Landscapes / seascapes in the arts Books

Book SynopsisStylish retro travel posters bring to mind summer holidays, happiness and fun. Perennially popular as wall art, their strong designs and clean, flat colours are perfect for hobby artists to emulate. A complete guide to producing your own travel-poster art, this book includes guidance on composing a strong design, selecting colours to make sure your artwork pops, and adding lettering for a picture-perfect finished poster. Learn to create key poster elements such as clouds, skies, water and architecture, and discover how to add your own stylized lettering. There are six striking international projects to complete, or you can use your newfound skills to celebrate your own home town or treasured place. This book is packed with examples of Susie West’s inspiring artwork and a short history of travel posters. Since 2015, Susie West has been working her way around the UK recreating the upbeat, retro charm of travel posters in the modern world. This book shares her techniques and secrets for producing fun, charming artwork. Suitable for beginners, this is a great way into art for those who want to develop their skills, or for experienced artists wanting to try something new.Trade ReviewIf you like the idea of working with bold colours and geometric shapes to capture the essence of a place in an interpretation, rather than a slavish imitation of the classic travel poster, this delightful book will give you all you need. It is almost certainly unique – I've never seen one before and I doubt I will again, so it needs to be a good and its pleasing to be able to report that it is both. Susie provides plenty of advice, both basic and advanced - how to take photographs as well as use them, for instance, and how to hold brushes as well as distil detail and colour to create striking images. Just leafing through the pages gives a sense of a job not only well, but completely done. This might be a niche book, but the results are intriguing and it's hard not to be encouraged to experiment. -- Henry Malt * The Artist *This book is probably most useful for beginners in acrylic painting and contains much useful information and tips on what essential equipment to buy and good alternatives to expensive kit too. More experienced painters could usefully use the book to try out, what for most, would be a different style of painting. There are six step-by-step exercises to enable you to put into practice the suggestions given earlier in the book. I intend using some of the techniques (which are transferable) to working on a textile art quilt at some point in the future. The book is colourfully set out. -- Heather Brialey * Amazon Customer Review *Posters have long been a way for artists to communicate with others, but the travel posters as we know them emerged in the early 20th century born out of the desire to travel and improvements in printing processes. Artist Sue West, has been working her way around the UK since 2015 recreating the retro charm of travel posters in the modern world. So far she has painted over 150 different places, from village greens to city architecture. In her new book, Passport to Painting, she shows us how to create our own travel posters, looking at elements such as equipment and materials, how to paint skies and water, foliage, architecture, lettering and the impact colour can have on your work. Susie has also designed six of her own travel posters that she presents as step-by-step projects so that we can have a go ourselves. As she writes in her introduction: 'Once, like me, you start seeing the whole world as a travel poster, there'll be no stopping you!' * Leisure Painter *If you are new to painting or have not painted for a while, the exercises are easy to follow. If you enjoy doing poster art and love trying a new medium, great to do with your acrylic paint pens or posca pens. -- Helen Shepherd * Amazon Customer Review *Table of ContentsIntroduction 6, Before you set out 12, Planning the trip: Designing your own travel poster 18, Getting started 36, Adding lettering 66 Projects 72 Amsterdam Canals 74 Sydney Opera House 80 London Tower Bridge 88 Mount Rainier National Park, USA 96 Lisbon Trams 104 Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco 112 Onward travel 120, Afterword 124, Lettering templates 125, Index 128

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Book SynopsisField Notes is the record of a territory in full colour: a book of words and artworks that capture a year spent on foot in the Lincolnshire landscape.It is about topography and time. Chalk and flint and marsh. The coming and going of the sea, Neolithic farmers and the razzle-dazzle of weary coastal towns. It is as much about the ghost of a mammoth as it is the scream of a jet fighter, heading east. Each image is a still from a film – a film that is under constant production inside Maxim Peter Griffin’s skull.Griffin’s art is about taking somewhere and looking at it over and over so that with each looking it becomes strange and new. As well as being a testament to the isolated beauty of Lincolnshire itself, Field Notes is an extraordinary account of what it is like to be present in, to fully inhabit, a place.

