Art Archives - Page 4 of 6

The Life and Love of Cats

by Lewis Blackwell

This is a gorgeous book. A must-have for any cat lover. It is full of stunning photographs- larger than life-size- celebrating feline grace and mystery. The striking images are interspersed with quotes on cats, and a number of essays by the author on different aspects of cats and their relationship with humans. Very thoughtful and insightful. Blackwell muses on why we find cats so appealing and irresistible (quoting the number of google results for cat compared to dog to assert their greater popularity), even scrutinizing the many websites where people share photos of cats (and attribute human thoughts to their behaviors). He examines how cats and people have come together historically- sometimes merely tolerated but more often inspiring such passion as to be revered or heavily persecuted. Looks into some pervasive myths regarding cats\’ abilities and how they probably arose, the reasons why cats have not evolved such diverse shapes like dog breeds (why was the munchkin cat not mentioned?); the mixing of domestic cats and wildcats, the affect cats have on our moods, and much more. I was surprised to read about how cats\’ body parts have been used in folkloric medicine in historical times. I was dismayed to read about the Paris cat massacre of 1730. I came away with a short list of more titles on cats, and inspiration to search the internet to learn more about domestic/wild crosses. But most of all I kept returning to the book just to look at the pictures. I had never seen such a closeup of a cat\’s tongue before, showing the barbels that make it raspy. The many images of cats in front of or outside of windows, looking through, infused with contemplation, are lovely. Overall it was just delightful.

These are some of my favorite images from the book:

This cat\’s eyes are my absolute favorite color:

This cat looks like one that used to hang around an apartment I lived in for a brief time in southern California. It was very friendly and purred like mad whenever I held it. I asked around; none of the neighbors admitted to owning the cat. My roommate urged me to take the cat home on the plane with me! but I couldn\’t think how that was possible (I was moving back to my parents\’ house soon):

So elegant:

So strange and curious:

Beautiful. I borrowed this book from the public library.

Rating: 5/5 216 pages, 2012

more opinions:
The Secret Writer
Texas a Cat in Austin

Tags: 5/5- Loved It, Animals Nonfiction, Art, Current Reads

Spirit Horses

by Tony Stromberg

A large art book full of gorgeous photographs. They all depict horses, most appear to be wild horses. Depicting the animals\’ beauty, strength, family bonds and most of all, the glory of their speed. In fact I was a bit surprised how many pictures in the book had a blurred effect. There were some so blurry I couldn\’t tell what the picture showed me- flowing horse hair? But the ones with close detail focus are really exquisite to look at. Many are black and white or with limited color; my favorites are the images in sepia tones. Especially the few (like the cover image) that show a blonde horse, the pale hair seeming to float as they move across the page. You really feel the strength and beauty of the animals in these pictures. There\’s an introduction where the artist explains why he chose to photograph horses and what he hopes his art will communicate to others. Our need to feel a connection to nature and what the horses can teach us. There are quotes about horses and nature throughout the pages. My favorite quotes from the book:

Different forms of life in different aspects of existence make up the teeming denizens of this earth of ours… and all beings primarily seek peace, comfort and security. Life is as dear to a mute creature as it is to a man. Just as one wants happiness and fears pain, just as one wants to live and not to die, so do other creatures. – the Dalai Lama

Until he extends his circle of compassion to include all living things man himself will not find peace. – Albert Schweitzer

This is a book you will want to look through again and again. Just sit and look at it. I borrowed it from the library. Some of the photographs here.

Rating: 4/5 160 pages, 2005

more opinions:
My Horse Daily

Tags: Animals Nonfiction, Art, Current Reads

Never Use White Type on a Black Background

and 50 other Ridiculous Design Rules
edited by Anneloes van Gaalen

This has been my \”bathroom book\” for a while now. It\’s one that\’s easy to dip into, read a few pages, come back to the next day. It\’s a compilation of design rules- both those unspoken and those rigorously taught in schools (at least to my experience) alongside numerous quotes by various photographers, architects, typographers, fashion designers and other artists either agreeing with, expostulating on or simply further exploring said rules. There\’s often a source as well: who first made up the rule, or a famous quote it was derived from. Sometimes the rule has evolved a long way from its origins! I got a kick out of some of these; one of my favorite Golden Age illustrators, Norman Rockwell, gets a serious nod here. Nearly all the rules I have either heard in art school (although some phrased differently) or just known intrinsically, but there were a few I had never encountered before (if you don\’t know what to do- just make it big and red took me by surprise). The ones related directly to fashion weren\’t as applicable to what I do, but felt familiar regardless. And if you read between the lines you get a sense of the paradoxical relationship that often exists between designers, their clients or directors, the intended audience and so forth. It\’s all about the rules of good design, how to apply them and know when to bend or break them. (And the title rule? I happen to agree with that one, especially when applied to web pages! White text on black ground makes my eyes swim and I get a headache. I usually never revisit a website that has a black ground.)

