4 comments about A Young Painter: The Life and Paintings of Wang Yani-- China's Extraordinary Young Artist.

1. After checking this book out of the library I loved it so much that I bought it from Amazon.com.
   The creativity and fun that the artist conveyed through the work is inspiring. Having painted for
   over fifteen years in oils and acrylics and getting my bachelor's degree in art I recognized an honesty
   in this young painter's style that I inspire to have in my own work. I enjoyed the reviewer's comment that said
   she has read it to her third graders and they loved it. Children are often the most honest and give the best critics of originality.



2. This is a wonderful book about a very talented young artist. Wang Yani is an extraordinary young woman who is an inspiration to us all. Her love of animals is something most children can identify with. I have read this book with 3rd graders and they loved every photo and detail about Wang Yani's life. The combination of reproductions and Wang Yani's own words make the book gripping for young children. A must-have for any class studying China or Chinese art.



3. THE BOOK IS SUTPID DONT WASTE YOUR TIME AND READ IT!!



4. A fanscinating novel about the life and times of an amazing young artist, who went through many stages in her life and still is. A powerful, though-provoking book, also alot of tips for artists in the making! Wang Yani has had alot of parent influences, which cannot be stressed enough, and that is really what counts. It talks about her being China's prized possesion, or The Picasso OF China. Although I don't believe she is all that popular in Canada, I belive she will eventually reach that poing, whatever the time period. I would recommend this novel to anyone who enjoys all aspects of art!

No comments about Maya Lin: Systematic Landscapes.

5 comments about Look Up: The Life and Art of Sacha Kolin.

1. "Look Up," Lisa Thaler's biography of artist Sacha Kolin is, in itself a work of art. Thaler's detailed biography is a tribute to the artistic spirit. She describes the hardships endured by Kolin, made all the more poignant by her generosity to other artists and the bouyant spirit evidenced by her work. The organization of the book is unique and paints a vivid picture of the life, not only of its subject, but of those artists, collectors, and gallery owners who enrich our lives while not necessarily enriching their own monetarily. While Kolin was never able to reach the top tier of the post-war artists, she did her part in reminding the world that World War II was perhaps as much about freedom of expression as about physical and political freedoms. Mrs. Thaler's book is as unique as was Kolin's art.



2. Without "Look Up" Sacha Kolin -- a gutsy artist who stood her ground and survived by bartering her way through New York -- simply would have faded away. Lisa Thayler's pursuit of Sacha's story came just as most people who could share memories of Kolin and her work were nearing the end of their own lives. Thayler's timing, great research skills, persistence and creative ability to accurately reconstruct an artist's life are evident throughout this book. Those who knew Sacha said that Thayler captured her ability to take advantage of everything she possibly could without losing her dignity. Thayler's rigor sounds an alarm for all artists. Most hate doing it, but as "Look Up" demonstrates, organization and record keeping are just as important as the work itself for artists who hope to be remembered. Kolin wanted fame, and her work, some of which I have seen, deserves recognition, but she was not neat and certainly not organized. Curators, collection managers and art buyers also can learn a great deal from Thayler's methods and approach to research. The book makes clear that in an ideal world, every Sacha should have a Lisa from the start! Suzanne T. Isaacs, President, Ampersand, Inc.



3. 
   "Look Up" is a magnificent job in every respect: purpose, content, layout, presentation, and above all, dedication. This book is also a window into the trials and tribulations of life in the art world; lessons that are as relevant today as they were for Sacha. Congratulations upon congratulations!
   
   Sacha would be speechless with delight in what you have done for her, but only speechless for an instant while she gathered her many thoughts of your triumph, and hers.



4. A chance encounter with a painting evokes a narrative of the intrigue of Vienna and Paris in the shadows of the Nazi threat, then sweeps forward into the tensions and stimuli of New York's community of immigrant artists and intellectuals. Lisa Thaler's insights into the art and the very soul of Jewish modernist Sacha Kolin become a fascinating story for anyone who loves books and provides new documented research that is essential for every art historian.



5. Amazing research!
   
   What a story!!
   
   Extremely complex situations for this multi-talented, persistent woman.
   
   Knowing Bertram Schaffner as a family member and having talked to you, I felt I was living in Sacha's shoes while reading this heart wrenching story - and - I was going CRAZY! At least 35 years ago, when Bertram gave me 2 of Sasha's pieces I never envisioned her producing these unique, simple, joyful works while having to endure such trauma! Up/down; in/out; with/without; failure/success; home/homeless, wealth/poverty, etc. The only information I had was that Sasha had given Bert her artwork in lieu of paying his fees. How she was able to cope is certainly beyond my imagination.
   