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Book SynopsisThis book builds on the success of Terry Harrison's Sea & Sky in Watercolour, adding six new projects and plenty of new paintings. Terry's clear, no-nonsense advice takes the mystery out of painting clouds, clear skies, sunsets, foam bursts, breaking waves, rippled water, reflections, boats, cliffs, rocks, beaches and much more. There are plenty of tips and techniques to show how to use Terry's specially made brushes to paint watercolour seascapes the easy way. There are then nine beautiful step-by-step projects that show the techniques in action.Trade ReviewApril 2015 By dealing with two perennially popular and persistently problematical subjects in one book, Terry Harrison demonstrates ways of handling both ground and aerial perspective. This is a relatively elementary book, but Terry has a way of explaining things that can have even the most experienced artist saying, 'Of course! His waves have motion and substance, his reflections hint at hidden depths and his clouds can contain real menace. There's a good variety of material here as well as landscapes, building and boats, of which Terry is a master. All round, this is excellent value. * Artist, The *March 2015 You'd expect nothing less than a comprehensive guide from Terry Harrison, and that's exactly what you get here. His 'easy way' is to work with a relatively limited palette and with a series of brushes he's developed that produce results quickly and predictably. Terry paints atmospheric scenes and all weather and conditions. You'll get storms and calm, waves crashing onto rocks or lapping a sandy shore. You'll get heavy clouds and peaceful sunsets. You'll also find boats, piers and buildings as well as all the other landscape elements associated with maritime subjects. Above all, what you'll get is Terry's patient and easily-followed guidance. He's one of those people who knows the question you're going to ask before you've thought of it yourself and he's there with just the right advice and just the right illustration. The Easy Way - I reckon that's it. Someone should bottle it. * SAA *Building on the success of his Sea and Sky in watercolour, this new book by Terry Harrison includes six fresh projects and many new paintings. Using his specially made brushes, Terry shows us how to capture sea and sky in clear step by step stages and with a disarmingly easy style. In all there are step-by-step projects and plenty of hints and tips. * Leisure Painter, The *February 2015 Terry Harrison isn’t the only person to have used “the easy way” in a book title, but he pretty much owns the phrase at the moment. Very sensibly, he makes no attempt to define it. You know that a Terry demonstration is going to be clear, succinct and easy to follow, and that’s probably enough. This new book is a comprehensive guide to just about every maritime subject there is, as long as it’s on the coast – we’re not in open water here. You get calm seas, rough seas, breaking and crashing waves as well as help on what to do with the horizon. At this point, moving upwards, we get to the sky – clear, cloudy, stormy and with the sun setting. As well as shorelines, cliffs and buildings, the odd boat finds its way in uncredited too, and Terry is particularly sound on the way boats sit in and not on the water. After these two-page exercises, the book concludes with a series of projects, fully demonstrated, that bring everything together. There’s no easy way to paint, you know that, but there is an enjoyable and fulfilling way to learn that makes it seem easy. How do you find that? Follow Terry Harrison. You won’t go wrong. * Artbookreview.net *Table of ContentsINTRODUCTION 6 Materials 8 My palette 10 Using photographs 12 Techniques 14 PAINTING SEAS 24 Calm water 26 Choppy water 28 Breaking waves 29 Crashing waves 30 A shoreline 31 Bands of colour 32 The horizon 33 PAINTING SKIES 34 A clear sky 36 A cloudy sky 37 A stormy sky 38 Another cloudy sky 40 A sunset 41 Painting reflections 42 Other elements 50 PROJECTS 58 Crashing Waves 52 Coastal Footpath 56 Sunset on the Sea 62 Breaking Wave Estuary Boats The End of the Pier On the Rocks Sunlit Shore Lighthouse in the Evening