My boyfriend brought this book back from a visit to Holland. I\’ve been really enjoying it. Some parts make me me think, others make me laugh, others I grin in recognition and agreement. And most of all, it makes me feel inspired to create again.

Rating: 3/5 …….. 145 pages, 2009

more opinions:
Greeting Card Designer
Battlefield Man

Tags: 3/5- Good Read, Art, Current Reads

Secrets of the Nest

by Joan Dunning

This is a beautiful book. I stumbled across it browsing library shelves once, and now it\’s one I dream to own someday. The exquisite illustrations drew me in, but the writing is just as fantastic. It\’s all about the different types of nests birds build: how they do it, where they make them, how they raise and defend their young. You learn a lot more about birds and their habits than just their nests in the course of the book, but it all revolves around their homes. I found it fascinating and delightful. A wonderful book that any nature-lover would treasure.

Rating: 5/5 …….. 198 pages, 1994

Tags: 5/5- Loved It, Animals Nonfiction, Art, Past Reads

Egret

by Helen Collins

I really picked up this book by mistake. Probably because of the title, it was shelved among nature books on birds, where I found it browsing at the Book Thing. It was an interesting read, but not really my kind of book.

Egret is about a young woman named Jodi trying to make her way in New York City. She\’s an artist, and her experiences adjusting to city life, living in crowded apartments with roommates who don\’t share your interests, and the often-desperate embarrassment caused by feeling like you\’ll never get out of poverty were all things I could relate to (from my years as an art student). Her experiences with budding sexual awareness and entanglement with various love interests were foreign to me. She\’s lesbian, also a virgin and very uncomfortable when her roommates drag her along to bars and nightclubs. Then they convince her to accompany them to Long Island, using an older woman\’s interest in her and her desire to see the local wetlands and wildlife, to get into a party, where they promptly ditch her. Lots of strange experiences unfold. I could not comprehend the behavior of many characters in this story, and the apparent love-at-first-sight scenario between two people from opposite backgrounds and social classes seemed very unlikely to me. Even up until the end of the story, I couldn\’t always understand what was going on, people\’s reactions to each other just did not make sense to me.

The book did make a good point that stereotypes are usually incorrect, whether it was from straight people judging the homosexuals they knew, or the other way around. I found their constant misunderstandings of each other rather amusing, although sometimes a puzzle to work out. But there were other problems with the book, for me. The writing often felt awkward, unpolished. The characters\’ inner thoughts and opinions on each other were all over-explained, yet in a way that left me with really no sense of who they were. I kept getting her three main friends mixed up; even though they were very different people their characters were unclear to me for a long time. I enjoyed the parts that had to do with art, but felt disappointed there wasn\’t a bit more depth there. And the aspect of the story that had to do with wildlife conservation felt unrealistic, an extra thing tacked onto the story that didn\’t really fit. I wished it had fit in better, but most of the narrative seemed to be about who-thought-this-about-whom and which party Jodi was awkwardly navigating now or who she was having overwhelming feelings for (in spite of hardly knowing them) and I just didn\’t care for all that.

Anyhow, it was interesting and I liked reading about the life-in-the-big-city with an artistic bent, but it\’s not a reading experience I\’ll care to repeat.

Rating: 2/5 ……… 220 pages, 2001

Tags: 2/5- Just Okay, Art, Current Reads, General Fiction

Drawings of the Masters

Flemish and Dutch Drawings from the 15th to the 18th Century

by Colin Eisler

Another art book I got from a library sale recently. I picked it up because in thumbing through saw a wonderful drawing of an elephant by Rembrandt, also several awesome lions, and figured there\’d be more. I was right- there was much more. Just a few are of animals: a boar\’s head, a scruffy-looking bull, a donkey, a beautiful little monkey with a chain on his neck, several cows in a group and quite a few horses (mostly with figures). There\’s also a wonderful page full of little studies of garden vegetables which made me wish I could draw plants better, and two that quite made me laugh. One is a drawing called Men Shoveling Chairs. Seriously. I was glancing at the plate titles in the front of the book and my eye wandered down the usual kind of names: Portrait of a Young Man, Virgin and Child, Landscape with a Bridge, etc. then I saw Men Shoveling Chairs. What!? I turned to that page and it was exactly that: four men with long-handled paddle-like shovels thrusting them under piles of three-and-four-legged stools and chairs. I still puzzle over what it means or why the artist drew it, but it makes me laugh nonetheless. The other amusing one is a drawing by Hieronymous Bosch called Tree-Man in a Landscape which reminds me how even centuries ago people would idly sketch fantastic things they just dreamed up: a \”man\” with an egg-shaped body (cut away to show figures around a table inside), his legs are trees and his feet boats, his hat has a jug on top out of which tiny figures climb on a ladder, an owl sits on a branch growing from his back. It\’s entirely fanciful and curiously delightful to peer at.

