A visually dazzling artistic odyssey, full of sharp insights and warmhearted encouragement.
Hard work is shown to be the key to success in Berends’ lavishly illustrated meditation on artistic labor.
The author, a Dutch painter now living on the Caribbean island of Curaçao, presents a 150-day journal covering the run-up to anexhibition of new paintings on the theme of “beach life” on display on the island’s seashore. The book is effectively a study of her hands-on creative process, which emphasizes open-ended, improvisatory experiments to see what looks interesting (“try not to think about a possible end result and just do things that come to you”), rather than angsty rumination. She began with simple, offhand abstract exercises on paper, featuring eclectic motifs from pastel blobs and blood-red drips to rectilinear stencil patterns. She worked in a profusion of eclectic materials, techniques, and formats: watercolors, oils, and oil bars (pressed oil paints used like crayons); diluted acrylics in a spray bottle; embossed rolling pins that imprint patterns in paint; images torn out of other pieces that she incorporates into new collages; and postcards, enlarged and printed to serve as backdrops. After a few weeks, Berends introduced figurative elements, mainly focusing on images of children goofing around at the beach (her favorite subjects include a young girl in a pink bathing suit, often peering intently at sand and water). In the journal’s concluding weeks, the artist brought together these strands in exuberant paintings of frolicking bathers with richly textured abstract motifs and the postcards, adding visual energy. Berends enriches her narrative with color photos of her studio, exercises, and the stages of her developing paintings, along with tips on everything from the quality of one’s brushes to the disposal of turpentine.
Berends’ journal is, in part, an engrossing account of an artist’s craft. Writing in limpid, straightforward prose, she presents readers with simple, practical descriptions of materials and techniques, as well as evocative musings on conundrums of visual effect: “One of the hardest things I find to recreate is the color of white when in shadow. It quickly turns to blue, and you lose the feel of it being white fabric in the shadow.” The book is also full of wisdom on the psychology of creativity, from the imperative to lurch from doubt and inertia into action (“The only thing to do is START!...The blank paper or canvas dares you to fail!”) to the hard lesson that the work of refining what seems like a masterpiece is never truly finished (“a good start to a painting is nothing more than that: a good start”). The photographs provide a splendid display of Berends’ work. Her paintings, especially the human subjects, sometimes leave a slightly rough-hewn impression, with figures and faces often decomposed into broad plats of color. Yet in closeups, they’re a riot of rich detail, full of swirling brush strokes and complex, intricate colors. Artists will find much food for thought here, while casual readers will find a feast for the eyes.
A visually dazzling artistic odyssey, full of sharp insights and warmhearted encouragement.Pub Date: June 30, 2024
ISBN: 9798329027228
Page Count: 200
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: March 7, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Not so deep, but a delightful tip of the hat to the pleasures—and power—of glamour.
A coffee-table book celebrates Michelle Obama’s sense of fashion.
Illustrated with hundreds of full-color photographs, Obama’s chatty latest book begins with some school portraits from the author’s childhood in Chicago and fond memories of back-to-school shopping at Sears, then jumps into the intricacies of clothing oneself as the spouse of a presidential candidate and as the first lady. “People looked forward to the outfits, and once I got their attention, they listened to what I had to say. This is the soft power of fashion,” she says. Obama is grateful and frank about all the help she got along the way, and the volume includes a long section written by her primary wardrobe stylist, Koop—28 years old when she first took the job—and shorter sections by makeup artists and several hair stylists, who worked with wigs and hair extensions as Obama transitioned back to her natural hair, and grew out her bangs, at the end of her husband’s second term. Many of the designers of the author’s gowns, notably Jason Wu, who designed several of her more striking outfits, also contribute appreciative memories. Besides candid and more formal photographs, the volume features many sketches of her gowns by their designers, closeups on details of those gowns, and magazine covers from Better Homes & Gardens to Vogue. The author writes that as a Black woman, “I was under a particularly white-hot glare, constantly appraised for whether my outfits were ‘acceptable’ and ‘appropriate,’ the color of my skin somehow inviting even more judgment than the color of my dresses.” Overall, though, this is generally a canny, upbeat volume, with little in the way of surprising revelations.
Not so deep, but a delightful tip of the hat to the pleasures—and power—of glamour.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9780593800706
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 7, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
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