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Book SynopsisKurt Jackson’s Botanical Landscape is a new collection of poems, paintings, drawings, sculptures and printmaking by the artist and staunch environmentalist: responses to his engagement with and rich experience within the natural world of flora. From day-to-day plants – weeds, the flowers in the hedge, familiar trees and the vegetable garden – to the more unusual, twisted forms and strange fruit of the undergrowth, Jackson’s works celebrate the staggering diversity of the plant kingdom. For the art enthusiast, the naturalist, the gardener and the armchair horticulturist, Kurt Jackson’s Botanical Landscape maps a particularly expressive communion with nature and offers a unique and beguiling interpretation of the natural world.Trade Review"Kurt Jackson's botanical art is urgently wondrous." - Rob MacfarlaneTable of ContentsForeword by Tim Smit; Introduction by Robert Macfarlane; Author Preface; FOXGLOVE; WEEDS; GORSE; FIGS; FUNGI; OAK; APPLE; VEGETABLES; THORN; BRAMBLE; Kurt Jackson Biography; Selected solo exhibitions; Selected group exhibitions; Awards and residencies; Broadcasts; Public collections; Select bibliography; Acknowledgements and Credits; Index

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Book SynopsisLook Again is a new series of short books from Tate Publishing, opening up the conversation about British art over the last 500 years, and exploring what art has to tell us about our lives today. Written by leading voices from the worlds of literature, art and culture, each book sheds new light on some of the most well-known, best-loved and thought-provoking artworks in the national collection, and asks us to look again. Author Philip Hoare takes us on an exploration of the sea and the way it has provided a deep source of inspiration for artists featured in the Tate collection, from William Blake to Maggi Hambling. Artists have always seen the sea as a mirror of their anxieties and desires; an endless resource for their creativity and their dreams. Under our human sway, the sea has shifted in meaning, from creation myth to economic wealth, from mystic wonder to modern exploitation. Look Again: The Sea dives into the breadth of historical and contemporary works in Britain's national collection of art, as well as the beloved literature they have inspired. By reframing them within a social and political perspective rather than a chronological or art-historical one, prize-winning author Philip Hoare shows how art has continually borne witness to the power and allure of the sea.

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Book SynopsisInhabiting a landscape, walking a landscape, writing a place and time For Linda Cracknell, exposure to wind, rock, mist, and salt water is integral to her writing process. She follows Susan Sontag’s advice to “Love words, agonise over sentences, and pay attention to the world,” observing and writing her landscapes from the particulars of each moment. In this varied essay collection, Linda backpacks on a small island that is connected to the mainland only at low tide. In winter snow, she hikes the wooded hillside close to her home, a place she is intimately familiar with in all seasons. And she retraces over three days the steps of a trek made by her parents seven decades earlier. She explores her inspirations, in nature and from other artists and their work, and she offers thoughtful writing prompts. Reading this collection will take you to new places, open your eyes to the world, and suggest ways to take note and make notes as you go—to inspire your own attentive looking, journaling, and writing practice. Trade Review “A revealing and meditative reflection on writing and the facilitation of writing … Cracknell’s deep engagement with and love of nature runs through the essays … What elevates these essays … is their sheer depth and range … A fantastic insight into the creative process and the necessity of the wilderness to the construction, presentation and consumption of art. Whether to help your own creativity or simply to learn the art of Serious Noticing, this book is an inspiring read for every writer or nature-lover.” -- The Bottle Imp

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Book SynopsisInverted Baroque, Mirrored Landscapes Oberschwaben (Upper Swabia), between the Black Forest, Lake Constance and the Allgäu, offers a richness of Baroque architecture and picturesque rolling landscapes. Axel Hütte’s images are not intended as portrayals of a cultural landscape and its history. They are photographic images, but not necessarily photographically realistic images. They are, collectively, titled Reflexio. Hütte works with the inversion of the colour spectrum, the reflection of the pictorial space. The photographer’s interventions in the realistic image are a radical transformation of what the eye initially registered, they contradict experience; negate customary perception. Instead, they are an autonomous aesthetic construct and reveal a different side of reality. The two themes in these works—“Baroque” and “landscape”—thus become equivalent tools for thoroughly investigating pictorial realities.