   Exposing the life of this gifted artist is a treasure for me and for those fortunate enough to have read it.
   
   Smiles
   through tears (for Sasha),
   Tamme
   

3 comments about Telematic Embrace: Visionary Theories of Art, Technology, and Consciousness by Roy Ascott.

1. Finding accurate accounts of historical turning points warrants careful scanning and careful elimination. There is much information to be read in articles, books and in the minds of academics who can give tid-bits of how we got to where we are today in a world of art and technology. But there are few people who can provide us with a rigorous account that actually has (1) depth and substance; and (2) an actual birthing of an era. This book provides us with both.
   
   For the disciplined reader, Roy Ascott and Edward Shanken provide alluring, inventive and down right smart accounts of the time frame in which art evolved into a 21st century discipline; for the lazy reader, Roy Ascott's sentences are a crisp and inviting story of what it could behoove the artist to pay attention to.
   
   Natasha Vita-More



2. This collection offers a unique and valuable history of art and technology from the 1960s to the 2000s as chronicled through the brilliant writings of Roy Ascott. A pioneer of cybernetic and telematic art, Ascott is generally recognized as a leading figure in the field of new media. His theoretical writings are inventive, prescient, and provocative, and are required reading for students and professionals who are interested in learning about the ideas that shaped interactivity, media art, and net art.

   Shanken's introduction offers an erudite but highly readable and insighful guide to Ascott's work as an artist, theorist, and teacher, placing his many contributions in a broad context of art history, the history of ideas, and the history of technology. At 94 pages, this essay offers one of the most extensive art historical treatments of art and technology currently in print and makes an invaluable addition to the literature.

   The book may be a bit pricey, but it is well worth it and this is one volume you'll be glad to have in hard-cover.




3. E. Shanken writes like a baton twirler with a Ph.D.

No comments about Magnetic Los Angeles: Planning the Twentieth-Century Metropolis (Creating the North American Landscape).

No comments about Nature Design: From Inspiration to Innovation.

1 comments about Alan Fletcher: Picturing and Poeting.

1. This book exudes unrefinement- with its exposed cover boards, doodles, and hand-made collages of graphics, photos and rubbish. This is not accidental, and will make perfect sense to artists of all stripes who want a good art book that isn't about technique and isn't a collection of beautifully rendered masterpieces. What makes this book so "good" is this lack of refinement itself, plus some words of guidance to make sense of it all. In his words, Alan's drawings show "a naivety not so easy to capture with a more calculated approach." And that is the better half of art- a blatant playfulness that defies conventions and labels. Losing this playfulness is no less devastating than losing technical proficiency.
   
   This is the lesson I learned. What will this book say to you?

5 comments about Craft and Art of Clay, The (4th Edition).

1. This book is an excellent reference for different levels of clay/ceramics work. It is a beautiful "coffee table book" as well.
   It came in perfect condition.



2. I am really enjoying this book. It is full of information and covers just about every aspect of ceramics you can think of. I am teaching a youth ceramics class this summer and am looking forward to having this as a reference!



3. If you are just learning, or are stuck in a rut, this book is a great reference for potters of all skill levels.



4. This is a large book chock full of information, and provides an in-depth survey of ceramics. There are many photographs about techniques and many illustrations of beautiful artistic ceramics pieces. Also it contains lots of technical information, tables, etc.
   
   Since other reviews have covered the merits of this book quite well, I'll mention a few issues:
   
   First, there are lots of sample photos of different clay bodies under different firings and different glaze colors and combinations, etc., but they are all *way too small* to really see the characteristics of each sample. Also sometimes there is a series of photos, e.g. throwing a pot, building a kiln, and when they are all arranged on the page, each one is too small (and many are b&w, from previous editions?) Otherwise the book is very well illustrated with a wide variety of work.
   
   The glaze discussion does not cover the properties of glaze bases and coloring oxides much at all, which is something I would expect in a book of this comprehensiveness. It does spent some time on commercial fritted stains and Mayco glazes, which other books don't, and can be useful to some, especially for low-temp work. But if you really want to get into glazes, this is not the book.
   
