Water to Paper, Paint to Sky


Book Description

Water to Paper, Paint to Sky is the first comprehensive retrospective of America’s oldest living artist Tyrus Wong, whose groundbreaking work on Walt Disney’s classic animation film Bambi influenced a generation of leading animators, including John Lasseter, Pete Docter, and Don Hahn. Tyrus Wong’s ability to evoke powerful feeling in his art with simple gestural compositions continues to inspire each new generation of artists, and his influence can still be seen in movies today. “Tyrus Wong’s sophistication of expression was a gigantic leap forward for the medium. Where other films were literal…Bambi was expressive and emotional. Tyrus painted feelings, not objects.” — John Lasseter, Academy-Award winning director Born in 1910 in Canton, China, Tyrus Wong immigrated as a young boy to the United States, where he has enjoyed a long, distinguished, and diverse artistic career as a prolific painter, illustrator, calligrapher, lithographer, muralist, designer, Hollywood sketch artist, ceramicist, and kitemaker. Tyrus is legendary for his innovative work on Walt Disney Studio’s classic animation film Bambi, in which his singular vision and evocative, impressionistic concept art caught the eye of Walt Disney himself and influenced the movie’s overall visual style.




Water Graves


Book Description

Water Graves considers representations of lives lost to water in contemporary poetry, fiction, theory, mixed-media art, video production, and underwater sculptures. From sunken slave ships to the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, Valérie Loichot investigates the lack of official funeral rites in the Atlantic, the Caribbean Sea, and the Gulf of Mexico, waters that constitute both early and contemporary sites of loss for the enslaved, the migrant, the refugee, and the destitute. Unritual, or the privation of ritual, Loichot argues, is a state more absolute than desecration. Desecration implies a previous sacred observance--a temple, a grave, a ceremony. Unritual, by contrast, denies the sacred from the beginning. In coastal Louisiana, Mississippi, Georgia, Miami, Haiti, Martinique, Cancun, and Trinidad and Tobago, the artists and writers featured in Water Graves—an eclectic cast that includes Beyoncé, Radcliffe Bailey, Edwidge Danticat, Édouard Glissant, M. NourbeSe Philip, Jason deCaires Taylor, Édouard Duval-Carrié, Natasha Trethewey, and Kara Walker, among others—are an archipelago connected by a history of the slave trade and environmental vulnerability. In addition to figuring death by drowning in the unritual—whether in the context of the aftermath of slavery or of ecological and human-made catastrophes—their aesthetic creations serve as memorials, dirges, tombstones, and even material supports for the regrowth of life underwater.




Water and Art


Book Description

Restless, protean, fluid, evanescent—despite being a challenge to represent visually, water has gained a striking significance in the art of the twentieth century. This may be due to the fact that it allows for a range of metaphorical meanings, many of which are particularly appropriate to the modern age. Water is not merely a subject of contemporary art, but also a material increasingly used in art-making, giving it a distinct dual presence. Water and Art probes the ways in which water has gained an unprecedented prominence in modern Western art and seeks to draw connections to its depiction in earlier art forms. David Clarke looks across cultures, finding parallels within contemporary Chinese art, which draws on a cultural tradition in which water has an essential presence and is used as both a subject and a medium. The book features a wealth of images by artists from East and West, including Fu Baoshi, Shi Tao, Wei Zixi, Fang Rending, Leonardo da Vinci, Bernini, Turner, Gericault, Klee, Matisse, Monet, Picasso, Mondrian, and Kandinsky. Fast-paced, accessible, and comprehensive, Water and Art will appeal to the specialist and the general reader alike, offering fresh perspectives on familiar artists as well as an introduction to others who are less well-known.




Walking on Water


Book Description

In this classic book, Madeleine L'Engle addresses the questions, What makes art Christian? What does it mean to be a Christian artist? What is the relationship between faith and art? Through L'Engle's beautiful and insightful essay, readers will find themselves called to what the author views as the prime tasks of an artist: to listen, to remain aware, and to respond to creation through one's own art.




The Art of Haiku


Book Description

In the past hundred years, haiku has gone far beyond its Japanese origins to become a worldwide phenomenon—with the classic poetic form growing and evolving as it has adapted to the needs of the whole range of languages and cultures that have embraced it. This proliferation of the joy of haiku is cause for celebration—but it can also compel us to go back to the beginning: to look at haiku’s development during the centuries before it was known outside Japan. This in-depth study of haiku history begins with the great early masters of the form—like Basho, Buson, and Issa—and goes all the way to twentieth-century greats, like Santoka. It also focuses on an important aspect of traditional haiku that is less known in the West: haiku art. All the great haiku masters created paintings (called haiga) or calligraphy in connection with their poems, and the words and images were intended to be enjoyed together, enhancing each other, and each adding its own dimension to the reader’s and viewer’s understanding. Here one of the leading haiku scholars of the West takes us on a tour of haiku poetry’s evolution, providing along the way a wealth of examples of the poetry and the art inspired by it.




