Grayson Perry: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Girl, by Wendy Jones

“This book is about the engine that drives me as an artist now. When people are looking at my work, I would like this book to sound as a hum in the background, the hum of my artistic engine. It is a portrait of the artist; it is what kind of man has made this [...]

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Life Class by Pat Barker

Spring, 1914. The students at the Slade School of Art gather in Henry Tonks’s studio for his life-drawing class. But for Paul Tarrant the class is troubling, underscoring his own uncertainty about making a mark on the world. When war breaks out and the army won’t take Paul, he enlists in the Belgian Red Cross [...]

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Shoot An Iraqi by Wafaa Bilal

Would you volunteer to spend a month letting people shoot at you? Artist Wafaa Bilal spent all of May 2007 in a side room of the Flatfile Gallery in Chicago being shot at with a paintball gun. The gun was connected to an online site where people pressed a button to make the gun fire [...]

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The Ice Chorus by Sarah Stonich: Lyricism, love and tales of the unexpected in windswept Ireland

After a brief but life-changing holiday affair ends her eighteen-year marriage, Liselle Dupre moves from Toronto to a remote village on the west coast of Ireland. She gradually becomes acquainted with some of the locals, whose wholehearted charm and colourful stories revive her spirits and inspire her to make a documentary about their interwoven tales [...]

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Who Owns Antiquity? by James Cuno

Who does art belong to? That is the question James Cuno attempts to answer. And not just regular art, either, but very old art from ancient civilizations. Not to mention pottery, wall murals, textiles and parts of buildings. Does it belong to the nation or to the world? Using the Elgin Marbles from the Athens [...]

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Best in Show:The Dog in Art from the Renaissance to Today by Edgar Peters Bowron and others

Every winter, the Crown Classic Dog Show comes to Cleveland and my sister and I look forward to it all year. So I was in the perfect frame of mind to review this book. ‘Lush’ is the first word that comes to mind when opening it. Produced to accompany an exhibition of the same name [...]

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Libby Sarjent mysteries by Lesley Cookman

Lesley Cookman’s novels are a pleasant addition to the ranks of cozy mysteries that I enjoy so much. For one thing, her heroine, Libby Sarjeant, “with a J”, is refreshingly ‘normal‘. She’s a short, overweight middle-aged woman who paints watercolors and lives with her tabby cat, Sidney, nicknamed “the walking stomach”. A former actress, she [...]

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The Private Lives of the Impressionists by Sue Roe

There have been dozens of books about The Impressionists, but none so vividly transports you to the France of the late 1800’s as Sue Roe’s masterpiece. Her rich tapestry dispels the stereotype of the isolated artist sitting at the café table before grabbing his smock and rushing to his easel in a frenzy. Instead, we [...]

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Chinese Takeout by Arthur Nersesian

I don’t know if Arthur Nersesian is a painter or can just channel one, but this book is the most perfect representation of an artist’s inner dialogue that I have ever read. Not just dreams and inspirations, but the anxieties, reactions and yearnings that provide a mental soundtrack to the creative process. He knows not [...]

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Museum:Behind the Scenes at the Metropolitan Museum of Art by Danny Danziger

This book on the Metropolitan Museum of Art is unusual, it’s not a sweeping history, nor is it a documentary, in fact, it doesn’t even follow a linear path. Instead, it’s a collection of interviews with the various workers and people involved in running the New York museum, not just the bigwigs, but “the little [...]

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