Of course there are lots of the types of drawings you\’d expect to find: the portraits and madonnas, landscapes and buildings. They all show me something to aspire to, but I was really glad that I found something to smile about, too.

The style of the drawings ranges from very rough, simple line sketches to highly detailed meticulous wash studies and finely hatched pen-and-ink works. Some you can imagine the artist having spent hours working on, others just a few moments. There are lots of amazing studies of folds from the clothing people wore, and a wide variety of faces. The introductory text describing the artwork and its changing styles through the centuries and via different artists wasn\’t nearly as incomprehensible as I feared, actually pretty interesting. But of course, I mostly enjoyed just looking and looking at the pictures.

Rating: 4/5 …….. 140 pages, 1963

Tags: 4/5- Great Book, Art, Current Reads

Metropolitan Zoo

by Joseph Bell

This book has been sitting on my shelf a long time, picked up from a library sale who-knows-when. I read it through several bouts of nursing the baby, taking time to look closely at all the pictures. Metropolitan Zoo is a collection of images from the Metropolitan Museum of Art that all feature wild animals. There are paintings, drawings, sculpture, embroideries, jewelry and other forms of art. Each image is described, not only explaining the medium and style, the artist\’s inspiration (whether from life or completely fanciful) and a bit of history, but also something about the animal. In particular, the author points out when the details of the artwork show something factual about the animal\’s life or habits, and when they got it dead wrong! I noticed myself a few small details: in the painted screen of white-handed gibbons (shown on the cover), the male is holding some kind of insect in his clenched fist. In few pages showing lions, I saw that quite a number of them depicted the Barbary lion, now extinct in the wild, whose mane extends along the belly. And one left me with a question: what is the other, un-named animal in the detail of the unicorn tapestry shown? Next to the hyena (which doesn\’t look much like a hyena) is a creature with a striped tail like a raccoon (only skinnier) but the longer neck and finer face of a weasel. A civet? I keep turning to that page, trying to puzzle it out. The artworks feature lions, elephants, rhinos, deer, squirrels and many other mammals. There are also quite a few pieces depicting snakes and other reptiles, and lots of various and beautiful birds. It\’s a book I thoroughly enjoyed looking through, and should be very popular with anyone who loves animals or art (or both, like me!)

I want to get my hands someday on the other edition they\’ve printed featuring cats from the museum\’s artwork.

Rating: 5/5 …….112 pages, 1985

Tags: 5/5- Loved It, Animals Nonfiction, Art, Current Reads

Animal Attractions

A Tribute to the Love Between People and Animals

edited by Diana Edkins

Rather like the previous two books I read these last few days, Animal Attractions is a mostly pictorial work with a few brief essays about the connections we share with other species (particularly cats and dogs). For the most part, this is a really beautiful book. The presented photographs, by a myriad of world-renowned artists, are absolutely beautiful. They depict many sorts of animals. Not just cats and dogs but also chickens, horses, goats, pigs, cows, parrots, elephants, sheep, chimpanzees, a rabbit and a few snakes. The only disappointment I have with the book is (again) the writing. The introduction by Diane Ackerman is eloquent and thoughtful, and really made me anticipate more of the same quality. But there are only three other essays in the book, and they all fell flat for me. The one about cats just tells about the different cats one woman owned throughout her life. The one focused on dogs was a bit more interesting but still, just about one guy\’s dog and how amazing his personality and intelligence was. The final essay, by Peter Beard \”on population pressure and the plight of wild animals\” really confused me. It was several very long sentences listing atrocities mankind has wrecked upon the earth (and ourselves). Shall I give you a sample?

