Here are 100 books that Amazing Art Adventures fans have personally recommended if you like
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I am an art historian and the author of various books about modern art, including Styles, Schools & Movements: The Essential Encyclopaedic Guide to Modern Art and three editions of Destination Art. I coined the phrase ‘Destination Art’ in order to discuss artworks in which location is an integral ingredient, as is the journey to find them. I had noticed projects like these happening all over the world, but often in a quiet way. They needed someone to shine the light on them – so I did! My goal is to educate, enthuse and excite – and to continue my mission of spreading the word about intriguing and inspiring art projects.
This is Hogan’s account of her road trip in search of famous, almost mythical, land art pieces, such as Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty and Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels. Travelling on her own she found some of the artworks – and a lot out about herself. Brave? Foolish? Probably both. But for the reader, certainly an entertaining and informative chronicle of her travels and discoveries.
Erin Hogan hit the road in her Volkswagen Jetta and headed west from Chicago in search of the monuments of American land art: a salty coil of rocks, four hundred stainless steel poles, a gash in a mesa, four concrete tubes, and military sheds filled with cubes. Her journey took her through the states of Utah, Nevada, New Mexico, Arizona, and Texas. It also took her through the states of anxiety, drunkenness, disorientation, and heat exhaustion. "Spiral Jetta" is a chronicle of this journey. A lapsed art historian and devoted urbanite, Hogan initially sought firsthand experience of the monumental earthworks…
The dragons of Yuro have been hunted to extinction.
On a small, isolated island, in a reclusive forest, lives bandit leader Marani and her brother Jacks. With their outlaw band they rob from the rich to feed themselves, raiding carriages and dodging the occasional vindictive…
I am an art historian and the author of various books about modern art, including Styles, Schools & Movements: The Essential Encyclopaedic Guide to Modern Art and three editions of Destination Art. I coined the phrase ‘Destination Art’ in order to discuss artworks in which location is an integral ingredient, as is the journey to find them. I had noticed projects like these happening all over the world, but often in a quiet way. They needed someone to shine the light on them – so I did! My goal is to educate, enthuse and excite – and to continue my mission of spreading the word about intriguing and inspiring art projects.
Both reference book and travel guide, this second edition includes over 90 sculpture parks in 27 European countries. The parks featured are those that have an ‘art and nature’ element, in which artists collaborate with nature, working in and with nature to create artworks and situations that help us think about and enjoy both. One to take with you on your next trip around Europe!
There is a continually increasing interest in parks and gardens in which modern sculptures and nature form a special symbiosis. Landscapes are an inspiring ambiance for works of art, which in turn add something to the parks and gardens, thus creating a very unique interaction between art and nature.
This guide is the second edition and presents more than 90 parks in 27 European countries, now also including Finland, Hungary, and Poland among others. The parks presented include classics such as the Fondation Maeght in Saint-Paul-de-Vence and the Louisiana Museum in Humlebaek, as well as spectacular new schemes such as…
I am an art historian and the author of various books about modern art, including Styles, Schools & Movements: The Essential Encyclopaedic Guide to Modern Art and three editions of Destination Art. I coined the phrase ‘Destination Art’ in order to discuss artworks in which location is an integral ingredient, as is the journey to find them. I had noticed projects like these happening all over the world, but often in a quiet way. They needed someone to shine the light on them – so I did! My goal is to educate, enthuse and excite – and to continue my mission of spreading the word about intriguing and inspiring art projects.
This is a beautiful coffee table book to read at home rather than take on your travels. Langen explores 25 private sculpture parks founded by individuals, most art collectors or artists. She weaves in the stories of these characters as their passions inform the themes of the collections. Note that not all of the sites that Langen visited are open to the public.
From Edward James's surreal sculpture garden Las Pozas in Mexico to Anselm Kiefer's sprawling studio complex in the French countryside, artists and art collectors are creating outdoor spaces in order to display sculpture and art that is both transformative and powerful. This book is filled with breathtaking photographs of 25 of these spaces from throughout the world - many of which are not open to the public. Captured in brilliant colour, these spaces are populated by works that both enhance and are enhanced by the landscape: rolling hills, mountain lakes, shaded canyons and empty deserts. Readers will discover Anish Kapoor's…
Jake Sledge, a rugged ex-cop turned private eye, teams up with his colossal partner Bobo to navigate the gritty streets of River City.