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Book SynopsisLandscapes of Extraction explores the art of mining, the transformative industry of the American West, competing in sublimity and striking color with the natural scenic landscape on its own terms. These landscapes of enterprise altered the natural environment on a spectacular scale, with open pit mines, coal tipples, and oil rigs. How artists portrayed the mining industry in the American West is explored in the book with four scholarly essays. Artworks were inspired by the multiple landscapes created by large-scale mining, specifically the mines themselves, the towns that grew up around them, and the miners and their families who lived and worked there. The industry shaped communities and landscapes throughout the West: Arizona, California, Colorado, Montana, New Mexico, Nevada, Oklahoma, Texas, and Utah. Landscapes of Extraction explores a powerful regional narrative that is a fundamental element of national identity played out on a vast geographical scale.Trade Review"Landscapes of Extraction reveals the rich historical heritage of a significant body of regional art that was inspired by an important industry considered over a vast region. Extractive industries meant jobs and profits, yet they left legacies of altered landscapes, environmental degradation, and public health challenges, vexing problems that have been of particular concern for contemporary artists." * American Art Review *"Landscapes of Extraction: The Art of Mining in the American West is one part catalogue to a fascinating exhibition at the Phoenix Art Museum, and one part meditation on the featured artists and their work to capture these gritty mining landscapes." * TICCIH Bulletin *"Created to accompany a Phoenix Art Museum exhibition by the same name, The Landscapes of Extraction focuses on more than 50 diverse, perceptively selected works, created in various media, that examine the manners and methods of extracting the mineral wealth of the American West. This is a handsomely and carefully illustrated volume. Complementing the visual chronicle of the mining industry are four succinct and engaging essays. . . . The catalogue itself reveals the diverse, distinctive visual manners in which this significant industry has been represented. The selected bibliography points readers to the most noteworthy publications on this subject. . . . Recommended." * Choice *“This well crafted, thoughtful exploration of artists’ grappling with a key industry holds appeal for both academic and popular audiences . . . .” * ARLIS/NA Reviews *

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Book SynopsisBeauty, terror, majesty, awe: mountain worlds have fascinated humankind since time immemorial. Stephan Huber ascends the snow-covered peaks "en miniature". In his sculptures he imitates the relief of the mountains and creates theatrical-looking, object-like works. This comprehensive volume reflects in powerful images the Alpine cosmos which Huber has been investigating for more than four decades. Stephan Huber’s “Mountains” can be found everywhere: in museums like the Hamburger Kunsthalle, the Bonner Kunstmuseum and the Messner Mountain Museum, and also as large-scale installations in the public space. His monumental contribution to the Venice Biennale in 1999 received international acclaim. In addition to the famous snow-white sculptures of mountain peaks, the publication also assembles early book objects, fictional expeditions, multiples and exhibition views. Essays and an extensive conversation with Reinhold Messner about the interior and exterior mountain worlds round out the volume.

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Book SynopsisDuring the 1860s, Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Alfred Sisley joined forces to revolutionize art with light- flooded landscapes that dispensed with the conventional imagery of the time. In 1874, with their penchant for working out of doors in order to capture fleeting sensory impressions directly on the canvas, they came to be known as the “Impressionists.” Berthe Morisot, Paul Cézanne, and Gustave Caillebotte became affiliated with the new tendency as well. More than a decade later, artists such as Paul Signac and Henri-Edmond Cross developed their pioneering ideas further, and in 1901, during his first year in Paris, the young Pablo Picasso too drew inspiration from the Impressionist style. No comparable collection provides such a comprehensive overview of Impressionist landscape painting and its development as the one assembled in recent decades by Hasso Plattner, founder of the Museum Barberini. On its basis, Ortrud Westheider, the director of the Museum Barberini, presents the history of French Impressionism. With its focus on the transitory moment, the artistry of the Impressionists continues to exert a powerful fascination. Guided by the interplay between light and atmosphere, they created exquisite and timeless images whose innovative spirit and vitality continue to delight viewers today.

