Everyday Artists

For the young child, art is a way of solving problems, conceptualizing the world, and creating new possibilities. In Everyday Artists, the author addresses the disconnect that exists between the teaching of art and the way young children actually experience art. In doing so, this book questions commonly held notions and opens up exciting new possibilities for art education in the early childhood classroom. A practicing teacher herself, Bentley uses vignettes of children’s everyday activities—from block building to clean-up to outdoor play—to help teachers identify and scaffold the genuine artistic practice of young children. Book Features: Tangible examples of everyday arts experiences told through lively classroom stories.An examination of the teacher’s role with suggestions of appropriate ways to support children’s artistic expression.Clear explanations of how inquiry and creativity contribute to the overall thinking and learning of the young child.A “Voice of the Teacher” section that offers teaching strategies for extending children’s thinking and learning.A wide-range of ideas for teachers who feel they do not know how to “do” art. Dana Frantz Bentley is a teacher researcher and preschool teacher at Buckingham Browne and Nichols School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She received a Doctorate of Education, Art, and Art Education from Teachers College, Columbia University. “Much has been written about the role of the arts in education, especially about the importance of the arts to early childhood learning. Dana Frantz Bentley endows the arts with an additional and central kind of significance rooted in a broad conception of cognition.” —From the Foreword by Judith M. Burton, Teachers College, Columbia University “Like the young children she describes, Dana Frantz Bentley is an ‘everyday artist,’ making something ‘beautiful’ of her informed and thoughtful pedagogy. There is much to learn from the artful reflection and generative inquiry of this inspired early childhood educator.” —Jessica Hoffmann Davis, author of Why Our Schools Need the Arts

This new book from the author of the international bestseller The Artist’s Way guides readers through a year of cultivating a deeper connection to their creative selves. The Artist’s Way has touched the lives of millions of people around the world. Now, for the first time, fans will have a beautifully designed daily companion to the author’s life-changing creative process. With 365 quotations culled from Julia Cameron’s most vital works on the creative process, this elegant little book can easily be carried along as the reader travels her groundbreaking spiritual path to higher creativity. In her introduction to the book, Cameron reveals the importance of cultivating one’s creativity every day and offers stunning new insights on the relationship between creativity and spirituality. As the world becomes increasingly challenging to navigate, The Artist’s Way Every Day will serve as a daily reminder of the healing power of creativity to nourish the soul.

"With its gentle affirmations, inspirational quotes, fill-in-the-blank lists and tasks — write yourself a thank-you letter, describe yourself at 80, for example — The Artist’s Way proposes an egalitarian view of creativity: Everyone’s got it."—The New York Times "Morning Pages have become a household name, a shorthand for unlocking your creative potential"—Vogue Over four million copies sold! Since its first publication, The Artist's Way phenomena has inspired the genius of Elizabeth Gilbert and millions of readers to embark on a creative journey and find a deeper connection to process and purpose. Julia Cameron's novel approach guides readers in uncovering problems areas and pressure points that may be restricting their creative flow and offers techniques to free up any areas where they might be stuck, opening up opportunities for self-growth and self-discovery. The program begins with Cameron’s most vital tools for creative recovery – The Morning Pages, a daily writing ritual of three pages of stream-of-conscious, and The Artist Date, a dedicated block of time to nurture your inner artist. From there, she shares hundreds of exercises, activities, and prompts to help readers thoroughly explore each chapter. She also offers guidance on starting a “Creative Cluster” of fellow artists who will support you in your creative endeavors. A revolutionary program for personal renewal, The Artist's Way will help get you back on track, rediscover your passions, and take the steps you need to change your life.

Author of Everyday Watercolor and Instagram darling Jenna Rainey presents a beautiful step-by-step guide to painting botanicals from lilies to daffodils in a wide variety of styles. Artist Jenna Rainey shares easy-to-follow ways to paint a wide range of botanicals, all in her fresh, modern style that appeals to the next generation of watercolor artists and creatives, from beginners to hobbyists. With gorgeously illustrated instructions for both loose and realistic watercolor depictions of more than 25 flowers, leaves, and plants, organized by form and shape, Everyday Watercolor Flowers is every nature-lover's answer to capturing that beauty on paper.