A murdered lawyer drags them into a web of political intrigue, neo-Nazi thugs, and bloody showdowns. With sharp wit and hard-hitting action, Jake tackles scumbags the only…
I am an art historian and the author of various books about modern art, including Styles, Schools & Movements: The Essential Encyclopaedic Guide to Modern Art and three editions of Destination Art. I coined the phrase ‘Destination Art’ in order to discuss artworks in which location is an integral ingredient, as is the journey to find them. I had noticed projects like these happening all over the world, but often in a quiet way. They needed someone to shine the light on them – so I did! My goal is to educate, enthuse and excite – and to continue my mission of spreading the word about intriguing and inspiring art projects.
Art critic Gayford’s engaging and entertaining essays recount his adventures over the years when meeting artists and visiting destination art sites around the world, such as Brancusi’s Endless Column in Romania and the Chinati Foundation in Texas. A great storyteller, his writing is both chatty and informative and the book is a pleasure to read.
Bestselling author of Modernists & Mavericks Martin Gayford recounts some of the extraordinary journeys he has made in the name of art.
In the course of a career thinking and writing about art, Martin Gayford has travelled all over the world both to see works of art and to meet artists. Gayford's journeys, often to fairly inaccessible places, involve frustrations and complications, but also serendipitous encounters and outcomes, which he makes as much a part of the story as the final destination. Entertaining and informative, Gayford includes trips to see Brancusi's Endless Column in Romania, prehistoric cave art in France,…
I’m an award-winning toy inventor and author/illustrator, with a lifelong love of art, learning, and creativity. I strive to inspire the future builders and creators of our world in my books, articles, and blog musings. Some of my favorite reads inspired my creative side.
When I first saw the previews of this book, I had to read it the first day it was published.
Though friends had highly recommended Kostova’s more popular book, The Historian, this book spoke to me.
With the point of view shifting from current time to 19th century France, it checked all my boxes: painting, art museum, impressionists - all tied together into a fabulous mystery bow.
While reading, I wanted to peacefully wander an art museum and dabble with a paintbrush on canvas.
To me, the best books evoke a unique artistic mist or glow that I can still feel years later.
Psychiatrist Andrew Marlowe has a perfectly ordered life - solitary, perhaps, but full of devotion to his profession and the painting hobby he loves. This order is destroyed when renowned painter Robert Oliver attacks a canvas in the National Gallery of Art and becomes his patient. Desperate to understand the secret that torments this genius, Marlowe embarks on a journey that leads him into the lives of the women closest to Oliver and a tragedy at the heart of French Impressionism. Kostova's masterful new novel travels from American cities to the coast of Normandy; from the late nineteenth century to…
In Six Memos for the Next Millennium, Italo Calvino writes that “we can distinguish between two types of imaginative processes, one that begins with words and ends with the visual image, and another that begins with the visual image and ends with its verbal expression.” All of my writing projects begin with the visual image. It is difficult for me to verbalize what precisely about art that captivates me. But when I stand in front of certain artworks, I feel a magnetic pull, and something in the piece—the brushstrokes, the colors, the materiality—compels me to write something in response to it.
Told from the perspective of a museum guard in London, Asunder is one of the most brilliant novels that engages with art.
The protagonist works in the National Gallery by day, and in the evening, she builds miniature dioramas. She also reflects on the destruction of a famous painting, goes on trips with friends, and eventually has a transformative encounter in a dilapidated castle. Asunder explores the meaning of art, decay, and preservation.
Marie's job as a guard at the National Gallery in London offers her the life she always wanted, one of invisibility and quiet contemplation. But amid the hushed corridors of the Gallery surge currents of history and violence, paintings whose power belies their own fragility. There also lingers the legacy of her great-grandfather Ted, the museum guard who slipped and fell moments before reaching the suffragette Mary Richardson as she took a blade to one of the gallery's masterpieces on the eve of the First World War.
After nine years there, Marie begins to feel the tug of restlessness. A…
Caroline Herschel has always lived in the shadows. Beholden to her wildly popular older brother, William, who rescued her from servitude, she's worked hard to build a life for herself – one where she can go unnoticed and repay the debt she believes she owes him. But when her brother…
I love a good, clean mystery/suspense story that's light enough to be escape fiction but has enough heart that I engage with the characters. Let me root for them and watch them grow. Give me hope and a happy ending. Bonus if there are some quirky ones who make me smile or some snappy dialogue. Double bonus if it's Christian fiction with an organic, non-preachy faith element and characters who grow spiritually. Why leave faith out of our fiction if it's part of our lives? I hope you'll make some new imaginary friends in the books I've listed!
I held my breath for some of Desiree's daring cat-burglar-type acts. I found this one a fun, fast ride, but again, the character makes it work for me. I love how, in the middle of her drive to do the right thing, Desiree is real enough to have self-doubts and struggle with applying faith to life.
