Search results for ""Author Susan Owens""

When we look at the landscape, what do we see? Do we experience the view over a valley or dappled sunlight on a path in the same way as those who were there before us? We have altered the countryside in innumerable ways over the last thousand years, and never more so than in the last hundred. How are these changes reflected in – and affected by – art and literature? Spirit of Place offers a panoramic view of the British landscape as seen through the eyes of writers and artists from Bede and the Gawain-poet to Gainsborough, Austen, W. G. Sebald and Barbara Hepworth. Shaped by these distinctive voices and evocative imagery, Susan Owens describes how the British landscape has been framed, reimagined and reshaped by each generation. Each account or work of art, whether illuminated in a manuscript, jotted down in a journal or constructed from sticks and stones, holds up a mirror to its maker and their world. With 80 illustrations

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The Art of Drawing is the first book in sixty years to cover the wider history of drawing in Britain exploring the crucial role drawing has played in British art. Featuring works by foremost British artists from the early seventeenth century right up to the present day, this book offers fresh insights into the wide range of ways in which these artists have used drawing to think on paper, build up ideas and make finished exhibition pieces. Taking examples from the greatest masters, including Isaac Oliver, Peter Lely, WIlliam Blake, Thomas Rowlandson, John Constable, Edwin Landseer, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones, Wyndham Lewis, Paul Nash, Lucian Freud, David Hockney, John Piper, Sian Bowen and Grayson Perry, Susan Owens discusses the art and craft of drawing, materials and techniques and why artists chose them.ory of drawing in Britain exploring the crucial role drawing has played in British art. Featuring works by foremost British artists from the early seventeenth century right up to the present day, this book offers fresh insights into the wide range of ways in which these artists have used drawing to think on paper, build up ideas and make finished exhibition pieces. Taking examples from the greatest masters, including Isaac Oliver, Peter Lely, WIlliam Blake, Thomas Rowlandson, John Constable, Edwin Landseer, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones, Wyndham Lewis, Paul Nash, Lucian Freud, David Hockney, John Piper, Sian Bowen and Grayson Perry, Susan Owens discusses the art and craft of drawing, materials and techniques and why artists chose them.

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Drawing is at the heart of human creativity. The most democratic form of art-making, it requires nothing more than a plain surface and a stub of pencil, a piece of chalk or an inky brush. Our prehistoric ancestors drew with natural pigments on the walls of caves, and every subsequent culture has practised drawingwhether on papyrus, parchment, or paper. Artists throughout history have used drawing as part of the creative process. While painting and sculpture have been shaped heavily by money and influence, drawing has always offered extraordinary creative latitude. Here we see the artist at his or her most unguarded. Susan Owens offers a glimpse over artists' shouldersfrom Michelangelo, Rembrandt, and Hokusai to Van Gogh, Käthe Kollwitz, and Yayoi Kusamaas they work, think, and innovate, as they scrutinise the world around them or escape into imagination. The Story of Drawing loops around the established history of art, sometimes staying close, at other times diving into exhilara

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Dr Susan Owens is an art historian and exhibition curator who has worked at the Royal Collection and the Victoria and Albert Museum. Her previous books include The Ghost: A Cultural History, described by the Guardian as eloquent and lively', and Who Shall Deliver Me? Christina Rossetti: Poetry in Art.

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Imagining England’s Past takes a long look at the country’s invented histories, from the glamorous to the disturbing, from the eighth century to the present day. England has long built its sense of self on visions of its past. What does it mean for medieval writers to summon King Arthur from the post-Roman fog; for William Morris to resurrect the skills of the medieval workshop and Julia Margaret Cameron to portray the Arthurian court with her Victorian camera; or for Yinka Shonibare in the final years of the twentieth century to visualize a Black Victorian dandy? By exploring the imaginations of successive generations, this book reveals how diverse notions of the past have inspired literature, art, music, architecture and fashion. It shines a light on subjects from myths to mock-Tudor houses, Stonehenge to steampunk, and asks how – and why – the past continues so powerfully to shape the present. Not a history of England, but a history of those who have written, painted and dreamed it into being, Imagining England's Past offers a lively, erudite account of the making and manipulation of the days of old. Praise for Imagining England's Past 'Susan Owens conjures our imagined past with such vivacity and lyricism that I can see the dawn mist rising over fabled fields and hear the tread of fictional histories on the worn stairs of yesteryear. Packed full of myths, stories, poems and paintings I found this book impossible to put down!' Charlotte Mullins, broadcaster, art critic and author of A Little History of Art

