For four decades, I have written about art for publications in the U.S., Europe, and Asia. I have interviewed, among other artists, Frank Stella, Mary Ellen Mark, Dale Chihuly, Deng Lin (the daughter of Deng Xiaoping), the most celebrated Vietnamese contemporary painters, and the leading Japanese ceramicists. My ideal vacation is to wander the cobblestone streets of Italy, walking into a church to see the art of Caravaggio, Raphael, and Bernini. On a trip to Venice, I saw the immense illusionist ceiling painting by Giovanni Fumiani in the church of San Pantalon. Looking up at angels swirling in heaven, the idea for my second novel was born.
I have never been able to look at Renaissance paintings of the Madonna and child the same after reading this brilliant and controversial book. I promise your eyes will be opened as well. These paintings were not simple religious decoration. Christ’s genitalia, exposed or covered, was a visible element in theological arguments in the Renaissance about the humanity of Christ. In our secular world, Steinberg argues, we have lost sight of the sexual component of these images. Steinberg’s breadth of learning is astounding, and the extensive footnotes are as stimulating as the text.
Steinberg argues in this work that the artists regarded the deliberate exposure of Christ's genitalia as an affirmation of kinship with the human condition. Christ's lifelong virginity, understood as potency under check, and the first offer of blood in the circumcision, both required acknowledgment of the genital organ. More than exercises in realism, these unabashed images underscore the crucial theological import of the Incarnation.
Diving headfirst into the enigmatic realm of eromanga and hentai, this book offers a captivating exploration of a genre often relegated to the shadows. Beyond the censorship laws and far from the mainstream gaze, eromanga and hentai have forged their own distinct visual language, a world rich with peculiarities such as the nipple after image, cross-section views and erotic onomatopoeias, not to mention the infamous ahegao expression.
Though somewhat academic in nature, this book is a fascinating journey into the heart of a comic subculture that has thrived beyond the gaze of polite society.
While manga is now a well known entity in the global publishing scene, the medium's international success has its roots in the realm of eros. Japanese media critic Kimi Rito dives into the history of manga's erotic world a genre known internationally simply as - hentai.
What are the origins of hentai? How has it evolved from the days of ukiyo-e to today's modern comics and animation. Who are the people making hentai? And who are the people reading these works? And what is the medium ultimately trying to express beyond sexuality? Rito looks at the content from a number…
As a fantasy and science fiction artist, or imaginative realist, I have always gravitated toward works of imagination and own many books on artists in this field, and love them all. Having met many of my artistic heroes this was a tough call so I picked the five that books that resonated with me during my early life and exploration of this most fantastic form of expression. I hope they fill you with the same wonder as they did with me.
Jeff Jones was a giant of fantasy illustration who followed in the footsteps of Frank Frazetta with great success, although the two men couldn't have been further apart in personality. Tired of restrictive art direction Jeff left illustration to evolve his style into fine art. He was one of those rare fantasy artists whose later works were stronger than his early works.
Jeff was a complex and tortured soul; an alcoholic who changed gender later in life to his own regret– a life lived to extremes. Jeff befriended me briefly online before his untimely death and it was wonderful to engage with him. Once again the Fenners created a labour of love here and the book is filled with full-page images and illuminating text.
From the 1960s through the early 1980s Jeffrey Jones was one of the most respected creators of fantasy and science fiction art. Comfortable as both a book cover illustrator and as a comics artist, Jones gained a large and loyal following that resulted in his being honored with a World Fantasy Award for Best Artist. Renowned for his paintings for the works of Robert E. Howard and Fritz Leiber, Jones' atmospheric style became a major influence on subsequent generations of artists. Though he left the commercial field in the late '80s to devote his full attention on Fine Art, Jones…
If you spend as long looking at medieval churches as I do, you also end up collecting a lot of books on the subject. Any church archaeologist cannot help also becoming something of a librarian. A passion for churches - and books. There are hundreds of church guidebooks out there, all of which have their own merits, but these are a small selection of books that look at different aspects of church history. They look at these amazing buildings through a different lens. These aren't a definitive guide - just books that I find myself returning to time and time again - for both information and pleasure.
