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Artist Toolbox: Painting Tools & Materials is an easy-to-use guide which focuses on teaching you the fundamentals of working with paint and the tools that come with it. In Artist Toolbox: Painting Tools & Materials, artists will discover the important differences in brush styles, sizes, shapes, and types; how each brush is used to create different types of strokes; and how different types of brushes interact with various paints and supports. You will learn how to properly load brushes with paint, how to shape brushes to create specific strokes and effects, when to choose synthetic hair over natural hair, and much more. Experienced art instructors focus on the key concepts and practical aspects of working with specific tools, materials, and mediums to impart a complete understanding for those seeking to learn the fundamentals of painting. The Artist Toolbox series provides easy-to-use reference guides for beginning and aspiring artists. While many instructional art books gloss over important concepts, focusing instead on how to replicate a piece of art, the Artist Toolbox series breaks down the whats, whens, whys, and hows of each relevant tool or technique, clearly demonstrating its purpose and how to employ it to achieve your desired effects.

This book addresses late-Soviet and post-Soviet art in Armenia in the context of turbulent transformations from the late 1980s to 2004. It explores the emergence of 'contemporary art' in Armenia from within and in opposition to the practices, aesthetics and institutions of Socialist Realism and National Modernism. This historical study outlines the politics (liberal democracy), aesthetics (autonomous art secured by the gesture of the individual artist), and ethics (ideals of absolute freedom and radical individualism) of contemporary art in Armenia and points towards its limitations. Through the historical investigation, a theory of post-Soviet art historiography is developed, one that is based on a dialectic of rupture and continuity in relation to the Soviet past. As the first English-language study on contemporary art in Armenia, the book is of prime interest for artists, scholars, curators and critics interested in post-Soviet art and culture and in global art historiography.

This compelling new study considers contemporary painting's relationship with time and with events, ideas and paintings from the past. Following French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard's determination of painting as entailing a series of temporal sites, Painting, History and Meaning examines works that tendentiously engage with aspects and events derived from the past. A unique examination of the relationship that contemporary painting has with history and historical material, Painting, History and Meaning is a timely response to, and discussion of, how contemporary painters and artists have addressed a significant area of concern for both practitioners and theorists in recent years.   Craig Staff explores art that has encompassed strategies of excavation, anachronism and memorialization, examining key works by artists including Dana Schutz, Tomma Abts, Gerhard Richter, Marlene Dumas, Johannes Phokela and Taus Makhacheva. A scholarly examination of contemporary painting through an innovative interdisciplinary research methodology, this fascinating study illuminates the complex relationship between painting and history. Primary readership will be the fine art academic community, art and painting practitioners, scholars and academics. Will appeal to second and third year undergraduate and postgraduate students of fine art and art  history. Of interest to students of cultural studies, history, curatorial studies and continental philosophy, and to those in the visual arts wanting to develop their understanding of contemporary art.      

First published in 1999, this book asks what kind of advice was available to somebody wishing to embark upon oil painting in England between 1850 and 1900.It is a fascinating collection of Victorian instruction on how and what to paint, linked to crucial advice about art, its meaning and its relation to contemporary life, given by practising artists, important and often popular in their time, but whose lectures and writings are long overdue for reappraisal: Leslie, Hamerton, O'Neil, Poynter, Watts, Leighton, Armitage, Quilter and Herkomer.Here, beyond the familiar voices of Ruskin, Whistler and Pater, we have a whole range of experience from an age in which issues about painting were hotly debated by large numbers of people: professional artists, amateurs, critics, gallery-goers and Academy students. This anthology brings back to life the humour, seriousness, ambitions, eccentricities and controversies of people whose work shaped the nature of mainstream Victorian art.

