Imagine having the ability to draw any subject with precision, detail and expression. With Claudia's help, you can do it! In How to See, How to Draw, you will discover how to tap into your powers of observation, strengthen your hand-eye connection, and draw the world around you with new skill and accuracy. Just take it one step at a time.
Claudia is an expert teacher, breaking down complex compositions into a series of achievable shapes and values that even beginners will understand. Through dozens of mini demonstrations, fun-to-do exercises and complete step-by-step instruction, you'll learn everything from basic drawing techniques to more challenging methods for rendering wonderfully rich, in-depth compositions.
Her visual instruction details how to:
- Use a variety of drawing tools to suit your style and artistic intent
- Learn to let go of preconceived ideas so you can observe lines, shapes and spatial relationships as they actually are
- Create strong compositions through comparison and proportional control
- Find, fix and avoid common mistakes by using simple grids and guide lines
- Understand and work with perspective to create the illusion of depth
- Reveal form through light and shadow
- Explore the potential of texture to create mood and movement
Claudia's drawings illuminate a range of subjects, including portraits, landscapes, animals and still life. You can practice using her reference photos and drawings, or you can apply her exercises to your own subjects.
Start today, Claudia's way! Following her masterful guidance, you'll see the world through new eyes and draw better than you ever have before.
Price: $15.73
The Ephrussis were a grand banking family, as rich and respected as the Rothschilds, who “burned like a comet” in nineteenth-century Paris and Vienna society. Yet by the end of World War II, almost the only thing remaining of their vast empire was a collection of 264 wood and ivory carvings, none of them larger than a matchbox.
The renowned ceramicist Edmund de Waal became the fifth generation to inherit this small and exquisite collection of netsuke. Entranced by their beauty and mystery, he determined to trace the story of his family through the story of the collection.
The netsuke—drunken monks, almost-ripe plums, snarling tigers—were gathered by Charles Ephrussi at the height of the Parisian rage for all things Japanese. Charles had shunned the place set aside for him in the family business to make a study of art, and of beautiful living. An early supporter of the Impressionists, he appears, oddly formal in a top hat, in Renoir’s Luncheon of the Boating Party. Marcel Proust studied Charles closely enough to use him as a model for the aesthete and lover Swann in Remembrance of Things Past.
Charles gave the carvings as a wedding gift to his cousin Viktor in Vienna; his children were allowed to play with one netsuke each while they watched their mother, the Baroness Emmy, dress for ball after ball. Her older daughter grew up to disdain fashionable society. Longing to write, she struck up a correspondence with Rilke, who encouraged her in her poetry.
The Anschluss changed their world beyond recognition. Ephrussi and his cosmopolitan family were imprisoned or scattered, and Hitler’s theorist on the “Jewish question” appropriated their magnificent palace on the Ringstrasse. A library of priceless books and a collection of Old Master paintings were confiscated by the Nazis. But the netsuke were smuggled away by a loyal maid, Anna, and hidden in her straw mattress. Years after the war, she would find a way to return them to the family she’d served even in their exile.
In The Hare with Amber Eyes, Edmund de Waal unfolds the story of a remarkable family and a tumultuous century. Sweeping yet intimate, it is a highly original meditation on art, history, and family, as elegant and precise as the netsuke themselves.
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Who stitched the first US flag? I'd bet you'd say Betsy Ross. Who sewed the first Liberian flag? Did you know it was seven African American women? Learn more about these 1847 seamstresses, some born free and others former slaves: Susannah Lewis, who chaired the flag committee, Sarah Draper from Philadelphia, Mary L. Hunter from South Carolina, Rachel Johnson, Matilda Newport, Mrs. J. B. Russwurm from Baltimore, MD, and Collinette Teage Ellis from Virginia.
The design of the Liberian flag, first unfurled on August 24, 1847, has remained the same through the decades. It is the same design that whipped in the wind on January 16, 2006 when Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf took the solemn oath of office as the twenty-fourth President of the Republic of Liberia.
This article includes an easy-to-make pattern for a queen-sized Liberian flag quilt. Article: 3,700 words. 15 pages including quilt pattern diagrams and photograph.
Price: Too low to display
The Art of War, compiled by Sun Tzu in the 6th century B.C., is the world's oldest surviving military treatise. Long revered as the definitive guide to strategy and tactics on the battlefield, its timeless wisdom is now being applied in the boardroom, on the playing field, and everywhere challenges must be faced. Required reading for U.S. Marine commandants, The Art of War has inspired generals from Douglas MacArthur to Norman Schwazkopf. But it has also been used by top executives, sports coaches, political strategists, lawyers, salesmen, pick-up artists, and Survivor contestants. Whatever your arena of battle, The Art of War will help you overcome overcome every obstacle along the path to success. Visit www.bestsuccessbooks.net to view our other new, inexpensive editions of the greatest success books of all time.
Price: $5.86
A brilliant book by Nobel Prize winner Eric R. Kandel, The Age of Insight takes us to Vienna 1900, where leaders in science, medicine, and art began a revolution that changed forever how we think about the human mind—our conscious and unconscious thoughts and emotions—and how mind and brain relate to art.
At the turn of the century, Vienna was the cultural capital of Europe. Artists and scientists met in glittering salons, where they freely exchanged ideas that led to revolutionary breakthroughs in psychology, brain science, literature, and art. Kandel takes us into the world of Vienna to trace, in rich and rewarding detail, the ideas and advances made then, and their enduring influence today.
