Excellent paintings by an excellent American painter
594789
Excellent paintings by an excellent American painter, Charles A Redlin.  Full of nice detail of outdoor scenes.  No painter paints better!.  A new discovery for me.
4905164
This is so much better than I expected- The quality is excellent- truly the best of its kind. This book is huge- just over 13" high; the colors and details radiant and the paper astonishingly thick.  The reproductions are unusually vibrant and clear. This magnificent book even includes a catalog of drawings- detailed studies underscoring the painter's genius. Beautiful and horrifying by turns, these paintings are captivating. Especially recommended for artists and art students. Five Stars.
3353409
Frank Frazetta is hands down the greatest and most influential painter in the realm of fantast art. This collection contains a fresher softer side of Franks work in a friendlier setting than we are used to seeing.  It is a beautiful book and another great acomplishment by the Grand Master!
696316
I highly recommend this book. This is an absolute beautiful book with large, color photos on nearly every page. The hot light of the Spanish summer sun is beautifully portrayed on his subjects, while the deep cool shadows provide contrast to this effect.  I enjoyed reading about Sorolla's personal and professional life in the beginning and at the end of the book. The book is a must-have for the painter and fan of plein air style.
998415
This collection of nineteen paintings, accompanied by passages from various literary pieces,is a neat little book that manages to convey an introduction to the art of Thomas Kinkaid in a compact manner. Tasteful and thorough are adequate words to describe this book. Having read several negative comment's about the author's work by art pundits and critics, I was surprised by the masterful way the paintings were done, reminiscent of the early Renaisssance palettes and early baroque chiaroscuros. I may not be an art critic (though I do have a degree in art history),but I am once again sadly confronted with how cynical and mediocre liberal academia has become. Today, if art does not shock, anger or offend you, it is summarily dismissed as inferior. But consider what makes art masterful. Michelangelo's Pieta for instance is a masterpiece, because, asides from the superb technical work done on the marble slab, it moves us to an emotional response, the pain of the mother with her dead child, the dead Christ off the cross, His death for our salvation. Art should move you, spur you to be better, to reach a higher place. That is the true value of art.  Kinkaid's work, to this end excels.
439852
Paintings by LT Dwight Shepler during Guadalcanal campaign are outstanding. Especially those featuring the USS Washington, BB56
1610879
I first fell in love with Mr. True's work when I entered the lobby of the (now closed but being renovated) Colorado National Bank building in downtown Denver.  The beauty of the murals that covered several walls was incredible, and I found myself staring at them every time I did my banking.  The Denver Post ran an article on him and I learned that this book was being pubished so ordered it through Amazon.  It is filled with interesting pgotographs of the artist and his life as well as beautiful images of many of his works.  I highly recommend this book to those who have an affection for western art as he was one of the best, albeit not particularly well known.
3472895
John Singer Sargent is my favorite artist.  He is a wonderful 18th and 19th century artist.  Beautiful colors and I like the ways he does impressionist colors as well as dark colors
292643
This monograph on Bay Area artist Theophilus Brown is richly illustrated with multiple color images of the works of Brown. The works are organized into themes with John Arthur offering an essay to accompany each chapter.

Arthurs essays fully document the work of Brown and the relationships and associations he had with other artists, particularly with the San Francisco Bay Area figurative artists.  These included Nathan Olivera, Richard Diebenkorn, and David Park.  Browns imagery and approach to the figure has much in common with that of David Park.  However, through his friend Thomas Hess, Brown became associates of the de Koonings and Rothko.

Browns life partner and fellow painter, Paul Wonner, is discussed and photographs and portraits are included in this book.  Browns work is gay themed at a time when such work was not appreciated. Browns friendships with Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy is discussed as well as other famous persons such as Allan Ginsberg and Igor Stravinsky.
The strengths of the book include the excellent illustrations and the well documented relationships Brown had with the avante garde.  I think the weakness of the book was the lack of in-depth discussion of Browns painting techniques.  John Arthur mentions some aspects of the techniques but more could be said.  It appears that Brown was a disciplined artist as he participated in weekly figure drawing sessions with other Bay Area artists. His paintings are firmly grounded in drawing, many of which are acrylic paintings over drawings on paper.  He appears to start from the drawing on paper and builds acrylic washes and then moves toward a thicker series of layers of acrylic paint.  He also appears to have worked from photographs and this seemed to be the case with the larger canvases of multiple nudes. I was trying to figure out whether Brown worked from a series of nudes and placed multiple independent nudes into the landscape but John Arthur mentions that Brown would work from photographs taken from nudist camp magazines.  This made total sense when you look at these larger canvases with multiple nudes scattered over the landscape. Many of these works on paper are relatively modest in size, for example 11 by 14 inches, but appear to be much larger in scale.  Some of the portraits are highly refined elegant works, such as that of Michael MacDowell and the exceptional painting of Kevin Kearney, owned by the Met in NYC. The series of industrial landscapes are superb and John Arthur was correct to include them in this book that mostly focuses on the human figure.

