No comments about Abraham Lincoln's First Inaugural Address (1861): A Milestone Documents Analysis.

No comments about The American on the Endurance: Ice, Sea, and Terra Firma: Adventures of William Lincoln Bakewell.

2 comments about Impressionist Garden.

1. Derek Fell does it again! Amazing photography combined with very well researched and written text, sprinkled with occasional glimpses of the original paintings. However, it and "Monet's Garden" are very similar. I personally liked the latter so much I bought several other of his works, and they all are exceptional.



2. Very well written. Just what I had hoped it would be. I plan to buy other books by the same author

1 comments about The Cow on the Roof.

1. The story is an old one, the illustrations are wonderful and have updated this tale. "Gone is gone." is said over and over as the man realizes how valuable woman's work really is.

No comments about Best Walks In the Welsh Borders (Frances Lincoln Guide for Walkers).

1 comments about Beneath the Surface: A Thousand Years of Artists at Work.

1. One realizes in reading about the materials, techniques, and tools relating to various types of art how knowledge of these can enhance the viewing of art. As with one who knows how an engine is put together or a piece of furniture, knowledge of the processes and materials of art gives much apprehension and in some cases apperception of a work of art beyond its appearance and elementary emotional impression. Recognition of the materials, etc., of a work of art can also figure into judgment of it and appreciation of the artist's skill and in many cases his or her particular creativity.
   
   An artist herself who is also a art conservator and museum consultant, Abrahams starts off with with the most basic art of drawing, followed by the topic of illuminated manuscripts of the medieval centuries; proceeding after this through fresco, egg tempura, miniatures, fresco, and egg tempera. When oil painting became highly developed in the Renaissance by combining pigment with oil, artists were able to "tell a story, make a portrait or a still life that looked so convincing that it could be mistaken for reality." This technical development in paint was interrelated to the humanism and new attention to the natural world leading to the science of the Enlightenment (although Abrahams only occasionally touches on the cultural and historical correspondences of the art subjects she deals with). She does regularly note the possibilities and effects of the materials, etc., of each type of art (which type is often associated with a historical era). Thus, the "aqueous [water-based] media" preceding oil paints could not realize such realism "because the colors dried to quickly to be smoothly blended" to copy the textures and infinite shadings of the colors of the physical world. The still lifes and portraits of the Renaissance especially evidence the realism attained with oil paint.
   
   In the latter part of the 1900s, acrylics, also used for car finishes came into use with modern artists "freed from constraints in terms of what they chose to make their work from or about." "Acrylic resins are synthetic binding materials," the author explains in the relatively simple technical language she uses. In the 1940s and '50s, there were two types on acrylic paint. The one mixed with turpentine or some other solvent was "quite a stiff paint." The other introduced by the manufacturer Leonard Bocour was a more liquid paint suiting artists "who wanted to throw the stuff around a bit and work on a large scale. A painting by David Hockney illustrates use of the first kind of acrylic; a work by Jackson Pollock illustrates the second.
   
   Though dealing with elementary tools and techniques of art, including preparatory techniques before a stroke is made, the work is not a how-to; nor does it have a workbook-like character. Nascent artists could profit from it, though the book is meant primarily and succeeds estimably as a supplement to art appreciation; and to some degree as a comparison to art history.

No comments about American Quilts in the Modern Age, 1870-1940: The International Quilt Study Center Collections.

No comments about Hippety-hop, Hippety-hay.

No comments about Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln (Easton Press: Signed First Edition).

No comments about Face Of Lincoln.