No comments about Hieronymus Bosch: Das Tausendjahrige Reich..

No comments about Circles of Thorns: Hieronymus Bosch and Being Human.

No comments about Bosch: The Man and His Paintings (The Man and his paintings).

No comments about Paintings ([Alpha books]).

No comments about Jerome Bosch.

No comments about Bosch (Library of Great Painters).

4 comments about Hieronymus Bosch.

1. This is a beautiful art book. If you are a fan of Bosch you will relish the gorgeous color plates and the insightful window into this artist's life. Very well done!



2. Hieronymus Bosch History of world's art knows a very few artists whose contribution can be compared to Hieronymus Bosch's
   oeuvre-this enigmatic Flemish master has set bar extremely high,& only Pieter Bruegel The Elder & perhaps Francisco Goya were able to expose real truth about human nature with almost equal depth and conviction-and today apocalyptic and sarcastic paintings of Hieronymus Bosch are as modern as ever...
   This particular book about Hieronymus Bosch is arguably one of the best amongst countless attempts to capture elusive magic of this old Flemish painter, and spectacular quality of art reproduction can take you as close to the original painting as you can possibly get, so there is very little left between mesmerizing Revelations of Hieronymus Bosch and reader of "Hieronymus Bosch" by Larry Silver.



3. I've always been fascinated by Hieronymus Bosch's work, but I've never been satisfied with reproductions. In this book there are amazing reproductions that aren't too small or too dark or too fuzzy. The close-ups of Bosch's works are great. They really let you see the minutiae - the brushwork, attention to detail and the sheer amount of activity going on in his paintings. Well worth the cost - if you buy on book about Bosch, it should be this one.



4. This book has the absolute best reproductions of Bosch's surreal masterworks, plus a boatload of other images that help demystify the peculiar themes and images that have dazzled art lovers for so long. It gives the artist a human face without taking anything away from the art.
   
   My only complaint would be that the layout is a bit cumbersome(it is annoying to be on page 194 and have to look back at figure 2A on page 3)and at times the text can be a bit hard to wade through. That being said, I urge anyone interested in Bosch to face the text head on, stick to it, and you will not be disappointed.

No comments about Bosch: C. 1450-1516 Between Heaven and Hell (Basic Series : Art).

No comments about Green Man and Other Plays (includes the plays Greenman, The Woodman and The Goblins, Specter, The Daughters of Edward D. Boit, and Hieronymus Bosch).

5 comments about Leap.

1. Terry Tempest Williams is first and foremost a naturalist. I say this not out of some secret biological knowledge of her, but simply as an extrapolation from her own writings. In her book REFUGE, she focuses on birds and the wild life preserve around the Great Salt Lake. The personal life bleeds out of the story of the natural in a way as to make the two seamless... and they are. In LEAP, Williams focuses her attention on the great triptych by Heronymous Bosch (El Bosco) - 'The Garden of Delights'. The triptych represents the three states of human (animal) existence as dictated by early Christian doctrine: Eden, Earth, and Hell. In each, human forms are involved - with an assortment of nearly unrecognizable creatures - in all manner of lewd, sensate, or holy activities. The painting perhaps is - for a naturalist like Williams - an unignorable bridge to a sort of philosophical incantation of one's own personal life.

   Though the book is told in four distinct parts, there is little cohesion. Each of the first holds some resemblance to the corresponding frame of the triptych it is supposed to represent, but not effectively enough to be truly meaningful. Essentially, I detected three distinct modes of writing scattered unpredictably throughout the book: an anecdotal style dedicated to Bosch and 'el Prado' (the museum in which it is housed) related activities, confessionals of the author's past and experiences, and an unexpurgated glut of rambling free-style writing that I guess is supposed to be philosophical or poetic, but is just sophomoric. It isn't difficult to find TTW's strengths. When speaking of nature - real nature, not the nature of the painting - her talents soar. Sadly, these moments are few and far between. The anecdotes of both TTW's life and others around her are fun, but not really enough to warrant more than a quick aside. The bulk of the book is in fact made up of those aforementioned stream-of-consciousness writing exercises that read like a teenagers angst-ridden journal more than the thoughtful prose of a serious adult writer. While Williams' attempts here are magnificent... she gets an A+ on concept (and what a truly excellent concept) the book fails in her lack of confidence. There is a clear insecurity here. TTW is best when at her calmest, but she wants to beef it all up, to be a serious writer, a stirring writer, a philosophical and educated writer; she so desperately wants everyone to be wowed by what she is saying that the result is a bunch of nonsense that doesn't amount to anything. With all said and done, there is no revelation about the painting, no revelation about Mrs. Williams and her relationships: to her father, her husband, and her religion (Mormon), and no real revelation about what we are supposed to think about all this writing. It all ads up to a boring bit of artistic voyeurism.




