Painting-the

I found this book wonderful! It's at the top of my list of all time favorites! The projects much fun to do. I have learned more from this book than any others, Thank you Gretchen! I have since become a teacher myself, with much thanks, Lana.

The ten very different projects described in this excellent reference book will give you detailed information often not found in other books of this genre. Included in the text are very detailed illustrations not only of the projects themselves, but also of paint values and brush strokes. Each contributing artist seems to almost hold your hand (and your brush!) as they take you from the beginning pattern through to the completed work of art. This is an excellent resource book for the beginning decorative painting student and certainly challenging enough for even the most advanced decorative artist. And the artist's biographies at the end of each project are fun in that they prove to the reader that they, too, started out a beginner just like everyone else.

I borrowed Decorative Painting from a friend who is already a very talented decorative artist. I read the entire book in one sitting, then sat down and ordered a copy for myself! I especially like the way the book is organized, from Materials and Techniques, to detailed instructions that are mistake-proof. Every brustroke is explained and is accompanied by photos of each brushstroke and how to position your hand. Ms. Lewis tells you exactly which brush to use, how to use it and what stroke to use for every petal, leaf and design. The 20 projects cover a variety of beautiful styles in full-color, from classic florals to decorative scrolls to French Country, my personal favorite! Included are templates, colour recipes, suppliers and brushstroke practice sheets to perfect your style. Lots of photos are a BIG plus!

This book is awesome! I have a desire to learn Interior Decorating Techniques, but I have no experience other than being a home-owner and learning by trial and error. This books shows you how to do all the cool painting techniques that you see your friends doing! This book gives detailed instructions for 30 different painting techniques including a list of tools and materials needed to accomplish each. It also gives tips on the preparation of surfaces as well as for choice of color. You'll be inspired to paint your whole house once you see this book!

This book is truly an amazing collection of both icons of Tibetan Buddhist deity-types, and information about the same.

While this book is undeniably expensive, if you're really interested in Tibetan Buddhist art and/or iconography, you'll be happy to have this book in your library.

Well, someone had to write the first review and give this book a 5-star rating!

We are lucky that so much of DELACROIX's art is still around, lightly spread throughout the world: the only lost works are "Cardinal Richelieu saying mass" during the sack of the Palais Royal in 1848, the decoration of the Salon de la Paix at the Paris Hotel de Ville during the Commune, and "Justinian drafting his laws" during the fire at the Conseil d'Etat in the Palais d'Orsay in 1871. Taken in by anything new that the paint suppliers were selling, DELACROIX made bad choices in canvas and paints: the Romantic "Battle of Nancy," the Classical "Boissy d'Anglas at the National Convention," and the exotic "Moroccan chieftain receiving tribute" suffered from using bitumen, just as "Barque of Dante" has from going over fresh spots. Yet he thought of painting as storytelling with the richly vigorous colors of Peter Paul Rubens and of Paolo Veronese's "St Barnabas healing the sick." He was the only great Western artist to leave masses of manuscripts, as journals, letters and published articles, so we can walk our way through his sketches and writings to the finished products of the master colorist of people, landscapes, buildings, and animals: "Louis-Auguste Schwiter" standing, as his only full-length portrait, inspired by Thomas Gainsborough and Joshua Reynolds; "Charles de Verninac," in two Thomas Lawrence-style expressive bust portraits, with a carefully worked face, large brushstrokes, sketchy background clothes, and subtly agreeing colors; and his last, "Alfred Bruyas," with a Hamlet-like head melancholic, meditative and languid in a harmony of greens, browns and blacks. He was also a master landscapist of few painted landscapes, such as "Banks of the river Sebou," his only salon-shown landscape; "Sea at Dieppe," Impressionist in subject and technique; and "Still life with lobsters," with John Constable-type smooth varnish obviously brushstroked and with a David Wilkie-type lobster right out of "Chelsea prisoners reading the gazette of the battle of Waterloo." But most of his landscapes backgrounded his historytellings, such as "Natchez" and "Ovid among the Scythians": his history style of adding expressiveness and framing scenes was Richard Parkes Bonington-like in being more entertaining and picturesque than heroic, such as in "Henri III at the deathbed of his favorite mistress, Marie de Cleves" and with "Henri IV courting Gabrielle d'Estrees" and in seeming neartransparent watercolor-like by varnish made with copal, such as in the richly colored "Charles VI and Odette de Champdivers" and "Louis d'Orleans showing his mistress Odette de Champdivers." His building decorations harmonized balanced colors with finely drafted figures while getting architecture, light and paint to work together: at the Palais du Luxembourg's cupola harmonious light and vigorous colors dealt with the architecture by background landscape in blues and greens, central sky cloud-filled, and figures fleshtoned against bright reds, blues, greens, ochers, oranges, and whites; and at the Salon du Roi half-domes lighted figures clustered on the bottom as well as the landscapes and skies topwards in intense blues and greens. My sculptress mother used to say, and my artist sister keeps on saying, that artists see the world first in blacks and whites, with perfect examples in the DELACROIX tigers, lions, and horses changed into blacks, grays, and whites particularly showing color mastery. In fact, the author describes these animals as Romanticized in character and power by the very play of color and matter: Theodore Gericault- and Antoine-Jean Gros-influenced "Wild horse," as my special favorite; "Tam O'Shanter" rapidly brushstroked into a horizontally elongated horse, rider and witch in the "Derby at Epsom" style of Gericault; and "Royal tiger" and "Lion of the Atlas," as his two most successful lithographs, along with the dramatically white counterpointed "Macbeth and the witches" lithograph haloing the former and turning the latter into "phantoms of obscurity." So Barthelemy Jobert's is the book to read, in this beautifully clear, masterful English translation: he owns up to only talking about fitting DELACROIX into what went before, and I wish that he would write a sequel fitting the artist into what came after. Any readers looking for comparison reading might find helpful and interesting DELACROIX: THE LATE WORK, Loys Delteil's EUGENE DELACROIX, EUGENE DELACROIX: SELECTED LETTERS, 1813-1863, Michele Hannoosh's PAINTING AND THE JOURNAL OF EUGENE DELACROIX, Lee Johnson's DELACROIX PASTELS, and Editor Beth Segal Wright's THE CAMBRIDGE COMPANION TO DELACROIX.