Sixteenth-century wall paintings in a Buddhist temple in the Tibetan cultural zone of northwest India are the focus of this innovative and richly illustrated study. Initially shaped by one set of religious beliefs, the paintings have since been reinterpreted and retraced by a later Buddhist community, subsumed within its religious framework and communal memory. Melissa Kerin traces the devotional, political, and artistic histories that have influenced the paintings' production and reception over the centuries of their use. Her interdisciplinary approach combines art historical methods with inscriptional translation, ethnographic documentation, and theoretical inquiry to understand religious images in context.

Artist. Activist. Curator. Joane Cardinal-Schubert was a phenomenal talent. Her work recognizes the social and political ramifications of lived Indigenous experience, exposing truths about history, culture, and the contemporary world. She was a teacher and mentor, supporting those who struggle against the legacies of colonial history. She was an activist for Indigenous sovereignty, advocating for voices that go unheard. Despite significant personal and professional successes and monumental contributions to the Calgary artistic community, Cardinal-Shubert remains under-recognized by a broad audience. This richly illustrated, intensely personal book celebrates her story with intimacy and insight Combining personal recollection with art history, academic reading with anecdote and story, The Writing on the Wall is a crucial contribution to Indigenous and Canadian art history. Cardinal-Shubert’s work leads the conversation, embracing the places where the personal, the political, and the artistic meet.

In sixteenth-century Venice, paintings were often treated as living beings.As this book shows, paintings attended dinner parties, healed the sick, made money, and became involved in love affairs.Presenting a range of case studies, Elsje van Kessel offers a detailed examination of the agency paintings and other two-dimensional images could exert.

Pierre Puvis de Chavannes is not a very well-known artist. Famous throughout his life yetquickly forgotten by the history of art, his work remains little-studied in comparison tothe Impressionist masterpieces of the same period. His oeuvre, however, was crucialin France at the end of the 19th century, in particular his mural paintings which are stillvisible today in numerous important public buildings, such as the Hotel de Ville and the Pantheon in Paris, or the Palais des Beaux-arts in Lyon. Puvis’ specialty was monumental decorative works. He tackled traditionalsubjects from a more general angle and his works were accepted by all the artistic principlesof the time. Far from being a cold and academic painter, he supported artists includingCourbet, Bazile, and Degas when they were attacked by the critics. His oeuvreplayed an essential role in the construction of a national French identity in the 19thcentury.Today the glory of Puvis de Chavannes shines forth in uncontested splendour. No one dreams of comparing him with any of his contemporaries, because his art reveals no kinship with that of any one of them. He is recognized as the successor and the equal of the great fresco painters of the Italian Renaissance. Even to these he owes nothing, having borrowed nothing from them. But he shares with them his passionate love of truth, his nobility of inspiration and sincerity of execution.

For students of Chinese art and culture this anthology has proven invaluable since its initial publication in 1985. It collects important Chinese writings about painting, from the earliest examples through the fourteenth century, allowing readers to see how the art of this rich era was seen and understood in the artists’ own times. Some of the texts in this treasury fall into the broad category of aesthetic theory; some describe specific techniques; some discuss the work of individual artists. The texts are presented in accurate and readable translations, and prefaced with artistic and historical background information to the formative periods of Chinese theory and criticism. A glossary of terms and an appendix containing brief biographies of 270 artists and critics add to the usefulness of this volume.

The five hundred or more paintings of Caillebotte werenot given much attention during his lifetime. For years, he was considered primarily a generous patron ofimpressionists, but not as a painter in his own right. Later,his style was seen to be more realistic than those of his friends Degas, Monet and Renoir. In 1874, he helped to organise the First Impressionist Exhibition. However, hedid not include his own work – he would show in laterimpressionist exhibitions. In this typical work he capturesthe feeling of a new Parisian boulevard in an area of theBatignolles quarter on a rainy day. The realism with which Caillebotte depicts the scene is later praised by the writer Emile Zola: “Paris Street, Rainy Day displays strollers and, in particular, a man and a woman in the foreground, of a beautiful realism. When his talent will have softened a little, Caillebotte will certainly be the most audacious of the group.”