Showing titles in Artists, Architects & Photographers

What is blurred vision? Is it merely a physical condition, or does it extend to matters of the heart? For Judy Kirby, author of a poignant collection of poems and writings spanning a decade, these questions have defined her life's journey. At the age of 20, Judy's path turned unexpectedly when she was diagnosed with Stargardt's Macular Degeneration. This condition gradually robbed her of the ability to see faces and navigate the world as she once did. The promising future ahead of her, including a college degree in computer programming and accounting, suddenly seemed uncertain

As one of America's most fabled communities - long a magnet for artists, celebrities, the very rich, and their respective hangers-on - the Hamptons have been a scene of constant collision among the established old guard, New Money, and the local families who farmed and fished the region for generations. In serving up three centuries of Hamptons history, Steven Gaines introduces a host of colorful characters including Jackson Pollock, Ron Perelman, Lauren Bacall, and the Bouvier Beales of Grey Gardens infamy.

In Gene Smith's Sink, Stephenson revives Smith's life and legacy, merging traditional biography with highly untraditional digressions. Traveling across 29 states, Japan, and the Pacific, Stephenson tracks down a lively cast of characters, including the playwright Tennessee Williams, to whom Smith likened himself; the avant-garde filmmaker Stan Brakhage, with whom he once shared a chalet; the artist Mary Frank, who was married to his friend Robert Frank; and Thelonious Monk and Sonny Clark, whom Smith recorded on surreptitious tapes.

This combination of serious artistic engagement with warmth and clarity of prose revels in the experiences and pleasures of art and the body, identity, and community.

Hoy en día, Vincent van Gogh es uno de los artistas más admirados y celebrados del mundo. Su nombre evoca pasión, originalidad, genioy, también, una obra valorada en precios exorbitantes. Sin embargo, durante su vida no conoció el éxito y quizá tampoco el amor, a no ser el de su hermano Theo. Este libro explora y recrea este fascinante mito moderno.

La locura y la genialidad reunidas en una sola persona. Maravilloso pintor holandés, Van Gogh fue uno de los principales exponentes del posimpresionismo. Si bien su obra sólo fue reconocida después de su muerte, es considerado con justicia como uno de los más grandes maestros de la pintura y su influencia en el arte del siglo XX, especialmente entre los expresionistas alemanes y los fauvistas como Derain, Vlaminck y Kees Van Dongen, marcó una nueva escuela y forma de pintar en el arte.

Conocido en su país como Madiba, es abogado y político, fue el primer presidente de Sudáfrica elegido democráticamente mediante sufragio universal así como el líder del Umkhonto we Sizwe, el brazo armado del Congreso Nacional Africano (CNA). Estuvo 27 años en la cárcel, la mayoría de los cuales estuvo confinado en la prisión de Robben Island. Tras su liberación lideró a su partido en las negociaciones para conseguir una democracia multirracial en Sudáfrica, cosa que se consiguió en 1994.

Rembrandt's life has always been an enigma. How did a miller's son from a provincial Dutch town become the greatest artist in the world? To find out, Onno Blom immersed himself in the world, the country, the city, and the house in which Rembrandt was born in 1606 and where he spent the first 25 years of his life. The result is a fascinating portrait of the artist as a young man, rich in local and biographical detail, and restless in its efforts to seek out the roots of his genius.

A rich, penetrating memoir about the author's relationship with a flawed but influential figure—the painter Lucian Freud—and the satisfactions and struggles of a life lived through art.

Bernard Marks and Martha Alford met by chance. No real reason for it, just a series of fluky coincidences. The odds were long that they would hit it off. That wasn’t in the cards they’d been dealt at birth. “It’ll never last,” people whispered after they got engaged. “Poor probability of success” was the general consensus when they married. But Bernie and Martha ignored the naysayers. Gamblers in love, they rolled the dice.