Yes, this could be known as the century when all of us sanctimonious, anthrophomorphic, bleeding hearts from Walt Disney country, \”man kind\” pushed by excessive densities and stress and innumerable stress-related horrors- all echoes of Dr. Strangelove- hugging darling Dumbo- \”buy an elephant a drink\”- desperate disillusioned adults displaying infantile regression longing for their nursery pets- obsessive avoidance of their own natural aggressiveness- Sigmund Freud- Charles Darwin- Thomas Malthus- Dr. Norman Borlaug- from the biolabs in Bangladesh to the Calhoun rat study cages in Bethesda, Maryland: \”separation of the sexes,\” \”territorial neuroses\”- heart disease from stress and pollution, competition from diminishing resources, cancer, HIV, personality disorders, hormone screw-ups, a sharp decline in tolerable human behavior- Somalia, Rwanda, Zaire, Mozambique, South Africa, Bosnia; and beyond- Hate and Blame- genocide, knife rape, kidnapping, incest, serial killing… we are literally going crazy, breaking the back of Nature, pressuring, squeezing, forcing our gross intrusion beyond the point of no return…. e.g. East Africa after a century of missionary manipulations: endless slum squalor, AID and AIDS, lost heritage, lost identity, corrugated iron, crime, pollution, garbage everywhere, tribal clashes, army rule, torture, assassinations, voodoo, overpopulation, unemployment, rape, rap, gangrenous graffiti, occasionally an open air zoo; tourism! – highway robbery.

Phew! That\’s one sentence. I looked very carefully. There\’s loads of commas, at least two ellipses, semicolons, colons and more dashes than my brain can process (can you do that all in the same sentence? isn\’t there some kind of rule?) Please tell me if you make sense of that. Because I don\’t. Maybe it\’s just the way Beard writes; horrors if I ever opened a book of his! Although I really shouldn\’t say that, I do have his End of the Game on my TBR, which I once perused in a bookstore and it was quite comprehensible, none of this jumble. So I really don\’t know what happened here.

It just made my head spin. The Beard essay, I mean (though the end of it was more readable). Overall I was surprised at the unevenness of writing quality in this book. Which is really a shame, as the photographs are so outstanding. I recommend it just to look at, if you like fine-art of books that feature animals.

Rating: 4/5 …….. 132 pages, 1995

Tags: 4/5- Great Book, Animals Nonfiction, Art, Current Reads

Second Chances

More Tales of Found Dogs

by Elise Lufkin

This book is a collection of stories about lucky dogs that got found and given a new home. Dogs picked up off the street, rescued when neighbors abandoned them, adopted from shelters, etc. Every one is a story with a happy ending, showing how a dog that was lost, wandering, or waiting for its end in a cage, was taken in by a loving family. Some had a rocky adjustment, coming from an unknown background (that was in many cases probably abusive) they were fearful and mistrusting at first, but all of them ended up happy dogs after realizing they were among people who loved them. Most became loved family pets, but there are also stories of rescued dogs that became service dogs or trained search-and-rescue dogs- just goes to show how much potential a creature can have.

Each story in Second Chances is accompanied by one or two images. While nothing spectacular, the photographs are all good, and many of the dogs are adorable or very handsome indeed. But what makes this just a nice book and not a great one, is that the pictures outshine the words. The stories are all incredibly brief, most no more than a page. They\’re written simply, most in a tell-don\’t-show fashion that just left me not feeling the emotion very much. I know these are all really special dogs to their people, but it just didn\’t come across very well. Sacrificing the number of stories to be able to give them more depth would have made a better quality book. I haven\’t seen the book\’s predecessor, Found Dogs, but I gather from a few reviews read online that the stories in that one are even more brief, which makes me not at all inclined to read it.

So… it\’s a nice enough book, lovely photographs, but just not a lot of substance and honestly an hour after reading the book I couldn\’t remember one of the stories to repeat to you.

Rating: 2/5 …….. 180 pages, 2003

Tags: 2/5- Just Okay, Animals Nonfiction, Art, Current Reads

A Dog\’s Book of Truths

by Nancy LeVine and Joseph Duemer

Here\’s a book I picked up at a library discard sale once, and never read until just yesterday. It\’s a beautiful tribute to one woman\’s two beloved dogs (Australian shepherds). Exquisite black-and-white photographs are paired with thoughtful, poetic sentiments on how dogs view and experience the world (text by Duemer). It\’s one of those books you could read in ten minutes but spend much longer lingering over the pictures and pondering the prose. My favorite passages:

Dogs make little of our music, but scent is as obscure to us.

Dogs know the world cannot be described from any one position- that everything must be explored by many circumnavigations.

Because they do not read the future, common wisdom says dogs know nothing of death, that it takes them by surprise- but the seriousness with which they watch the night come on is rich with knowledge of the dark.

On LeVine\’s website you can view some of the photographs from the book

Rating: 4/5 …….. 96 pages, 2002

Tags: 4/5- Great Book, Animals Nonfiction, Art, Current Reads

Tag: Art

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