Saturday, February 10, 2007

SF: The perfect art book

This week's topic for Friday February 9th: The perfect art book!
"As I was talking about books so much lately... if there was the ideal book for you as an artist on studios and life as an artist what would be the absolute most important thing in your eyes for it to have in it? What kinds of topics, elements, images would you love to have in it? A few words from your favourite artist as well? What would inspire you, what would support you, give you courage? Would you like it to be a big book with tons of pages or a small book?"



Ah, the perfect art book. It would have to be a very large book encompassing the books I use most often. Some would say I have too many books. The book would need to cover techniques of all kinds. Sometimes the starting point for a picture comes from a technique I haven't tried. Other times, I just need to find a technique that will give the effect I need. The book would need to have lots of pictures from nature. To me, the patterns in nature are so inspiring. For those times when I'm not feeling so inspired, I would want some material on creativity. That would include some text on artists and creativity so I wouldn't feel so alone in my feelings and some suggested exercises to help get me out of my slump. Finally it would include some pictures from a wide variety of artists using a variety of media. Some of my favorites include
Georgia O'Keefe and Debbie New. It would also need to include artists that are new to me such as this fiber artist I found recently, Karen Kamenetzky who combines science and fiber art. Hmm, maybe it needs to be a self updating book.

1 comments:

Anonymous said...

I have that smae Guide to Drawing book. It's one of the best, I agree. It was required reading when I went to art school back in the early 80s. Yikes! It's been THAT long?