Discovering The Great Masters

"Discovering Great Artists" has 75 great artists featured in 110 amazingly fun and unique quality art appreciation activities for children. They will experience the styles and techniques of the great masters, from the Renaissance to the Present. A brief biography of each artist is included with a fully illustrated, child-tested art activity, featuring painting, drawing, sculpture, photography, architecture, and more. Includes such greats as Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Monet, Degas, Picasso, Van Gogh, Dali, Matisse, Pollock, and O'Keeffe. 1998 Benjamin Franklin Silver Award, 2002 Practical Homeschooling Reader Award. Full "click-to" resource guide at Bright Ring's website to show each artist's most famous works. Some activity examples are: Da Vinci - Invention Art Michelangelo - Fresco Plaque Rembrandt - Shadowy Faces Monet - Dabble in Paint Degas - Resist in Motion Picasso- Fractured Friend Van Gogh - Starry Night Pollock - Action Splatter 1997 Benjamin Franklin Silver Award, Education 2003 Practical Homeschooling Award, 3rd Place 2007 Practical Homeschooling Reader Award in the art appreciation category, 3rd place. 2009 Practical Homeschooling Reader Award in the art appreciation category,1st Place

Discover the secret symbols and meaning behind 62 featured paintings in this unique volume. Ranging from Giotto’s 14th-century painting of the Last Judgment to the 19th-century symbolist Gustave Moreau’s depiction of Jupiter and Semele, each work has been selected for its own symbolic enigma. This book’s innovative design pairs each painting with a page of die-cut windows that help the reader focus on specific aspects of each painting and features captions that highlight the most important symbols. Other works in this unique and fascinating book include Renaissance masterpieces such as Botticelli’s Primavera and The Birth of Venus, Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa and The Last Supper, and Michelangelo’s The Last Judgment.

This book brings together thirteen distinguished critics and scholars to explore children's art and its profound but rarely documented influence on the evolution of modern art. It shows that children's art and childhood have inspired major works of art, served as central metaphors for artistic spontaneity and honesty, and provided a window into the fundamental human qualities explored by modern artists. The volume complements editor Jonathan Fineberg's groundbreaking new book, The Innocent Eye (Princeton, 1997), in which he showed how many of the greatest masters of modern art collected and were directly influenced by children's drawings. Contributors here both expand on Fineberg's themes and take the study of children's art in new directions. They examine, for example, the influence of child art on such artists as Kandinsky, Klee, Larionov, and Miró; the diverse styles of children's art; the influence of Romantic ideas on perceptions of children's art; the conception of giftedness versus education in children's drawings; and the relationship between children's art and primitivism. The book offers unique glimpses into the working processes of great modern artists, presenting, for example, Dora Vallier's personal recollections of Miró and his creative process, and new documentation about the works of the Russian avant-garde. The essays draw on art theory, psychology, and the close study of individual works of art and written texts. Discovering Child Art will appeal to a wide range of readers, including art historians, psychologists, and art educators. Contributors to the book are Troels Andersen, Rudolf Arnheim, John Carlin, Marcel Franciscono, Ernst Gombrich, Christopher Green, Josef Helfenstein, Werner Hofmann, Yuri Molok, G. G. Pospelov, Richard Shiff, Dora Vallier, and Barbara Würwag.

"Caravaggio was born Michelangelo Merisi in 1570 or 1571, in Caravaggio in Lombardy, and moved to Rome in 1592, when he was in his 20s. His earliest influences were Lombard art, a style which has been noted for its realism. The relation between objects and natural and artificial light, which is an important feature of Caravaggio's work, was assimilated from this local tradition. The author examines the life and work of this innovative artist, including the Supper in Emmaus and the Beheading of the Baptist."--Amazon

