, Mark Ledbury, Simon Lee, Heather McPherson, David O'Brien, Satish Padiyar, Todd Porterfield, Susan L. Siegfried, and Helen Weston
Jacques-Louis David (1748-1825), the most celebrated painter of his era, was appointed court painter to Napoleon in 1804 and exiled to Brussels in 1816. This important book--based on the proceedings of an international symposium--explores David's grand projects of the Empire period and the often mysterious works produced in his last years as a political exile.
"David after David" features twenty-one essays by leading art historians that discuss these later works--which include innovative portraits as well as paintings and drawings that address the opposing themes of the antique and modern--in the aesthetic, political, and social contexts of their production and reception. The book" "also draws upon recently discovered letters the artist wrote in exile and provides fascinating new perspectives into his life and art.

15th century Italian painting mastered the art of painting light in the world. As Leon Battista Alberti wrote in On Painting (1435), "light has the power to vary colour", hence a rich palette of pigments and how to mix colours was necessary to capture every nuance. Countless recipes are provided by the anonymous author of "Secrets for Colours" (c. 1450), called the Bolognese Manuscript, intended for use in fresco and in oil on panel, accompanied by instructions on how to make varnishes for paintings.

In 1440, on the feast of Saints Peter and Paul, Florence unexpectedly defeated Milanese forces near the town of Anghiari in eastern Tuscany. Nicholas A. Eckstein reveals the impact of this celebrated victory on Florentine public life and how it could have triggered the custodians of the Brancacci Chapel, the Carmelite friars, to seek the completion of frescoes by Masolino (c.1383-c.1436) and Masaccio (1401-c.1428). Today, tens of thousands of people visit the Brancacci Chapel annually to gaze at the brilliant frescoes of Saint Peter's life. Universally recognized as a canonical masterpiece of the Florentine Renaissance, these glowing murals span the interior in long panels. The first serious examination to position the frescoes at the heart of Tuscan society and culture, Painted Glories teems with fascinating characters and intrigue. In swiftly paced prose, Eckstein explores the chapel's history, medieval culture, and art patronage, progressively peeling back the story's layers amid the tumultuous politics of the 15th-century Florentine state.