   For many advanced topics, she has just a mention that leaves me hungry for more. E.g. lusters she briefly mentions using and making, but Rhodes has a much more thorough discussion of making lusters. Paperclay is mentioned briefly but not enough to really tell me how to make it or use it. For many of the topics in the book, more detailed discussions are possible and likely available elsewhere. However she has assembled lots of brief mentions of different and experimental work that you might not encounter in other ceramics survey books, so it is useful for knowing what else I want to look into.
   
   [This review pertains to the 4th edition, 2003.]



5. This is a great book for anyone who wants to work with clay. It is clearly written with prospective and actual studio potters in mind.
   
   The book originally came out in 1992, and is now in its fourth edition. And, after mentioning some safety issues, it has plenty of instructional material on how to shape clay, and what tools to use. There are sections on hand building: pinching, coil building, and slab building. Then there's plenty about the technique of "throwing" clay on a potter's wheel, with nice sequences of photos. This takes plenty of skill and practice! As the author says, the wheel is very sensuous, rhythmic, and hypnotic. Peterson is always warning us to treat clay properly: if you attack it in one way and then hit it from another direction in the same place, you may find cracks there in firing, induced by the strains you imposed on it. It's simply wrong to overwork clay.
   
   Still, many potters and artists like to produce many objects with the same overall shape. And that means making and using molds made from plaster, and making casting slips, so Peterson shows us quite a bit about these. After this comes a discussion of decoration. This involves artistry and visualization.
   
   There is a good discussion of types of clays, and explanations of what earthenware, stoneware, and porcelain are. We're shown different types of clay bodies, including terra sigillata and raku (a process which requires a clay body that has some dirt mixed in with it to make it porous enough to avoid thermal shock). And there is a wonderful chapter on glazes. Following that, there is plenty about kilns and firing, including using cones, inconel tubes, and pyrometers to measure temperature.
   
   A technical section explains how to do calculations on glazes, and there are charts of coefficients of expansion, data on frits, color charts of clay and glaze combinations, and much more.
   
   There is a historical overview, which includes a discussion of the studio potter movement and the contributions to it from Bernard Leach and Shoji Hamada. And we see some of the work of Maria Martinez and Lucy Lewis in Pueblo Indian ceramics. There is also an excellent portfolio of interesting works. I especially like some of the low-fire ones.
   
   This is a very useful resource and I highly recommend it.

3 comments about Art and Photography (Themes & Movements S.).

1. Notwithstanding the promise of its title, "Art in Photography" is simply a survey of avant-garde photography of the last half of the twentieth century.
   
   The book is divided into three parts: an essay by Campany, photographs and other works, and documents consisting of excerpts of articles, interviews and statements. The essay is divided into sections with titles like "The Urban and the Everyday" with similar sections of the photographs and documents. Each essay section makes a few general comments about the new in photography and then discusses in a sentence or two the particular photographers whose works appear among the photographs.
   
   The essay's principal thesis is that while other plastic arts moved away from content toward form in modern times, photography has generally moved away from form to content. At the same time, the goal of either set of movements was always self-referential, although it seemed as if photographers were deliberately subverting the form to show its inadequacies. (The author ignores the main stream of photography during that same period, when there were many portrait, fashion and landscape photographers who clung splendidly to the combination of form and content, using form to explicate the content.)
   
   The essay is often supported by thumbnails an inch and three-quarters high, but it is difficult to see much at this small size, and the reader may be further confounded in the effort to relate the picture to the text by the fact that the captions for the thumbnails are printed vertically in small type, requiring one to rotate the book 90 degrees and then look closely to confirm the relationship of the picture to the text.
   
   The pictures themselves are difficult to understand out of the context of a particular photographer's work, although occasionally an image will arrest one's eye, like the photograph of a single woman's face turned toward the camera in a sea of black-cloaked praying Moslem women, or Chuck Close's painting of Philip Glass. For the most part the pictures, out of context, are enigmatic. Campany acknowledges that it is difficult to draw any consistent theory of photography from the pictures.
   
   The documents vary in interest from insightful articles to artistic double-speak. It pained me to see Walter Benjamin's seminal article "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" abridged to a short excerpt, but it does add the flavor of the work to some understanding of the pictures presented.
   
   Survey books are always difficult for me because they can never go into enough detail to comprehend larger movements. Still, for the individual interested in a collection of representative works of avant-garde photography, this book may fill the bill,



2. The book starts with a 35-page survey written by the editor does a very good job of covering photography's use in the arts. This is then followed by some 150 pages of photographs. The next 80 pages cover the documents, writings on and by the artists using photography in their practice. The book concludes with artist and author biographies and a decent bibliography.
   