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"Five thousand years have now elapsed since the creation of the world, and still it is undecided whether or not there has even been an instance of the spirit of any person appearing after death. All argument is against it; but all belief is for it." --Samuel Johnson Ghosts are woven into the very fabric of life. In Britain, every town, village, and great house has a spectral resident, and their enduring popularity in literature, art, folklore, and film attests to their continuing power to fascinate, terrify, and inspire. Our conceptions of ghosts--the fears they provoke, the forms they take--are connected to the conventions and beliefs of each particular era, from the marauding undead of the Middle Ages to the psychologically charged presences of our own age. The ghost is no less than the mirror of the times. Organized chronologically, this new cultural history features a dazzling range of artists and writers, including William Hogarth, William Blake, Henry Fuseli, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais, Susan Hiller and Jeremy Deller; John Donne, William Shakespeare, Samuel Pepys, Daniel Defoe, Percy and Mary Shelley, Emily Bronte, Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Henry James, Thomas Hardy, Muriel Spark, Hilary Mantel, and Sarah Waters.

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The first art book to explore Rossetti's art and poetry together, including her own artworks, illustrations to her writing, and art inspired by her Christina Rossetti (1830–1894) is among the greatest of English Victorian poets. The intensity of her vision, her colloquial style, and the lyrical quality of her verse still speak powerfully to us today, while her striking imagery has always inspired artists. Rossetti lived in an exceptionally visual environment: her brother, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, was the leading member of the avant-garde Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and she became a favorite model for the group. She sat for the face of Christ in William Holman Hunt’s The Light of the World, while both John Everett Millais and Frederick Sandys illustrated her poetry. Later on, the pioneering photographer Julia Margaret Cameron and the great Belgian Symbolist Fernand Khnopff were inspired by Rossetti’s enigmatic verses. This engaging book explores the full artistic context of Rossetti’s life and poetry: her own complicated attitude to pictures; the many portraits of her by artists, including her brother, John Brett, and Lewis Carroll; her own intriguing and virtually unknown drawings; and the wealth of visual images inspired by her words.Published in association with Watts GalleryExhibition Schedule:Watts Gallery, Guildford, Surrey (11/13/18–03/17/19)

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A gorgeously illustrated volume devoted to the natural history drawings and watercolors of Leonardo da Vinci and other outstanding artists of the Age of Discovery From the fifteenth century onwards, as European explorers sailed forth on grand voyages of discovery, their encounters with exotic plants and animals fanned intense scientific interest. Scholars began to examine nature with fresh eyes, and pioneering artists transformed the way nature was seen and understood. In Amazing Rare Things, renowned naturalist and documentary-maker David Attenborough joins with expert colleagues to explore how artists portrayed the natural world during this era of burgeoning scientific interest. The book focuses on an exquisite selection of natural history drawings and watercolors by Leonardo da Vinci, Alexander Marshal, Maria Sibylla Merian, and Mark Catesby, and from the collection of Cassiano dal Pozzo—works all held in the Royal Library at Windsor Castle. Attenborough and his coauthors offer lucid commentary on topics ranging from the 30,000-year history of human drawings of the natural world, to Leonardo’s fascination with natural processes, to Catesby’s groundbreaking studies that introduced Europeans to the plants and animals of North America. With 160 full color illustrations, this beautiful book will appeal to readers with interests that extend from art and science to history and nature.

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