1 comments about The Seascape Painter's Problem Book.

1. This book written before E. John was truely "great", at least in my opinion, shows very basic techniques that he used as he was becoming the master he is today. The reason that his book is a must have for any marine painters libary is because it shows the work and technique before E. John could do what he does so "effortlessly". I have attended a one week painting workshop with E. John and I found this book very helpful in pointing out the basics of wave, sky, rock, light, shadow and foam structure.

1 comments about Portrait and Figure Painting Book : A Comprehensive Guide to Painting Male and Female Portraits with over 250 color plates including 30 step-by-step demonstrations in full color.

1. This book is billed as a comprehensive guide to painting male and female portraits, children's portraits, and the nude figure in oil. It contains 400 illustrations with over 250 color plates and includes 30 step-by-step demonstrations in full color. The paintings are all by George Passantino.
   
   The book starts with a few pointers on materials and some black and white plates illustrating the painting of facial features. From there it's straight into the 10 adult portrait demonstrations. Each has from 7 to 11 color plates detailing the steps and each plate includes discussion on colors used and features modified, etc. This is followed by a discussion on composition, lighting, drawing and sketching.
   
   The next section, children's portraits, follows exactly the same format with 10 children's portrait demonstrations and the same discussion afterward.
   
   The final section begins with a section on painting the torso, arms and legs. It then goes through 10 nude figurative demonstrations. All are female, different poses, and each is accompanied by a similar number of color plates and discussion. This section ends with a discussion on body proportions, lighting, and drawing.
   
   The portrait and childrens demonstrations cover different sexes, ages, and races. All told this book is a very nice set of portrait and figure demonstrations. It's suited for the beginning or intermediate artist. If you're familiar with any of the other painting books by Wendon Blake this is the same format only much larger.

5 comments about Painting Murals: Images, Ideas, and Techniques.

1. This book has been a wonderful addition to my collection. I really enjoy all the beautiful illustrations and actual pictures of murals. As an amateur muralist, it has also been a wonderful reference book and I have used it many times!



2. I wanted a book that taught me how to paint murals, and by golly that's what I got. This book has a thorough explanation of tools, techniques and strategies to get the beginning muralist started. There are examples of murals, old and new, to get the creativity going. Just enough inspiration to jump off from. I don't like mimicking other's work, just getting good foundational ideas. You need this book if you don't want too much fluff, and just enough stuff!



3. GREAT BOOK. FULL OF A GREAT DEAL OF INFORMATION. PLAN TO KEEP THIS ONE. CAME IN GOOD CONDITION AND ON TIME.



4. While there were several photographs of murals in different stages, most were not done sequentially with step by step instructions. There were good hints for painting effects. Overall, I found it to be the author's brag book with mostly photographs of their completed murals.



5. I have owned this book for several years. I have loaned it out, and purchased it many times for artist friends that want ideas or to start painting murals. If not complete, it has wonderful pictures and lovely step-by-step photos that make it a gem of a book.

5 comments about Brushfire: Illuminations from the Inferno.

1. Artist Wayne Barlowe is simply brilliant. With this book and its predecessor, INFERNO, Barlowe gives illustration to that most dreaded place still to linger in the minds and consciences of many a man and woman: Hell.
   
   Barlowe's literally tortured landscape is one of the few truly original and imaginative renderings of the Demonic realm that I've seen or read in quite a while.
   
   Barlowe's Inferno with its demonic overlords, ruling from citadels built with the crushed souls of condemned humanity over a dimension of pain and humiliation is repugnant yet fascinating.



2. But please do not let the title heading fool you. Of course Mr. Barlowe's work is brilliantly creepy (in this respect). In fact, with this book, there are more creatures in addition to his previous Inferno book which gives his hellish world more life but my disappointment lies with the fact that it is very short in comparison to his former work.



3. Beautiful, Interesting and Haunting. Really makes you think about the bad side of judeo christian beleifs.



4. First off, Barlowe is an amazingly talented artist, and anything he does is worth owning.
   Second, this book is an excellent continuation of "Inferno". If you do not own "Inferno", this can be read alone. However, the two are part of the same vision of Hell.
   Third, while this book has slightly less content than "Inferno", it's still excellent. The artwork is inspired and haunting. The demons have an organic feel that makes them look real. They also have the remnants of their angelic heritage. Whereas "Inferno" is Barlowe's travels through Hell, focusing on people, places, and "beings", this book focuses on beings in the hierarchy of Hell, from officers to demons to fallen souls.