Deleuze's work is complex and often difficult, especially for the reader who comes with an interest in art, music, and literature but little familiarity with (or perhaps tolerance for) late-twentieth century philosophy.

In this study of Deleuze's writing on music and painting, Ronald Bogue distills the essence of the philosopher's decades-long interest in these disciplines. This is no "Deleuze for Dummies"--some familiarity with Deleuzian concepts is assumed and expected. As with similar texts (Harari's _How James Joyce Made His Name: A Reading of the Final Lacan_, for example, or Rochlitz's _The Disenchantment of Art: The Philosophy of Walter Benjamin_), _Deleuze on Music, Painting, and the Arts_ tells us probably as much about Bogue as it does about Deleuze.

This is useful, however, because Bogue has read widely and with comprehension not only in Deleuze but in the whole network of related subject matter touching on his concerns--Jacob von Uexkull, Susan Oyama, Paul Griffiths and Alois Riegl among others. Additionally, Bogue's consideration of Modern music is exemplary for its clear-sighted and vivid engagement with difficult (what Adorno might even call radical) music. Take as an example this brief segment from the discussion of Messiaen's spectacular _Catalogue d'oiseaux_: "...Messiaen never approaches an individual bird's song in isolation, but instead juxtaposes it with the songs of other species and situates it within an evocative sonic landscape....Such pictorialism might suggest that Messiaen's aesthetic is purely mimetic, but the actual results of his practice belie this suspicion." He goes on to discuss the piece's motivic development and the composer's modal style.

Deleuze is at his most brilliant in the writings on Messiaen and Francis Bacon, and Bogue's book allows easier access for readers without the necessary time or desire to wade through thousands of pages to find what they're looking for. Of course, the ideas about music and painting are inextricable from the other ideas in those pages (there are, after all, 'a thousand plateaus', and it is not impossible that the reader may feel the need to explore further to obtain a more complete understanding--which is, after all, not such a bad thing....)

At the beginning of the twenty-first century we could do worse than immerse ourselves in a study of Deleuze. For the student of music and art, as well as for those interested in expanding their knowledge of one of the great thinkers of that long, dark, and now late century, this is a valuable book.

93 outstanding pages of plates, many in color. The book is superb only for those. I am looking for an english version because if the prose is as good as the art i want one!

For anyone who has ever been fascinated with Diego Rivera and his works, this is a wonderfully detailed guide to the Detroit Industry Murals. Readible either from cover-to-cover or in chapters, this book is filled throughout with photos, historic background, interviews and amazingly interesting details to all that went into the Detroit Industry Murals. Starting with other Rivera murals located across the United States, Downs leads into the situation of Henry Ford wanting a depiction of Detroit and the auto industry for a neglected garden gallery. A chapter details the fresco process used by Rivera during this immense project, and is skippable for those not interested in art technique. Another chapter details how Rivera and his wife, artist Fridah Kahlo, spend their time in the Motor City. The especially amazing introduction tells the story of how in 1979 Detroit Institute of Art staff found in a dusty closet the original "cartoons" (full size pencil sketches) that Diego Rivera had made during the planning and layout of the murals. Downs ends the book with reactions to the finished project, which ranged from churches outrage to extreme pride for the city's auto workers, which the work most positively depicted. Because of the artist's political convictions (Mexican communist) the murals were almost destroyed during the Cold War and had to be protected under armed guard. Detroit is the last place you would expect to find the masterpiece of the Mexican muralist movement's greatest son. Just like it's topic, this book is an amazing and unexpected masterpiece.

Bravo! I bought this book to learn more about Chardin and I came away with so much! It is a small book crammed with information and photos. Worth the time and money!