Water in a Dry Land


Book Description

Water in a Dry Land is a story of research about water as a source of personal and cultural meaning. The site of this exploration is the iconic river system which forms the networks of natural and human landscapes of the Murray-Darling Basin, Australia. In the current geological era of human induced climate change, the desperate plight of the system of waterways has become an international phenomenon, a symbol of the unsustainable ways we relate to water globally. The Murray-Darling Basin extends west of the Great Dividing Range that separates the densely populated east coast of Australia from the sparsely populated inland. Aboriginal peoples continue to inhabit the waterways of the great artesian basin and pass on their cultural stories and practices of water, albeit in changing forms. A key question informing the book is: What can we learn about water from the oldest continuing culture inhabiting the world's driest continent? In the process of responding to this question a team of Indigenous and non-Indigenous researchers formed to work together in a contact zone of cultural difference within an emergent arts-based ethnography. Photo essays of the artworks and their landscapes offer a visual accompaniment to the text on the Routledge Innovative Ethnography Series website, http://www.innovativeethnographies.net/. This book is perfect for courses in environmental sociology, environmental anthropology, and qualitative methods.




Art on the Water


Book Description

This is an amazing collection of nautical chart paintings created by artist Salina Kalnins. This book represents a small, yet very diverse body of artwork completed between 2008-2017 for several branches of U.S. Naval Services.




The Politics of Water in the Art and Festivals of Medici Florence


Book Description

This book tells the story of one dynasty's struggle with water, to control its flow and manage its representation. The role of water in the art and festivals of Cosimo I and his heirs, Francesco I and Ferdinando I de' Medici, informs this richly-illustrated interdisciplinary study. Else draws on a wealth of visual and documentary material to trace how the Medici sought to harness the power of Neptune, whether in the application of his imagery or in the control over waterways and maritime frontiers, as they negotiated a place in the unstable political arena of Europe, and competed with foreign powers more versed in maritime traditions and aquatic imagery.




Ground/water


Book Description

Groundwater brings together a diverse community of artists, designers, and scientists interested in understanding and raising public awareness about local water and its relationship to global climate. This engaging collection of photographs, graphic design, architectural drawings, artist books, essays, and poems by University of Arizona faculty and students is an ode to the dry rivers of Tucson, Arizona. Poems and essays by Nathaniel Brodie, Alison Deming, Allison Dushane, Gregg Garfin, Ander Monson, Logan Phillips, and Paul Robbins provide poetic perspectives on the Rillito River; an overview of the region's climate, hydrology, and water policy; a comparison between the theory and practice of interdisciplinary research; and a trail of the overlapping roles of science and art in the construction of contemporary concepts of nature from the Romantic period to the present. Art and design projects include intercontinental comparisons of arid regions and river systems, finely detailed drawings and photographic series reflecting direct encounters with the local landscape, and collaborations with the Rillito River Project. One scientist in the project describes the ability of these creative projects to "transform messages from the stilted language of scientific literature into rich, multifaceted vocabularies that can be grasped by those interested, but inexpert, in the subject matter." Turning the desecrated and overlooked dry rivers of Tucson into muse and inspiration, this project speaks volumes about community, creativity, and responsibility. Groundwater is a work of art in itself, beautifully designed and produced with lush color reproductions, letterpress printed covers and open-sewn binding.




Art and Identity at the Water's Edge


Book Description

The water's edge, whether shore or riverbank, is a marginal territory that becomes invested with layers of meaning. The essays in this collection present intriguing perspectives on how the water's edge has been imagined and represented in different places at various times and how this process contributed to the formation of social identities. Art and Identity at the Water's Edge focuses upon national coastlines and maritime heritage; on rivers and seashore as regions of liminality and sites of conflicting identities; and on the edge as a tourist setting. Such themes are related to diverse forms of art, including painting, architecture, maps, photography, and film. Topics range from the South African seaside resort of Durban to the French Riviera. The essays explore successive ideological mappings of the Jordan River, and how Czech cubist architecture and painting shaped a new nationalist reading of the Vltava riverbanks. They examine post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans as a filmic spectacle that questions assumptions about American identity, and the coast depicted as a site of patriotism in nineteenth-century British painting. The collection demonstrates how waterside structures such as maritime museums and lighthouses, and visual images of the water's edge, have contributed to the construction of cultural and national identities.