5. As my first thought, the point of view of Brushfire was much different from that of Inferno. This time it is written as if Barlowe were actually in Hell while painting his various subjects. Although this can be interesting, the perspective sometimes leaves out alot of information about the demons major and minor, focusing more on what he was thinking and what was happening around him at the time he was painting.
   Brushfire mananages to have very visually rewarding illustrations. Pictures of "posing subjects" tend to be more photographic, while pictures outdoors are usually more like the ones from Inferno. However, I feel it could have incorporated more of the titanic scale so ubiquitous in Inferno. This effect gives Barlowe's Hell a very supernatural feel, one that separates his vision from that of other's.
   As a humorous ending note, there is a little "insider joke" in the book. One of the pictures is of Morphaiis, a demon that Barlowe befriends on his visit to Hell. What makes it funny is that the painting is of James Cowan, Barlowe's friend and book publisher (who just happens to work for Morpheus International.

3 comments about Van Gogh and God: A Creative Spiritual Quest (Campion Book).

1. Eventhough my studies do not allow me a great deal of time to read books of my choice, I could not deny the work of Dr. "Cliffy-baby" Edwards. His book, "Van Gogh and God: A Creative Spiritual Quest" was just that. It was, in every sense of the phrase, a creatively spiritual page turner. His language and content captures the reader's mind and by doing so, captures the reader's spiritual core. Once mesmerized by the life, work, and creative madness of the artist, the reader becomes smoothly inundated with the thorough biographical information that Dr. Edwards so eloquently puts to page. At the risk of sounding mildly educated, I had never realized the influence Zen Buddhism had on the artist until reading Dr. Edwards' book. I did, of course, realize the "oriental" aspect of Van Gogh's approach to painting but I never knew of his "Zen Buddhist" approach to living. Sometimes the samurai leaves the monarchy and spends his life in caves painting. Congratulations Dr. E. for a fine work indeed.



2. I recently heard the author of Van Gogh and God, Dr. Cliff Edwards, speak about Vincent. At this particular gathering, he also showed wonderful slides of the artist's work. As a result of that encounter with Dr. Edwards and Vincent Van Gogh, I bought Dr. Edwards' warm and accessible book, Van Gogh and God. While reading it, much like the disciples who spoke to Christ without recognizing him on the road to Emmaus, I felt my heart burn within me while Vincent's life opened up before me like a lotus flower. I especially connected with Van Gogh's insistence that he was "not an admirer" of biblical subjects (to paint). Apparently he felt that paintings such as The Nativity and Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane avoided getting to the "reality of things" and gave him "a powerful feeling of collapse instead of progress." To paint biblical material must have felt inauthentic to Vincent as he journeyed on his spiritual quest. Lois Lowry in her book, The Giver, addresses this very issue of authenticity. Jonas, the hero, lives in a community where sameness and conformity are valued. Jonas sees things differently, though, and is chosen to become the one who acts as receptacle and transmitter of the community's collective memory. Jonas receives these memories/stories from the Giver, someone who currently has the task of holding memory. One of the questions the book raises in the reader's mind is, "When does a story become MY story?" People in Jonas' community lived without authenticity because the locus of memory was institutionalized within an individual. I couldn't help but think that Vincent, striving for authenticity, wanted to show that those sacred memories (institutionalized in the Church and in biblical paintings) gave him "a powerful feeling of collapse instead of progress." For a story (either word or image) to have meaning, it must first connect with an individual's experience. Vincent Van Gogh, like Jonas, saw things differently. Both struggled in a world that would have preferred their acquiesence to the status quo. Dr. Edwards convincingly shows that Vincent imaged God outside the parameters and conventions of the Church. Dr. Edwards suggests that "[p]erhps such profound power revealed through one's life task was a more accurate description of the divine than the word 'God.' " Another powerful image is "the child in a cradle as best evidence for God." As Dr. Edwards points out, "Vincent experiences God in the concreteness of his own most intense and significant personal history." We all do. Vincent found meaning in his life's work, his care and concern for the prostitute Sien, her daughter, and newborn son, and also in nature--wheat, flowers, olive groves, cypress trees. To image and paint a Christ that has no personal connection is, again, to live inauthentically. It would appear that Vincent would have none of that. One of my favorite parts in Dr. Edwards' book is in the Preface. "[M]ost Judeo-Christian scholars...[take] the unyielding position that religion must be expressed primarily as hearing and obeying, and cannot be expressed significantly as seeing and creating. Dr. Edwards shows how Vincent navigated those waters. It gives hope to those of us who have felt stifled by the Church's insistence that memory/story resides within its embrace.