Her sense of humor adds that little extra to satisfy me, and I like the attraction that grows between her and the FBI agent who appears at the most inconvenient times.
Surrounded by no good options, much less safe ones, Desiree Jacobs knows that no matter what she must protect her father's reputation and his legacy.
If Desiree Jacobs knows anything, it’s art. Her father, whose security company is internationally renowned, taught her everything he knew. Most of all, he taught her about honor. Integrity. Faith. So surely God will forgive her for despising the one man--Special Agent Tony Lucano, who's determined to destroy her father’s good name?
Agent Lucano knows that Hiram Jacobs is an art thief. But what he can’t figure out is Desiree. Is she an innocent victim…or…
As a child I did not enjoy reading of any kind, detested English class, and loathed poetry in particular. I simply couldn’t comprehend what relevance poems had to my life. Then, while living overseas, in my mid-twenties in a country in which I didn’t speak the language well and had no friends, I took refuge in an English-language bookstore. There, I would find the slimmest books I could find, which happened to be poetry collections, and I’d pull one down hoping for commiseration. At some point, I realized that I could make certain friends with certain poems. Twenty-five years of growing friendships later, now I read and write poetry for a living.
Frank O’Hara is most talked about as a “city poet” who, on his time off from working at an art museum, walked around Manhattan writing about what he felt and saw. A poet of “I do this, I do that,” O’Hara is lauded for his finding the beautiful in the quotidian. But that’s the lesser half of the story. O’Hara’s greatest feat is writing tender, quirky and deeply satisfying love poems. If you are not enviably moved by his poem “Having a Coke with You,” there’s little reason to continue reading poems at all.
Available for the first time in paperback, The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara reflects the poet's growth as an artist from the earliest dazzling, experimental verses that he began writing in the late 1940s to the years before his accidental death at forty, when his poems became increasingly individual and reflective.
I am an award-winning art director, creative mentor, and print and pattern designer with nearly two decades of experience working successfully in the creative industries. As a young person, I loved drama, dance, and art, and was constantly bursting with creative passion. As I grew older, I faced doubt from the people around me about pursuing a creative career. I stubbornly pursued it anyway and ignored the naysayers who told me to “stop dreaming” or to “get a real job.” I am now described as a “powerhouse” in the design world and someone who fearlessly strives forward in her creative career and helps thousands around the world to believe in their own creative power.
I truly adore this book. It was very easy to read and kept my attention (as I usually get distracted so easily). I felt a sense of calm on every page, and Ali's words really resonated with me.
My favourite section was chapter 12, which focused on children as I look forward to some green sketching time with my young son every school holiday.
The book is a great size to carry around and read on the go, and it's beautifully illustrated. It brought me a lot of comfort and encouraged me to slow down in life with a gentle reminder to soak up all the beauty that's around us so we can turn that into a productive practice. A truly special book.
'A warm and inspiring invitation to put down our phones, pick up a pencil and start really looking at the beauty all around us.' - Kathy Clugston, presenter of Gardeners' Question Time
Learn to let go of your worries and lose yourself in nature with this practical guide to sketching for pleasure, not perfection.
Most of us know that creativity and time outdoors are good for our wellbeing, yet so many of us struggle to find the time or motivation to step away from our screens. But there's a solution! Combining quick and easy exercises with the latest research on…
Rodney Bradford comes into Lindsay's restaurant, offers to buy her small house for double its value, eats her brownies, and drops dead on the sidewalk in front. Next, her almost-ex-husband offers to sign the divorce papers, but only if she'll give him her small,…
A part of me is reluctant to recommend books on art. The same part of me is reluctant to write books on art. After all, a work of art should speak for itself. Then I remembered that for most contemporary art shows, a catalog is produced, and that catalog typically features an explanatory essay by some sympathetic scholar or critic. If the art of today requires verbal elaboration, how much more will the art of the past—especially the remote past—require such commentary? These recommendations are a selection of some favorite texts about how art comes into being—and is part of our being.
Not much in common between Gombrich and Berger, ideologically—so I would presume. Yet Berger’s social history of Western art, woven into the rise of capitalism, advertising, and mass media, is similarly direct in style.
It irritates me; it’s supposed to irritate. Given its radical energy, the book seems surprisingly undated. First published in 1972, it also still seems adventurous in design—the art book as a work of art.
"Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak.""But there is also another sense in which seeing comes before words. It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but word can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it. The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled."John Berger's "Ways of Seeing" is one of the most stimulating and the most influential books on art in any language. First published in 1972, it was based on the BBC television series about…