   Both the photography and the documents are organized into rough thematic groupings. These are:
   * Memories and Archives
   * Objective Objects
   * Traces of Traces
   * The Urban and the Everyday
   * The Studio Image
   * The Arts of Reproduction
   * `Just' Looking
   * The Cultures of Nature
   This organizational structure works quite well, in that rather than overwhelming you with a whole book worth of imagery and commentary, it is divided into more manageable chunks that still allow contemplation of the whole but also allow a tighter consideration, as needed. The work and documents cover the whole time range from the 60's to the early 21st Century (2003 to be specific, the year of publication). So the book is an excellent survey document.
   
   Anyone who is serious at coming to grips with the use of photography in contemporary art practice should have this book handy. It brings together in one great resource not only great examples of the work produced but also, through collating the writings that are included, bringing together the thoughts, criticisms and analysis of the major artists, critics, theorists and analysts of the time. Very highly recommended.



3. The front free endpaper of this book says "Art and Photography is the first book of its kind to survey the presence of photography in artistic practice from the 1960s onwards. The photographic image is central to contemporary art and the debates that surround it, yet it took most of the last century for it to acquire this status. Despite the extensive exploration of photography as an independent art in the Modernist era, it was not until the late twentieth century that artists, museums and galleries began to explore its social roles as a medium of representation. This volume provides a comprehensive survey of photography's place in recent art history, further contextualized in the Documents section by original artists' statements and interviews, together with critical and theoretical reflections on the photographic and the art of the photograph."
   
   Does the book live up to this hype? I think it does. It's a handsome 304-page tome, with the first two-thirds printed on white semiglossy paper (for the "Survey" and "Works") and the last third on cream-colored uncoated paper (for the "Documents," biographies, bibliography, and index).
   
   The "Survey," "Works," and "Documents" parts are arranged into the same eight sections: "Memories and Archives" on "public and private histories"; "Objective Objects" on photos' "apparently direct relation to the world"; "Traces of Traces" on "photography as a record of the real and its effects"; "The Urban and the Everyday" on "contemporary city life"; "The Studio Image" on "fine art's traditional space of making"; "The Arts of Reproduction" on "works that reflect upon the way mass culture is experienced as fragments"; " 'Just' Looking" on "the social structures of vision and the place of the gaze in the formation of our identity"; and "The Cultures of Nature" on "how the current understandings of the natural are formed and reflected through contemporary representation." This organization is unique to my knowledge; most books on art are arranged chronologically or by artist.
   
   The "Survey" essay by David Campany places the Works and Documents into historical context and explains in some detail the eight categories. It's illustrated with small reproductions of art and photos. I found it enlightening.
   
   Within each of the eight sections of "Works," from pages 46 to 205, the photos are presented in more or less chronological order, with the earliest works dating from the 1960s. Of the dozens of photographers, the ones who have more than one photo (from different series) reproduced in the book are John Baldessari, Victor Burgin, Gregory Crewdson, John Divola, John Hilliard, Joel Meyerowitz, Gabriel Orozco, Richard Prince, Gerhard Richter, Martha Rosler, Thomas Ruff, Allan Sekula, Cindy Sherman, Thomas Struth, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Larry Sultan, Jeff Wall, Andy Warhol, Gillian Wearing, and William Wegman. I detect no significant errors of omission or commission in the choice of artists. The specifications of media (e.g., "tinted black and white photographs") and dimensions, and the lengthy captions, are valuable.
   
   "Documents" contains excerpts of writings by photographers (including ones with only a single photograph in "Works," e.g., Yve Lomax and Robert Smithson) and non-photographers (e.g., Roland Barthes, Jacque Derrida, Craig Owens, Marcel Proust), as well as interviews with photographers. These "mostly left-brain" texts complement the "half-left-brain, half-right-brain" Works.
   
   If I had to improve anything, I would say to editor Campany and publisher Phaidon only "Lay off the fancy typography, like the 'decreasing font size' effect from page 14 to page 17, and the full-page treatment of brief quotations on pages 221, 226, 235, and 283! While it makes the book visually attractive, it distracts from the book's main messages and wastes space." Buy this excellent book from Amazon.com!

No comments about Critical Mess: Art Critics on the State of their Practice.