The Vienna School of Medicine led the way with its realization that truth lies hidden beneath the surface. That principle infused Viennese culture and strongly influenced the other pioneers of Vienna 1900. Sigmund Freud shocked the world with his insights into how our everyday unconscious aggressive and erotic desires are repressed and disguised in symbols, dreams, and behavior. Arthur Schnitzler revealed women’s unconscious sexuality in his novels through his innovative use of the interior monologue. Gustav Klimt, Oscar Kokoschka, and Egon Schiele created startlingly evocative and honest portraits that expressed unconscious lust, desire, anxiety, and the fear of death.
Kandel tells the story of how these pioneers—Freud, Schnitzler, Klimt, Kokoschka, and Schiele—inspired by the Vienna School of Medicine, in turn influenced the founders of the Vienna School of Art History to ask pivotal questions such as What does the viewer bring to a work of art? How does the beholder respond to it? These questions prompted new and ongoing discoveries in psychology and brain biology, leading to revelations about how we see and perceive, how we think and feel, and how we respond to and create works of art. Kandel, one of the leading scientific thinkers of our time, places these five innovators in the context of today’s cutting-edge science and gives us a new understanding of the modernist art of Klimt, Kokoschka, and Schiele, as well as the school of thought of Freud and Schnitzler. Reinvigorating the intellectual enquiry that began in Vienna 1900, The Age of Insight is a wonderfully written, superbly researched, and beautifully illustrated book that also provides a foundation for future work in neuroscience and the humanities. It is an extraordinary book from an international leader in neuroscience and intellectual history.
Price: $20.75
Preface par Henry Frichet
Price: $4.40
Why A World of Art? Henry Sayre wrote the first edition of World of Art because he wanted to use a text in his own art appreciation course that truly represented all artists, not just the Western canon found at that time in the other texts. He also wanted a text that fostered critical thinking through looking at, talking about, and questioning works of art for his students. We are proud to present the new sixth edition of World of Art, which further strengthens these two key aspects of the text while presenting hot topics like video and time-based media.
Price: $70.00
The spellbinding story, part fairy tale, part suspense, of Gustav Klimt’s Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, one of the most emblematic portraits of its time; of the beautiful, seductive Viennese Jewish salon hostess who sat for it; the notorious artist who painted it; the now vanished turn-of-the-century Vienna that shaped it; and the strange twisted fate that befell it.
The Lady in Gold, considered an unforgettable masterpiece, one of the twentieth century’s most recognizable paintings, made headlines all over the world when Ronald Lauder bought it for $135 million a century after Klimt, the most famous Austrian painter of his time, completed the society portrait.
Anne-Marie O’Connor, writer for The Washington Post, formerly of the Los Angeles Times, tells the galvanizing story of the Lady in Gold, Adele Bloch-Bauer, a dazzling Viennese Jewish society figure; daughter of the head of one of the largest banks in the Hapsburg Empire, head of the Oriental Railway, whose Orient Express went from Berlin to Constantinople; wife of Ferdinand Bauer, sugar-beet baron.
The Bloch-Bauers were art patrons, and Adele herself was considered a rebel of fin de siècle Vienna (she wanted to be educated, a notion considered “degenerate” in a society that believed women being out in the world went against their feminine “nature”). The author describes how Adele inspired the portrait and how Klimt made more than a hundred sketches of her—simple pencil drawings on thin manila paper.
And O’Connor writes of Klimt himself, son of a failed gold engraver, shunned by arts bureaucrats, called an artistic heretic in his time, a genius in ours.
She writes of the Nazis confiscating the portrait of Adele from the Bloch-Bauers’ grand palais; of the Austrian government putting the painting on display, stripping Adele’s Jewish surname from it so that no clues to her identity (nor any hint of her Jewish origins) would be revealed. Nazi officials called the painting, The Lady in Gold and proudly exhibited it in Vienna’s Baroque Belvedere Palace, consecrated in the 1930s as a Nazi institution.
The author writes of the painting, inspired by the Byzantine mosaics Klimt had studied in Italy, with their exotic symbols and swirls, the subject an idol in a golden shrine.
We see how, sixty years after it was stolen by the Nazis, the Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer became the subject of a decade-long litigation between the Austrian government and the Bloch-Bauer heirs, how and why the U.S. Supreme Court became involved in the case, and how the Court’s decision had profound ramifications in the art world.
A riveting social history; an illuminating and haunting look at turn-of-the-century Vienna; a brilliant portrait of the evolution of a painter; a masterfully told tale of suspense. And at the heart of it, the Lady in Gold—the shimmering painting, and its equally irresistible subject, the fate of each forever intertwined.
Price: $18.37
Analyze, Understand, Appreciate
Living with Art provides the tools to help students think critically about the visual arts. Using a wealth of examples, the first half of the text examines the nature, vocabulary, and elements of art, offering a foundation for students to learn to analyze art effectively. The latter half sets out a brief but comprehensive history of art, leading students to understand art within the context of its time and place of origin. High quality images from a wide range of periods and cultures bring the art to life, and topical essays throughout the text foster critical thinking skills.
Taken together, all of these elements help students to better appreciate art as a reflection of the human experience and to realize that living with art is living with ourselves.
Price: $94.98
Even in an age of skyscrapers and sports stadiums, the cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence, with its immense dome, retains a rare power to astonish. Yet, for more than a century after work began on the cathedral in 1296, the proposed dome was regarded as impossible to build. It became the greatest architectural puzzle of the age, and when finally complete in 1436, was hailed as one of the wonders of the world. Ross King tells the full story of how the cupola was raised, from conception to consecration. He also tells the story of the dome's architect, the brilliant and volatile Filippo Brunelleschi. His ambition, ingenuity and rivalries are set in the context of the plagues, wars and political feuds of Renaissance Florence. It is a fascinating story.
Price: $7.91