From Marx to Murakami and Beethoven to Bacon, 'Daily Rituals' examines the working routines of more than a 160 of the greatest philosophers, writers, composers and artists ever to have lived. Filled with fascinating insights on the mechanics of genius and entertaining stories of the personalities behind it, it is irresistibly addictive and utterly inspiring

From Henry Darger's elaborate paintings of young girls caught in a vicious war to the sacred art of the Reverend Howard Finster, the work of outsider artists has achieved unique status in the art world. Celebrated for their lack of traditional training and their position on the fringes of society, outsider artists nonetheless participate in a traditional network of value, status, and money. After spending years immersed in the world of self-taught artists, Gary Alan Fine presents Everyday Genius, one of the most insightful and comprehensive examinations of this network and how it confers artistic value. Fine considers the differences among folk art, outsider art, and self-taught art, explaining the economics of this distinctive art market and exploring the dimensions of its artistic production and distribution. Interviewing dealers, collectors, curators, and critics and venturing into the backwoods and inner-city homes of numerous self-taught artists, Fine describes how authenticity is central to the system in which artists—often poor, elderly, members of a minority group, or mentally ill—are seen as having an unfettered form of expression highly valued in the art world. Respected dealers, he shows, have a hand in burnishing biographies of the artists, and both dealers and collectors trade in identities as much as objects. Revealing the inner workings of an elaborate and prestigious world in which money, personalities, and values affect one another, Fine speaks eloquently to both experts and general readers, and provides rare access to a world of creative invention-both by self-taught artists and by those who profit from their work. “Indispensable for an understanding of this world and its workings. . . . Fine’s book is not an attack on the Outsider Art phenomenon. But it is masterful in its anatomization of some of its contradictions, conflicts, pressures, and absurdities.”—Eric Gibson, Washington Times

More of Mason Currey's irresistible Daily Rituals, this time exploring the daily obstacles and rituals of women who are artists--painters, composers, sculptors, scientists, filmmakers, and performers. We see how these brilliant minds get to work, the choices they have to make: rebuffing convention, stealing (or secreting away) time from the pull of husbands, wives, children, obligations, in order to create their creations. From those who are the masters of their craft (Eudora Welty, Lynn Fontanne, Penelope Fitzgerald, Marie Curie) to those who were recognized in a burst of acclaim (Lorraine Hansberry, Zadie Smith) . . . from Clara Schumann and Shirley Jackson, carving out small amounts of time from family life, to Isadora Duncan and Agnes Martin, rejecting the demands of domesticity, Currey shows us the large and small (and abiding) choices these women made--and continue to make--for their art: Isak Dinesen, "I promised the Devil my soul, and in return he promised me that everything I was going to experience would be turned into tales," Dinesen subsisting on oysters and Champagne but also amphetamines, which gave her the overdrive she required . . . And the rituals (daily and otherwise) that guide these artists: Isabel Allende starting a new book only on January 8th . . . Hilary Mantel taking a shower to combat writers' block ("I am the cleanest person I know") . . . Tallulah Bankhead coping with her three phobias (hating to go to bed, hating to get up, and hating to be alone), which, could she "mute them," would make her life "as slick as a sonnet, but as dull as ditch water" . . . Lillian Hellman chain-smoking three packs of cigarettes and drinking twenty cups of coffee a day--and, after milking the cow and cleaning the barn, writing out of "elation, depression, hope" ("That is the exact order. Hope sets in toward nightfall. That's when you tell yourself that you're going to be better the next time, so help you God.") . . . Diane Arbus, doing what "gnaws at" her . . . Colette, locked in her writing room by her first husband, Henry Gauthier-Villars (nom de plume: Willy) and not being "let out" until completing her daily quota (she wrote five pages a day and threw away the fifth). Colette later said, "A prison is one of the best workshops" . . . Jessye Norman disdaining routines or rituals of any kind, seeing them as "a crutch" . . . and Octavia Butler writing every day no matter what ("screw inspiration"). Germaine de Staël . . . Elizabeth Barrett Browning . . . George Eliot . . . Edith Wharton . . . Virginia Woolf . . . Edna Ferber . . . Doris Lessing . . . Pina Bausch . . . Frida Kahlo . . . Marguerite Duras . . . Helen Frankenthaler . . . Patti Smith, and 131 more--on their daily routines, superstitions, fears, eating (and drinking) habits, and other finely (and not so finely) calibrated rituals that help summon up willpower and self-discipline, keeping themselves afloat with optimism and fight, as they create (and avoid creating) their creations.