Stephen Hart spent a lifetime travelling around English churches and was one of the most knowledgeable - and good-natured - individuals I ever had the pleasure to work with. One of his passions was for flushwork - the decorative flint work seen on many English churches, most especially in East Anglia. This book was published towards the end of his career and brings together many of his thoughts and ideas - as well as a fantastic selection of images.
Flint Flushwork is a wholly external decorative medium, where the skills of medieval craftsman blended with the iconography of the medieval church to create a unique new art form. It is an artistic achievement that is built into the very fabric of many hundreds of medieval churches. As such, many examples of Flushwork survive where more impermanent artworks have succumbed to the ravages of reformation and over-zealous restoration. Despite this, however, ithas not attracted the same depth of research and analysis as other aspects of church architecture.
This book provides a wide perspective on the several different modes of Flushwork…
I love the painting of the Dutch
Golden Age for its humanity. All of life is there in its calm domesticity.
In
Dutch hands, even a tied bunch of asparagus attains the luminosity of an
Assumption, as Laura Cumming reveals as she weaves a memoir of her father, also
a painter, with the story of Carel Fabritius, the artist of The Goldfinch, most
of whose work was destroyed in the same sudden moment as his life in an
accidental munitions explosion in Delft in 1654.
Thunderclap offers a salutary
reminder that life comes at you fast – and death too – and that we should use
the little time we have to look at our world.
'Brilliant ... rush out and buy it' Edmund de Waal, author of The Hare with Amber Eyes
A stunning new memoir of a life in art, a father and daughter, and what a shared love of a painting can come to mean.
'We see with everything that we are'
On the morning of 12 October 1654, a gunpowder explosion devastated the Dutch city of Delft. The thunderclap was heard over seventy miles away. Among the fatalities was the painter Carel Fabritius, dead at thirty-two, leaving only his haunting masterpiece The Goldfinch and barely a dozen known paintings. The explosion that…
I have been fascinated by women who are artists and activists, such as Ivy Bottini, Käthe Kollwitz and Peggy Guggenheim. (All subjects of plays I wrote). They are convicted, unique, champions of justice, diversity and inclusion.
Ms. Kollwitz is one of the most famous expressionistic German artists and was the first female to teach in a university setting. She was a pacifist, champion of the poor, a politically-active socialist. Under the Nazi regime, her work was labeled “Degenerate.” After learning about Ms. Kollwitz, I wrote a play about her entitled Censored.
I am a children’s book author who is awed by the ocean and the creatures that dwell in its depths. I love writing for kids because they’re unabashedly eager, enthusiastic, and curious! To write this book, I dove deep into researching information about the ocean. The more I learned, the more I wanted to know. I kept thinking, kids will love these fascinating facts and they’ll want to learn more. The wonderful books on this list tell amazing tales, take kids on adventures, and turn dry facts into a deluge of fun. These nonfiction stories offer kids opportunities to become immersed in our awesome ocean!
I highly recommend this true tale of deep-sea exploration!
The suspense is intense, compelling readers to keep turning pages. In 1930, two intrepid explorers climbed into a 5,000-pound hollow metal sphere and descended 800 feet into the ocean—farther than any human had ever dared to venture. They were amazed to find animals aglow in the ocean’s cold, dark depths.
Young readers (and older readers, too!) will be inspired by Otis and Will’s desire to know more, their persistent problem solving, and this remarkable feat of science and engineering. Over 90% of the ocean is still unexplored! Well-researched pencil, ink, and watercolor illustrations suit the story perfectly.
The suspenseful, little-known true story of two determined pioneers who made the first dive into the deep ocean.
On June 6, 1930, engineer Otis Barton and explorer Will Beebe dove into the ocean inside a hollow metal ball of their own invention called the Bathysphere.
They knew dozens of things might go wrong. A tiny leak could shoot pressurized water straight through the men like bullets! A single spark could cause their oxygen tanks to explode! No one had ever dived lower than a few hundred feet...and come back. But Otis and Will were determined to become the first people…
I grew up in a small Welsh town and I read to escape into other worlds. My love of myth and legend began when I came across a book of Greek myth in the library. I fell in love with the great voyages, the larger-than-life characters, the snake-haired monsters, and flying horses. I’ve been collecting legends ever since. I studied comparative literature at university, which included epic tales from all over the world and I was struck by how the same motifs come up again and again – quests, battles, magic. I love any story that takes you out of your everyday surroundings and into adventure.