3. The author misleads the reader by perpetuating two myths about van Gogh's religious life 1) that he was raised Calvinist and 2) that he was Buddist. If the author had taken the time to research van Gogh's biography, he would have found that van Gogh's family rejected Calvinism entirely, particularly the notions of sin and limited salvation, for a more liberal theology, favoring universal salvation and the belief that God dwells within us all. The author continues his false representation of van Gogh by arguing that he became a Buddist after he left the Christian ministry. This is based on one simple painting that van Gogh made for his friend, Gauguin, with his head shaven like a Buddist monk. Although van Gogh was thoroughly fascinated with Oriental culture, he never visted the Far East, never studied Buddism, nor did he show any real understanding of its basic ideas. In fact, all he learned of Asian culture and religion came from what he saw in the Japanese woodblock prints that came into Europe in the late 19th century and also what he garnered from reading 19th century French novels. Mr. Edwards only clouds our understanding of van Gogh with his own personal interests. For example, his discussion of van Gogh's famous work, "Crows over the Wheatfield," reads "The painting itself enters the mode of being of all things in their impermanence yet transformation, becoming a koan that poses the Zen Master's question: 'If you call this wheat you cling to it; if you do not call it wheat you depart from the facts, so what do you call it then?'" (What does this have to do with van Gogh?) The reader is best to stay away from this book entirely.

3 comments about The Rhetoric of Perspective: Realism and Illusionism in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Still-Life Painting.

1. This is not a book for light beach reading, but it is a book worth reading for anyone interested in painting in general or still life specifically or Dutch still life very specifically. Actually, I quoted it in my M.F.A. thesis. Put simply, the author discusses painting as a way of thinking and 3-dimensional perspective (or the lack thereof by extrapolation, I suppose) an expression of painting as a way of thinking--all placed in the context of Dutch Still Life. That was worth the price of the book to me. As a painter, this idea led me to deeper exploration of the connection between my ideas and the vehicles I choose to present my ideas; i.e., oil paint, linen, brushes, 3-D modeling, color schemes, etc.



2. As a painter of still-life, I purchased the book for obvious reasons. The text is for a more academic audience; this is not a light read. Some familiarity with post-modern analysis is helpful. Fortunately the writing is not too dense. As an artist I was able to gain some insights into how some intellectuals would interpret my own work and to a lesser extent made me aware of some of my own unchallenged assumptions.



3. Grootenboer takes a fresh and captivating look at Dutch Still Life and its philosophical implications, touching on many fields and ways of seeing. This book is dense, yet Grootenboer's voice leads the reader through its density towards a whole new way of experiencing this specific, fascinating genre. I was excited to read someone appropriately synthesizing postmodern theories and ideals into a new way of looking at Dutch art, which in my opinion lends itself perfectly to these heady ponderings. Buy the book and more importantly read it, like the great artworks it discusses, Rhetoric of Perspective may change your overall "perspective."

No comments about Concrete to Canvas: Skateboarders' Art.

2 comments about Peter Doig.

1. First of all, thanks to Amazon for an excellent service.. I live in Ecuador (South America) and don't have too much chances to get good contemporary art books. This book gives the opportunity to see many of Doig's first works and the recent ones. The buyer won't feel dissapointed. You can get to see the images on a good size, the color reproduction is acceptable. Doig's paintings does not only show a lot of his imagination but also an awesome technique. It is not boring at all to contemplate the million details he makes all over the canvas. Great use of the palette. Excellent resource for painters esentially because in this type of work you get to understand that you have to get over your fears or to make mistakes. Doig's paintings give you a real sense of freedom and the love of the artist for his job.
   
   To Amazon: I gave you my whole trust and you made a perfect job. Congratulations



2. Doig is really one of the best living artist, and this book really does him justice. The book includes older work as well as recent. Reproduction is excellent. I can not give a better recommendation.

No comments about Watercolor Painting Techniques.

No comments about Learning by Heart: Teaching to Free the Creative Spirit.