Art
Book Reviews
cont.,
Lotte Laserstein was a prolific artist. She was born in Berlin but because of her Jewish heritage she left she had her burgeoning and well respected career in Germany smashed beginning in 1935. After exhibiting in Sweden her plight was recognized by the museum directors who sent her an invitation to return in 1937 and she was able to get most of her artwork out of Germany. Mostly this work has been exhibited and written about but the Moderna Museet exhibition and this book, Lotte Laserstein: A Divided Life, look at her whole career - mainly as a portraitist but also with some striking landscapes over her 50 year career.
Arne Jacobsen is a well-known architect from Denmark known around the world yet he is even more well-known, in some respects for his furniture and industrial design - basically Designing Denmark and beyond as this exhibition book points out. Jacobsen was a painter in his youth and continued to keep sketchbooks over his career often painting in watercolour. The first page I opened was a beautiful watercolour spread over two pages for Jacobsen's Industriens Hus design. In the 1940s he put his studies of nature to use and collaborated with his future wife to design textiles and wallpapers. The designs are fantastic.
Dr. Susan Evans is a former curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Her knowledge of drawing as a medium is amazing and I'm enjoyed her brand new book The Story of Drawing - An Alternative History of Art. I actually started the book towards the end. I was interested in how artists used drawing in modern art more as an end product rather than a means to an end. I also covered some of the history of drawing throughout my years studying art history however it is worth the renewal and also to read what wasn't taught as drawing was always seen as inferior to painting or sculpture. I also particularly liked the glossary describing different media and supports for drawing. I'm a nerd like that.
Hubby has been mining the new books section of the Toronto Public Library and including books I might like and he picked well. Pen and Ink Drawing Techniques was a great pick on his part. Even the usual "supplies" section in these types of books have drawn images rather than photographs. The ideas for mark making are traditional in a sense like cross-hatching but it feels like a fresh approach.
Along the same lines of Harrison's book is Neil Whitehead's Line and Wash in the Urban Landscape. Whitehead's approach is even more loose and sometimes spare, leaving a lot of white space, and I find it fascinating. The artist tends to use the continuous line approach to his drawings. It is definitely a quicker technique.
I took Albert Kiefer's Domestika course in the past. I love his loose line drawing combined with his "washes". In his case his washes are marker based but my usual watercolour or ink could be used. What you really take away from House Sketching is the expressive use of line in his work. There are also QR codes in the book in case you want to watch a tutorial rather than read about it - so great for visual learners. Kiefer frees you from stuffy architectural drawings - exaggerating line to emphasize certain things including not being forced into true perspective.
This is a lovely book to leaf through even if you've never been to Brooklyn, NY. Brooklyn Storefronts is right up my alley (I've done photo series of shopfronts and watercolours as well). I love old, creative storefronts and so many of them are disappearing. This is a combo of old treasures and some new places. The history of each is researched by David Dodge with accompanying watercolours by Joel Holland.
Photographer Christoph Irrgang was inspired by the Impressionists' works in the Barberini Museum and wondered what the places that the artists painted would look like now 150 years on. Impressionist Places: Revealed in Paintings and Photographs is the result of this journey. The paintings appear alongside the photos with text about the locations themselves then and now and how they affected the paintings. Surprisingly many look very like they did when the artist painted the scene en plein air.
This book is the Courtauld Gallery's book for the Peter Doig exhibition in 2023. The gallery's permanent collection was something that the student Doig visited while studying at Saint Martin's art school. The collection's works by Manet, Gaugain and Van Gogh were very influential on the young painter. After years spent living abroad in Trinidad, Doing has returned to London. His time in Trinidad also had a huge influence on his subject matter. The book has an interview with the artist and essays alongside beautiful reproductions of his work.
If you've read through all of the book reviews above you will note that I love books featuring other artists' sketchbooks. I love having a peek inside and Drawn In is another such book. It features artist from North America and Europe with images of pages from their sketchbooks and answering interview questions about their practice. Fascinating as usual.
Yet another great pick! So you started with Pen and Ink but want to explore watercolour. Well here's your second book Pen and Wash by John Harrison. Harrison has a very light touch and lovely way with colour. He takes you through his setup with supplies, how he approaches composition and perspective.
I don't tend to use acrylics anymore except with gelli plate printing. But this is a very handy volume for the beginner or intermediate. The Acrylics Companion really covers some things that beginner books don't like the many mediums you can add to the paint for texture, slowing down the drying process (something that puts people off who have switched from oils), or building up the paint or thinning it down (it is best NOT to use water). Then there are examples of ways to use mark making including without brushes. It's a great little book.
Martin Gayford's latest book How Painting Happens is basically a conversation with major artists of our time including David Hockney who he has closely worked with over decades. It delves really into the process of artists and their approach to painting and art making as well as artists' views on other artists like Van Gogh on Rembrandt or Constable on Titian. Of course it is so well illustrated. It's a treat of a book.
