Showing 1-11 of 11 Results.
This is a very new book, but already one of my favourites. Karen’s distinguished career has included working with designers, exhibiting her own textile art and teaching students. In this very modern and stylish book, she explains how thrifted finds and ancient sewing and embroidery techniques inform her work. It’s a stylish guide to the power and possibilities of textiles and has made me excited about sewing all over again.
Katie Allen - 04/10/2012 |
Roger Scruton is a philosopher who writes on a wide range of subjects within aesthetics. His observations on art and music are profound and stated with great clarity.
Alexander McCall Smith - 28/07/2011 |
Maybe the strangest thing about this book is remembering that it accompanied a BBC TV series in 1972. They don’t make ‘em like this anymore…. I’m fond of it because my father always kept it with him, wherever he lived, in flats or old people’s homes, long after he’d been divorced and had only about five books to his name. I think it represented to him a time when there was a stronger desire, in the culture, to bring complicated ideas to the masses. Anyway it’s a moving and polemical essay about property and art, seeing and owning.
Zadie Smith - 10/08/2012 |
Raymond Briggs; Raymond Briggs I don't think I've ever read this book without my eyes tearing up. How Briggs manages to impart such feeling and generosity towards his parents in this deeply moving and heartfelt yet never overly sentimental memoir amazes me. It reminds me a little in its after-effects of Thornton Wilder's "Our Town," though the two works are otherwise completely different. It will make you care more deeply about life and the people you live it with, which is about the best one can say about anything.
Chris Ware - 02/10/2012 |
His illustrations of birds in field guides have always had an unrivalled sense of animation, movement and characteristic jizz. This volume is a selection of his field sketches and watercolours which display his mastery in conveying fleeting impressions of moving subjects in changing light and weather conditions: instants of perception. There are also very intelligent diary notes and commentary.
Jeremy Mynott - 13/03/2012 |
Lynda Roscoe Hartigan; Walter Hopps;... The finest monograph on any artist I've yet read, it provides a thorough overview of the work and the man who kept poetry and the beauty of the ineffable alive in the visual arts during its blunter and decidedly more "effable" periods. Including a DVD of his experimental films, a facsimile digital collection of his record and book collections, and three-dimensional digital models of his better known boxes, this book is a fittingly great assessment of the man who I think was the greatest and most original artist of the 20th century.
Chris Ware - 02/10/2012 |
Virginia Woolf; Lyndall Gordon I value Woolf’s diaries as much for their pathos as for the insight they give into her modernist technique. Woolf’s life was as full of epiphanies as it was of sadness, and each page reads like an intimate note from a sensitive friend.
Teju Cole - 12/09/2012 |
Christopher Alexander; etc. Christopher Alexander is an architectural guru whose work is greatly appreciated by a growing band of followers. This book is astounding. I dip into it at odd moments, savouring the insights of this prophet of humane architecture and design. He changed the way I feel about buildings; after you read it, prepare to look at the world around you with very different eyes.
Alexander McCall Smith - 28/07/2011 |
I was trained as a historian of 16th century Northern European art, and this brilliantly-written study, which matches aesthetic considerations with social context, is my model for what art historical writing can be.
Teju Cole - 12/09/2012 |
In this three-volume box set, Van Gogh's correspondence, mostly to his brother Theo, reveals both his creative process and personal anguish.
Barry Fantoni - 11/06/2012 |
I received this book for my 14th birthday, and I remember being mesmerised by the model on the cover sporting Flapper-style hair, a pink Galliano dress evoking 1890s fringed shawls and a sharp red shoe “pointing towards the future”. The book instructed what vintage clothes and accessories to buy even before “vintage” became an everyday, almost hackneyed word. While I never found original Levis or Fifties Lucite handbags in my local Oxfam, I discovered that my pastime of hunting for second-hand treasures was something to be proud of.
Katie Allen - 04/10/2012 |