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Book SynopsisThe Kisokaidō route through Japan was ordained in the early 1600s by the country’s then-ruler Tokugawa Ieyasu, who decreed that staging posts be installed along the length of the arduous passage between Edo (present-day Tokyo) and Kyoto. Inns, shops, and restaurants were established to provide sustenance and lodging to weary travelers. In 1835, renowned woodblock print artist Keisai Eisen was commissioned to create a series of works to chart the Kisokaidō journey. After producing 24 prints, Eisen was replaced by Utagawa Hiroshige, who completed the series of 70 prints in 1838. Both Eisen and Hiroshige were master print practitioners. In The Sixty-Nine Stations along the Kisokaidō, we find the artists’ distinct styles as much as their shared expertise. From the busy starting post of Nihonbashi to the castle town of Iwamurata, Eisen opts for a more muted palette but excels in figuration, particularly of glamorous women, and relishes snapshots of activity along the route, from shoeing a horse to winnowing rice. Hiroshige demonstrates his mastery of landscape with grandiose and evocative scenes, whether it’s the peaceful banks of the Ota River, the forbidding Wada Pass, or a moonlit ascent between Yawata and Mochizuki. Taken as a whole, The Sixty-Nine Stations collection represents not only a masterpiece of woodblock practice, including bold compositions and an experimental use of color, but also a charming tapestry of 19th-century Japan, long before the specter of industrialization. This TASCHEN XXL edition revives the series with due scale and splendor. Sourced from the only-known set of a near-complete run of the first edition of the series, this legendary publication is reproduced in the finest quality, bound in the Japanese tradition and with uncut paper. A perfect companion piece to TASCHEN’s One Hundred Famous Views of Edo, it is at once a visual delight and a major artifact from the bygone era of Imperial Japan.Trade Review“A masterpiece of Japanese woodblock prints, an exquisitely designed illustrated book.” * Kulturzeit *“An incredible ticket to travel.” * L’Express *“Spectacular views, local delicacies, hot spring baths, and other more carnal pursuits.” * The New York Times *

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Book SynopsisThe beauty of nature and man’s loneliness are dominant themes in the work of Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840). The artist often places a small human figure in a broad landscape, as in his famous paintings Monk by the Sea and The Wanderer above the Sea of Fog. For a long time the importance and influence of this great Romantic painter were underestimated. When he died, Friedrich had already been forgotten by his contemporaries and was only rediscovered in the early 20th century. Today he is considered to be the most important German painter of his generation and a precursor of Expressionism. Once Friedrich gave the following advice to an artist-colleague of his who was constricted by academic rules: “Shut your physical eye so that you first see your painting with your spiritual eye. Then bring to light what you saw in the dark so that it has an effect on others, shining inwards from outside.” In other words, concentration and not imitation, essence and not frivolous brushwork.

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Book SynopsisSwiss photographer Tom Haller has gained wide recognition for his work in portraiture and reportage. Less well known, but equally arresting, are the landscapes Haller has produced during his travels throughout the United States over the course of nearly three decades. His photographs of America - of prairies, mountains, roads and the buildings lining them, motels, stadiums, shops, and abandoned cars - display a traveller's detached, inquisitive, perspective, with Haller directing his gaze at subjects while simultaneously depicting both the promise of these landscapes and the limits to the dreams they inspire. Tom Haller - Nuggets compiles a selection of his American landscapes that reflect the state of the country and the feelings and experiences of its people. Taking Haller's images as his starting point, Christian Seiler draws on his own extensive travels throughout the United States to explore the artist's intentions and the mood of the country as a whole. Text in English and German.

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Book Synopsis“Broek’s work’s got attitude.” – ­Marlene Dumas “In combining extremes, Broek homes in on our zeitgeist." – Wilma Sütö The central theme in the oeuvre of Dutch artist Hans Broek (b. 1965) is landscape. He often paints locations where history has left an indelible mark, manifesting his belief that art should jolt you awake. He finds inspiration all around the world: a telegraph pole under a dark, cloudy Spanish sky; modern bungalows on the outskirts of LA; melting ice caps in Greenland; and wind-blown, rainy landscapes on the Atlantic seaboard in the wake of Hurricane Sandy. His series of paintings that depict prisons, dungeons, cell doors, plantations, and seats of colonial power funded by slavery - ‘guilty architecture’ where injustice was witnessed without intervention - serve as moving, silent witnesses to the ugly history of the Dutch slave trade. With contributions by Edo Dijksterhuis, Dominic van den Boogerd, Wilma Sütö and the artist himself. This book is published on the occasion of the exhibition. Text in English and Dutch

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