Yes another David Hockney book but this one IS a bit different. Paper Trails This focuses on Hockney’s 60 years of works on paper (prints and even digital works) . I think these best show his working out of subjects or even theories on art more than his paintings. You really do get to see the artist's process.
Adam Moss is a former magazine editor and journalist who quit his job to pursue a painting career. While working out how to be a good, if not great, artist he began questioning how great art comes to be. He is interested in the whole process - what lead to the finished work, what ideas were dismissed etc. He examines various works in The Work of Art. This book doesn't just look at painting and sculpture but all the arts like writers, music, dance, theatre etc. It is quite an interesting read.
Alexandra Loske's The Artist's Palette also examines the artistic process but in a more niche way and I love it. I love seeing artists' palettes and thinking how they ordered colours and made a "mess" of their palettes. Some of the older masters she examines did not leave behind palettes to examine but it can be worked out the colours that they tended to favour. Colours before the 18th century were limited and from natural sources. Some colours were rare, highly prized and expensive and had to be mixed by the artist or their studio helpers. For more modern artists they had more availability of colours, some synthetic and with the introduction of tubes of paint, they could paint more easily outside the studio. A fascinating read and the palettes look like art works in themselves!
I was very lucky to have a chance to go to the Tate Britain while I was in England recently. I had been before but I like to visit "old friends" and of course that includes the large Turner collection that they have. It is always amazing to stand in front of his works. And yes, again, I'm interested in the process and this book, How Turner Painted, delivers. Joyce Townsend examines both Turner's works on paper (watercolour) and canvas (oil). He was truly innovative for his time and alive at a time when access to more colours and easier methods of painting (see above) were becoming more available. He even happened to live in an area of London known for the colourmen trading in Covent Garden. I really want to own this book.
Hubby got this thin volume out of the library for me after my trip to the Barbara Hepworth museum run by the Tate and who published this book. It's a great overview of her work and includes images of her home and garden that I visited. It was such a fantastic visit sitting in her garden and sketching her work. See the video of my trip to St. Ives.
As you may already know I make my own watercolour. If not then you can find them here. I use pigments for my watercolour as is traditional but I love reading about creating other sorts of art supplies especially with botanical sources. Now I don't have the space to do this without making a mess so I will stick to watercolour that is messy enough. Botanical Inks by Babs Behan mostly deals with creating dyes for fabrics but there is a section of creating art paints like tempera, gouache, ink and even watercolour. A section at the end of the book gives you some project ideas like creating table linen, sleep masks and bags. It's fun read even if you're not tempted to start a little production factory and there are beautiful photos.
If you are interested in making your own inks, Plant and Ink by Judith Rosema is a great place to start. This book is divided into seasons with things you could forage for your ink like daffodil in the Spring, dahlia and goldenrod in the Summer, horsechestnut in the Autumn and grapevine in the Winter. I didn't realize how many colours you can get from red cabbage (except actual red). The end of the book tells you how to make your dyes into pigments and from there make paints like oil, watercolour and tempera and chalk pastels and screenprinting ink. Again, beautiful images throughout.
Anselm Kiefer The Women focuses on one aspect of Kiefer's oeuvre. The female figure allows him to contemplate ideas of identity, memory as well as examining the idea of myth and history. I just love the textures that are created in some of his works. I am not comparing myself at all to the great German artist, but there is one particular suite of works that makes me think about the textures that I am trying to achieve with gel plate experiments. This book looks at a broad spectrum of his work including sculpture, watercolour, printmaking and photography. It's a gorgeous coffee table book.
This is the book for the exhibition Siena: The Rise of Painting 1300-1350 held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the National Gallery in London. It opened while I was in London but it was near the end of my trip and I just didn't have the time or inclination. While I love the exploring the technical approach to painting of this time (as it led to the Renaissance) I'm not a big religious art fan. This is a key turning point in art when artists particularly in this region began to approach realism and perspective (baby steps) that we now take for granted. The book has a number of essays by renowned curators and art historians to flesh this out and of course stunning reproductions of the artwork. The exhibition and therefore book also looks at sculpture and textiles.
If the above book leads you to wanting to get an overall view of the history of art this book will give you a crash course. This is more fun than the huge art history book I had to buy in my first year of art history at university. Art: The Definitive Visual Guide is part of a series of DK publications (the ones who do those great travel books) that include one on Design and one on Fashion. It's a massive book.
Yes another David Hockney book and yes you'll find a lot of the same images repeated as David Hockney was published in association with the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, for their major 2025 David Hockney retrospective exhibition. Essays by curatorial experts, art historians, and critics accompany large scale reproductions including some pull out images. It charts his beginnings in Bradford, time spent in California, his return to the UK and his Normandy home. Later chapters deal with his working with the latest technology, something that has always interested him with research into camera lucida in the past, to photography and now drawing on iPads.