2. and this book has imspired me so much - What a wonderful depiction of eternal life or in other words - the eternal struggle - lived in modern times by a modern woman



3. Terry Tempest Williams has a lovely writing style, and she needs it to pull off the extreme abstractions she writes about. I couldn't finish the book because the subject was way too contemplative. It is only engaging because of her amazing ability to compose one beautiful sentence after another, a work of art in itself.
   
   If you enjoy going places deep in your mind, you may enjoy this book. I thought that was me, but it kept me wondering--is this going anywhere? After a while it was just tiresome.



4. Reading and re-reading Terry Tempest Williams over the past three decades has been to journey from the American west into landscapes of the heart, from the political into the personal and around to activism again, from a naturalist's cool sensibilities into the sizzling passions of a visionary. In LEAP that trajectory continues. Williams' edgy artistry -- heretofore offered most tellingly in the title essay in the collection AN UNSPOKEN HUNGER (Pantheon, 1994) -- has consistently infused her writing, but with this sojourn she has taken full flight. The unifying story here is that of a painting, the masterpiece by Hieronymus Bosch ("El Bosco") known today as "The Garden of Delights." The author enters fully into the work, announcing from the outset that she has moved because of a painting, moved from Salt Lake City (her home of many decades) to the Paradox Basin (no more apt name is possible, and yet, it is in fact the name of the geologic locus of her new home). And we learn that she moved there after seven years travel in a canvas, through Paradise, Hell, Earthly Delights and Restoration, and moved on from her natal Mormonism. This book is a journal and a poem, a paean and a polemic. This book is brilliant. Tripping from the Reformation and Counter-Reformation to the tribulations of Joseph Smith, clipping newspaper accounts of genetically modified headless frogs and children fallen to convulsions while viewing Japanese cartoons, caroming from Czech poetry to Blake to Joan Miro, back to the wetlands rimming the Great Salt Lake, and forth to Madrid's Prado and the presence of Bosch once more, Williams compasses whole galaxies. Visiting La Albufera de Valencia, one of the largest freshwater lakes in Spain, the author writes, "Walking around the shoreline, stepping over heaps of garbage braided into the bulrushes, the familiar grief I know at home returns. I came to Spain to get away from my torn heart ripped open every time I see the landscapes I love ravaged, lost, and opened for development. "There are too many of us, six billion strong and rising, our collective impact on fragile communities is deadly. "No wonder El Bosco's birds torture us in Hell." Later, she recounts a wilderness rite in which she and her husband sever their marriage from Mormon orthodoxy, and exposes her heart at the moment when she realizes that she has outgrown her heritage, weeping in a crowded Salt Lake City stadium, knowing that ties no longer bind. Further on, into the personal and painterly Restoration, Williams asserts, "This is my living faith, a faith of verbs: to question, explore, experiment, experience, walk, run, dance, play, eat, love, dare, taste, touch, smell, listen, argue, speak, write, read, draw, provoke, emote, scream, sin, repent, cry, kneel, pray, bow, rise, stand, look, laugh, cajole, create, confront, confound, walk back, walk forward, circle, hide, and seek. "To seek: to embrace the questions, be wary of answers." A seeker's tale, LEAP conveys the reader into and out of dark corners and glimmering fountains, to the embrace of wilderness and high culture, and to dare to act from conviction. Terry Tempest Williams has herewith delivered a powerful testament to life and love and intellect, LEAP is a work of terrible beauty and exquisite craft.



5. Refuge is one of my favorite books. Sadly this one by comparison is awful. It seems way over written--like she is trying too hard to be literary and it just didn't work. I thought her exploration of her Mormonism and falling way from it was interesting (hence two instead of one stars), but all in all it sort of wandered around and actually bored me. I think part of it may have been that my expectations were so high from her previous work that this seemed more of a let down in comparison.