Books about Painter from Amazon.com

From the acclaimed author of The Epicure's Lament, a novel of literary rivalry in which two competing biographers collide in their quest for the truth about a great artist.

Oscar Feldman, the "Great Man," was a New York city painter of the heroic generation of the forties and fifties. But instead of the abstract canvases of the Pollocks and Rothkos, he stubbornly hewed to painting one subject—the female nude. When he died in 2001, he left behind a wife, Abigail, an autistic son, and a sister, Maxine, herself a notable abstract painter—all duly noted in the New York Times obituary.

What no one knows is that Oscar Feldman led an entirely separate life in Brooklyn with his longtime mistress, Teddy St. Cloud, and their twin daughters. As the incorrigibly bohemian Teddy puts it, "He couldn't live without a woman around. It was like water to a plant for him." Now two rival biographers, book contracts in hand, are circling around Feldman's life story, and each of these three women—Abigail, Maxine, and Teddy—will have a chance to tell the truth as they experienced it.

The Great Man is a scintillating comedy of life among the avant-garde—of the untidy truths, needy egos, and jostlings for position behind the glossy facade of artistic greatness. Not a pretty picture—but a provocative and entertaining one that incarnates the take-no-prisoners satirical spirit of Dawn Powell and Mary McCarthy.

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Price: $14.31 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Liberate Your Creativity With Acrylic Paints!

Acrylic Revolution is your essential, all-in-one guide for acrylic painting techniques and more. It features over 101 ways to break through the boundaries of conventional painting and re-define the creative potential of this all-purpose medium.

Every page provides insight on how to use acrylic paint in ways you never thought possible to create stunning visual effects and textures. Ten complete sections detail a range of empowering applications, including how to:

• Prepare and paint on virtually any surface
• Create textures of all kinds
• Work with transfers, collage, resists and mixed media
• Achieve innovative stenciling and line work
• Customize your paint to adjust thickness, transparency and drying time
• Simulate other mediums, such as oil, tempera or watercolor
• Create faux finishes, magical effects, sheens and more

To give you additional insight and inspiration, this book features a gallery of finished works by fellow painting revolutionaries that blend various acrylic techniques to create amazing effects. You'll also find practical advice that covers the basics and beyond--from selecting materials and cleaning your brushes to finishing and preserving your artwork. There's even a complete glossary of terms for fast and easy referencing.

Pick up a brush and start your own acrylic revolution today!

Use the techniques in this book to free your creative spirit and create the paintings you've always dreamed of..
Price: $16.99 [Notify me when price goes down.]

An Affair with a House continues to be a top seller for STC, with more than 45,000 copies in print
Shows readers how to realize their own taste and design preferences

You learn from people with great taste,” says Bunny Williams She should know. As a novice, Williams worked for legendary decorators Sister Parish and Albert Hadley, absorbing everything she could of their peerless design sense. Striking out on her own, she rose to the top rank of the interior design profession, where she has stylishly remained for the last 30 years. Now, it’s our turn to learn from her.

Part memoir and part how-to manual, Bunny Williams’ Point of View showcases many of the drop-dead chic but always cozily comfortable residences whose interiors Williams has designed during her astounding career. As Williams tells it, every design decision she makes is based on a bedrock principle: “Knowing what you value is essential.” Her conviction that every person’s home should manifest their personality guides her as she creates environments that fit each client precisely, “like a couture suit.”

By showing you how to plan and then accomplish that plan for each room of your house, Williams inspires you to take account of your own values—and to realize your personal vision of how you want to live. As she says about the book: “My point of view will help you discover yours.”.
Price: $37.99 [Notify me when price goes down.]

#1 New York Times Bestseller
"The Shell Seekers is a deeply satisfying story, written with love and confidence "
—Maeve Binchy, The New York Times Book Review
The Shell Seekers, the classic novel by acclaimed writer Rosamunde Pilcher, is now available in hardcover once more. This epic romance has sold over 3.5 million copies to date; her other bestsellers include Winter Solstice, Wild Mountain Thyme, and Coming Home.
Set in London and Cornwall from World War II to present, The Shell Seekers tells the story of the Keeling family, and of the passions and heartbreak that have held them together for three generations. The family centers around Penelope, and it is her love, courage, and sense of values that determine the course of all their lives, Deftly shifting back and forth in time, each chapter centers on one of the principal players in the family's history. the unifying thread is an oil painting entitled "The Shell Seekers," done by Penelope's father. It is this painting that symbolizes to Penelope the ties between the generations. But it is the fate of this painting that just may tear the family apart..
Price: $8.31 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Reminiscent of Memoirs of a Geisha, a re-imagining of the life of Pan Yuliang and her transformation from prostitute to post-Impressionist

Down the muddy waters of the Yangtze River and into the seedy backrooms of "The Hall of Eternal Splendor," through the raucous glamour of prewar Shanghai and the bohemian splendor of 1920s Paris, and back to a China ripped apart by civil war and teetering on the brink of revolution: this novel tells the story of Pan Yuliang, one of the most talented—and provocative—Chinese artists of the twentieth century.

Jennifer Cody Epstein's epic brings to life the woman behind the lush, Cezannesque nude self-portraits, capturing with lavish detail her life in the brothel and then as a concubine to a Republican official who would ultimately help her find her way as an artist. Moving with the tide of historical events, The Painter from Shanghai celebrates a singularly daring painting style—one that led to fame, notoriety, and, ultimately, a devastating choice: between Pan's art and the one great love of her life..
Price: $11.00 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Nowadays it is difficult to conceive of the impact that Gustave Courbet's paintings made on French art of the mid-nineteenth century. At once casting himself as revolutionary, bohemian and peasant, Courbet (1819-1877) overturned a deeply-entrenched tradition of academic painting in France, and, eschewing the Romanticism of Delacroix and the NeoClassicism of Ingres, coined instead an idiom he named "Realism." Realism was not pretty, classically proportioned, or literary; rather, it confronted the conditions of rural working life, then an unimaginable subject for art. The first masterpiece of this new style was "Burial at Ornans" (1849-1850), a colossal anti-epic that depicted an ordinary funeral in Courbet's home town. The contrast between the work's scale and its subject matter was pronounced, and its murky earth tones struck critics as willfully ugly--a defining reaction that would recur throughout Modernism, particularly in the reception of early works by Manet and Picasso. Courbet's palette emphasized mass and body politically--that is, in a manner that affirmed the world itself rather than the transcendence of it. His equally famous "The Origin of the World" of 1866, which presented the female genitalia close-up, made this stance explicit. The conceptual beginnings of the "painting of modern life" are as much in Courbet's "Realism" as in Charles Baudelaire's famous essay of the same name.
In this new assessment, published on the occasion of the major 2008 traveling exhibition, renowned experts shed light on the development of Courbet's realistic, critical style and trace his influence on his contemporaries and subsequent generations, as well as his relationship to early photography. At 480 pages, this monumental volume provides a long-overdue reckoning of this great artist's work..
Price: $54.03 [Notify me when price goes down.]