This book takes you on an incredible adventure through a series of strange magical lands. It’s full of humour, imagination, and great characters – Lady Crepuscular is a particularly terrifying and memorable villain. I love the twists and turns in the plot and the friendships that develop between the crew of the Impossible Postal Express. If you like to laugh out loud while you’re reading, this book is for you.
All aboard for the first journey in the bestselling Train to Impossible Places Adventures, with magic at every stop.
Shortlisted for the Waterstones Children's Book Prize, the Branford Boase Award and the IBW Book Awards, with dazzling illustrations from Flavia Sorrentino, join Suzy on this magical adventure, where the journey will never, ever take you where you expect it to.
When Suzy hears a strange noise in the middle of the night, she creeps downstairs to find a train roaring through her house. But this is no ordinary train. This is the magical delivery express for The Union of Impossible…
Having written several books on cultural history, I was puzzled in the late 1990s by the insistence of most American curators, art historians, and gallerists that there could not possibly be any spiritual content in modern artbecause the modernproject (beginning, they assert, with the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874) was all about the rejection of tradition, religion, etc. This overarching narrative has dominated the professional art world since World War II. I knew it was false because I was aware that many prominent modern artists had spiritual interests, which were expressed in their art. So began a 17-year-long research quest focused on what the artists themselves had said.
The Romantic painters of the early 19th century were intrigued with notions of the sublime, the Absolute, and the unity and divinity of all nature. After the mid-1880s the focus of the avant-garde painters became energized by the quest to escape the bounds of “materialism” (an umbrella term by which they meant positivism, the mechanistic worldview of Newtonian physics, as well as the destructive effects of industrialism). Lynn Gamwell illuminates the fascination many of the modern artists felt for various scientific discoveries in various decades. For instance, the first exhibition of x-rays by the Berlin Physical Society in 1896 was hailed by the artists as proof that an invisible structure underlies every surface, just as Theosophy asserts! Exploring the Invisibleis subtle, thorough, and insightful engagement with this rich interplay.
How science changed the way artists understand reality
Exploring the Invisible shows how modern art expresses the first secular, scientific worldview in human history. Now fully revised and expanded, this richly illustrated book describes two hundred years of scientific discoveries that inspired French Impressionist painters and Art Nouveau architects, as well as Surrealists in Europe, Latin America, and Japan.
Lynn Gamwell describes how the microscope and telescope expanded the artist's vision into realms unseen by the naked eye. In the nineteenth century, a strange and exciting world came into focus, one of microorganisms in a drop of water and spiral…
Born and raised in Mississippi, I have long been fascinated with the natural history of the South and of the Americas in general. And as an outdoorsy guy, a NOLS graudate, mountain-biker, trail-runner, and paddler, I revel in reading accounts of the early days of Western exploration in the woodlands, mountains, and coastal regions of our hemisphere. Finally, as an avid reader and now author, I constantly seek out enthralling and wide-ranging narratives about exploration, outdoor adventure, and the natural world.
I had never heard of Maria Sybilla Merian before researching my latest book, but her life was amazing.
A brilliant artist, Merian lived an unconventional life—even before going to the Dutch colony of Surinam in 1698 accompanied only by her daughter. There Merian produced stunning and important works, illustrating the life cycles of insects and relationships between insect and plant species.
Before Darwin, before Audubon, before Gilbert White, there was Merian. An artist turned naturalist, known for her botanical illustrations, Maria Sybilla Merian was born in Germany just sixteen years after Galileo proclaimed that the earth orbited the sun. But at the age of fifty she sailed from Europe to the New World on a solo scientific expedition to study insect metamorphosis - an unheard-of journey for any naturalist at that time, much less an unaccompanied woman. When she returned she produced a book that secured her reputation, only to have it savaged in the nineteenth century by scientists who disdained…