75 great American masters are introduced through open-ended quality art activities allowing kids to explore great art styles from colonial times to the present. Each child-tested art activity presents a biography, full color artwork, and techniques covering painting, drawing, sculpture, photography, architecture, and more. Special art options for very young children are included. Many great artists will be familiar names, like Cassatt, Warhol, and O'Keeffe. Other names will be new to some, like Asawa, Smithson, and Magee. Each featured artist has a style that is interesting to children, with a life history that will entertain and inspire them. Sample of some of the artists and companion activities: Andy Warhol - Package Design Bev Doolittle - Camouflage Draw Dale Chihuly - Pool Spheres Maya Lin - Memorial Plaque Jasper Johns - Encaustic Flag Joseph Raffael - Shiny Diptych Roy Lichtenstein - Comic Sounds Thomas Jefferson - Clay Keystone Edward Hopper - Wash Over Grant Wood - Gothic Paste-Up Wolf Kahn - Layered Pastel Jackson Pollock - Great Action Art Mary Cassatt - Back-Draw Monoprint Louis Comfort Tiffany - Bright Windows Hans Hofmann - Energetic Color Blocks Rube Goldberg - Contraption Georgia O'Keeffe - Paint with Distance 2009 Moonbeam Children's Bronze Award 2009 Benjamin Franklin Award

"Secret Knowledge created an international sensation when it was first published. David Hockney's theory of how the great works of Western art were created with mirrors and lenses attracted major media attention around the world and generated intense debate in the fields of science and art history. Now, in this expanded edition, Hockney takes his thesis even further, revealing for the first time new findings." "In Secret Knowledge, Hockney explains how he uncovered piece after piece of scientific and visual evidence, each one yielding further revelations about the past. With the benefit of his painter's eye, he examines the major works of art history and reveals the truth of how artists such as Caravaggio, Velazquez, van Eyck, Holbein, da Vinci, and Ingres used mirrors and lenses to help them create their famous masterpieces. For this new edition, Hockney delves still deeper into art history, disclosing the evidence that Renaissance artists also used these methods to develop perspective and chiaroscuro - radically challenging our view of how these two foundations of Western art were established." "Hundreds of paintings and drawings are reproduced and accompanied by Hockney's descriptions. His own photographs and drawings illustrate the various methods used by past artists to capture accurate likenesses and present the results they would have achieved. In addition, extracts from the many historical and modern documents he uncovered offer further intriguing evidence, while correspondence between him and an array of international experts provides an account of the remarkable story as it happened." "Secret Knowledge is not just about the lost techniques of the Old Masters. It is also about now and the future. It is about how we see, treat, and make images today, in an age of computer manipulation."--BOOK JACKET.

- This breathtakingly intricate, beautiful book accompanies an exhibition at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh and extensive publicity surrounding it. The exhibition runs 19 May to 28 October and there will be a BBC tv program exploring the work of Raqib Shaw this spring Raqib Shaw is one of the most extraordinary and sought-after artists working in the world today. Born in Calcutta in 1974 and raised in Kashmir, he came to London to study in 1998 and has lived there ever since. Inspired by a broad range of influences, including the old masters, Indian miniatures, Persian carpets and the Pre-Raphaelites, his paintings are infused with memories and longing for his homeland in Kashmir. His technique constitutes a completely unique kind of enamel painting. Spending months on preparatory drawings, tracings and photographic studies, he then transfers the composition onto prepared wooden panels, establishing an intricate design with acrylic liner, which leaves a slightly raised line. He adds the enamel paint using needle-fine syringes and a porcupine quill, with which he maneuvers the paint. The finished works are intricate, magical and breathtaking in their color and complexity. This book accompanies an exhibition of eight paintings by Raqib Shaw at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, alongside two paintings which have long obsessed him and have influenced specific works: Sir Joseph Noel Paton's The Quarrel of Oberon and Titania, 1849 (National Gallery of Scotland) and Lucas Cranach's An Allegory of Melancholy, 1528 (private collection). The book includes the first full-length biographical study of the artist.

"ScienceArts" builds upon natural curiosity as children experience and explore basic science concepts as they create over 200 beautiful and amazing art experiments. Projects use common household materials and art supplies. The art activities are open-ended and easy to do with one science-art experiment per page, fully illustrated and kid-tested. The book inclues three indexes and an innovative charted Table of Contents. Suitable for home, school, museum programs, or childcare, all ages. Kids call this the "ooo-ahhh" book. Examples of projects include: - Crystal Bubbles - Dancing Rabbits - Building Beans - Magnetic Rubbing - Stencil Leaves - Magic Cabbage - Marble Sculpture - Immiscibles - Paint Pendulum - Ice Structures - Bottle Optics - Erupting Colors - Chromatography 1993 Benjamin Franklin Gold Award, Education/Teaching/Academic 1993 Benjamin Franklin Silver Award, Interior Design 1993 Benjamin Franklin Silver Award, Book Cover 1993 Washington Press Communicator Award, First Place Winner, Non-Fiction Book