Robert Crumb is often credited with single-handedly transforming the comics medium into a place for adult expression, in the process pioneering the underground comic book industry, and transforming the vernacular language of 20th-century America into an instantly recognizable and popular aesthetic, as iconic as Walt Disney or Charles Schulz. Now, for the first time, Dan Nadel, a curator and writer specializing in comics and art, shares how this complicated artist survived childhood abuse, fame in his twenties, more fame, and came out the other side intact.

Diane Arbus was one of the most brilliant and revered photographers in the history of American art. Her portraits, in stark black and white, seemed to reveal the psychological truths of their subjects. But after she committed suicide at the age of 48, the presumed chaos and darkness of her own inner life became, for many viewers, inextricable from her work. In the spirit of Janet Malcolm's classic examination of Sylvia Plath, The Silent Woman, William Todd Schultz's An Emergency in Slow Motion reveals the creative and personal struggles of Diane Arbus.

Claude Monet has been the icon for the impressionist movement. His family life wasn’t perfect, but despite all obstacles, the French genius painter has left us a legacy and a new perspective on realism and technique in their purest forms. In this guide, we’ll go over his youth, his style, his methods, his most famous paintings, and many of the reasons why he made the decisions he made.

Chris Rush was born into a prosperous, fiercely Roman Catholic New Jersey family. But underneath the gleaming mid-century house, the flawless hostess mom, and the thriving businessman dad ran an unspoken tension that, amid the upheaval of the late 1960s, was destined to fracture their precarious facade. His older sister, Donna, introduces him to the charismatic Valentine, who places a tab of acid on 12-year-old Rush’s tongue, proclaiming: “This is sacrament. You are one of us now.”

Growing up in Seale, Alabama as a Black Queer kid, then attending the Rhode Island School of Design as an undergraduate, Jon Key hungered to see himself in the fields of Art and Design. But in lectures, critiques, and in the books he read, he struggled to see and learn about people who intersected with his identity or who GOT him. So he started asking himself questions: What did it mean to be a graphic designer with his point of view? What did it mean to be a Black graphic designer?

Phoebe Hoban, author of definitive biographies of Jean-Michel Basquiat and Alice Neel, now turns her attention to Lucian Freud, the grandson of Sigmund and one of the greatest painters England has produced. Lucian Freud: Eyes Wide Open is the first biography to assess Freud’s work and life, showing how the two converge.

A distilled, crystal-like companion to H is for Hawk, Birds Art Life celebrates the particular madness of chasing after birds in the urban environment and explores what happens when the core lessons of birding are applied to other aspects of art and life. Moving with ease between the granular and the grand, peering into the inner landscape as much as the outer one, this is a deeply personal year-long inquiry into big themes: love, waiting, regrets, endings.

Many of the first artists in the West were assigned to exploration and geological parties, working as archivists and obedient to demands of cold accuracy. However, a few were driven by an imaginative mix of real events and fantastical visions to whet the appetite of Eastern consumers and preserve their own nostalgia on canvas. Among the most prominent artists depicting the "old" West was Charles Marion Russell, a prolific painter, sculptor, writer, and storyteller based in the heart of the Montana country.

This audiobook is a memoir told in three parts: about growing up in the wake of the destructive choices of an unconventional mother. Glen David Gold was raised rich, briefly, in southern California at the end of the go-go 1960s. But his father's fortune disappears, his parents divorce, and Glen falls out of his well-curated life and into San Francisco at the epicenter of the Me Decade: the inimitable '70s. Gold grows up with his mother, among con men and get-rich schemes. Then, one afternoon when he's 12, she moves to New York without telling him, leaving him to fend for himself.

When Adam Parfrey tracked down Walter Keane - the credited artist of the weepy waifs - for a San Diego Reader cover story in 1992, he discovered some shocking facts. Decades of lawsuits and countersuits revealed the reality that Keane was more of a conman than an artist and that he forced his wife, Margaret, to sign his name to her own paintings. As a result those weepy waifs may not have been as capricious an invention as they seemed.