This is a fine product which I score as 5 out of 5.
1956099
Excellent illistrations of some of Ingres best works.  A very good book worth adding to any art library.  Worth the price.
451661
I knew Will over 40 years ago and always admired his beautiful paintings. I am so glad I saw this book and can see some of them again, if not in reality, but at least in print.
616362
The book contains 46 color and innumerable black and white reproductions which make one long to see the latter in color. On the other hand, at this time, the book is available at a bargain price (for a  used copy), which it would not be if one's wish had been granted. In a footnote, the author  points out that he was not given access by  the artist's family to his numerous  private writings, the only ones being available to him being those relatively few which were published and those in the hands of the Whitney Museum. This limited the depth into which he could penetrate Burchfield's written self-imagery and outlook on his life experiences. Whether these have since been put into public view in the intervening 45  years(give or take), I do not know.
Despite the two drawbacks mentioned, this is quite a first rate book which can be recommended, at the price for any serious person's art library. The text by Baigell, one of our finest student's of American art, is a work of art itself, dealing judiciously and poetically with an American artist whose work places him among the most interesting working in the 20th century. I recall walking through a retrospective a few years ago, in what we must now call the latest Old Whitney building (now being rented by the Metropolitan Museum), and being astonished at the range of depth in his portrayal of the countryside and small town setting of the American scene of his day. The book provides the imagery, the essay an analytic viewpoint, which clarifies the work of a man who went his own way in expressing the impact upon him of the only world in which he felt at home. Whatever may have been the fads, fashions and significant developments in the art of his day, whatever the shifts in the focus of his attention, he remained an artist seeking only to express the product of the interaction of his immediate environment and his Self. Looking at his pictures is a continual joy, the book, published in the authors first years at Rutgers, after coming from a post in the Midwest, is only the first in a line of achievements forthcoming during his long tenure there. ( He retired more than a decade ago but has continued a very active career).
My admiration for artist and author is, obviously, considerable. I can recommend the book to all those interested in art, particularly the American variety and to anyone interesting in good writing and meaningful pictures.
1149635
Edward Hopper's paintings, well known to almost everyone in this country, are unique in that they convey a sense of loneliness, yearning, suggestions of dark thoughts, pessimism, and hopelessness - not exactly the moods one would want to examine on a daily basis, but certainly painterly images that cause us to pause when we encounter them in museums and collections.

Gordon Theisen is a fine writer and in this book STAYING UP MUCH TOO LATE: EDWARD HOPPOER'S 'NIGHTHAWKS' AND THE DARK SIDE OF THE AMERICAN PSYCHE he manages to successfully use the famous night diner painting of the artist to address the current mental state of affairs seeping into our consciousness.  He wisely covers every aspect of the artist's life and work, giving us the necessary details of his life and his idiomatic stance in American art, spreads those ideas into his output thus assuring us that the one painting of the title is not an isolated image, and then begins to apply his ideas to our cultural status - at times not comfortable, but always creatively informative.

If Thiesen strays a bit too far from his title subject, drawing on his own interpretation of concepts he perceives as more than just legitimate diversions, then he can be forgiven by the reader who want more from an author than a term paper presentation.  Thiesen indulges in reminiscing about our cultural icons such as diners, cigarettes, coffee, plastic, jazz, war, sex, film noir, and personality disintegration in a time of easy drugs AKA medications.  Perhaps these are topics many would not elect to explore, but then they are bookmarks to the greater understanding of where our current culture stands.

If indeed our artists are our shamans then Hopper as Thiesen presents him is a prophet of sorts.  Not that the book is depressing as the Nighthawks painting: Thiesen has the good will to engage us in the positive aspects of all of the negatives listed above.  There is humor here, but it is humor with an edge.  This book, along with other contemporary 'paintings as examples of current thought' books by such authors as Biel and van Hensbergen in their evaluations of Grant Woods' American Gothic and Picasso's Guernica, once again proves that art gives us more than visual delight: art gives us valuable food for thought...and change.  Grady Harp, November 06
2621601
Excellent, excellent presentation of common pitfalls in oil painting. While I am not a fan of most of Gregg's work, he is a brilliant artist, and has a lot to share. I own a lot of art books, and this is one I keep going back to.
2584805
I was not disappointed in the beautiful reproductions of Richard Schmid's paintings. I am glad that for the first time in many years his landscape paintings are once again available in book form. This book should please all who are admirers of this artist's work.
4296299
A masterful collection by an original artist, using words as brush strokes of metaphor and color.
4728471
Wonderful collection of work by a too-underrated and nearly unknown artist. Campbell is credited with being the first black American with a syndicated strip, but more important he's a good cartoonist/artist period. There's a lovely looseness and energy to his style and his women (almost all white, which couldn't have been as easy or fun for him) are nicely proportioned without being overt, funny without being demeaning, graceful yet humorous. I hope he gets more of the recognition he deserves, not for his race for his work.