An educational, eye-catching primer on how to look at art and “see as an artist.”
Reimer’s instructional debut portrays the “adventure of abstract painting” for neophytes and admirers of modern art.
Innately human, the need to create images stems from our need to communicate, says the author, an accomplished artist. Since it concerns the “personal feelings and perceptions” of both the artist and the viewer, “works of art should not be translated into words,” contends Reimer, “least of all by the artist.” Nonetheless, from approaching and interpreting others’ work to setting up the proper space in which to create your own, the Danish-born author teaches basic skills and techniques through “fun projects,” in acrylic and watercolors—due to their shorter drying times—and helpful instructions, including a foolproof, step-by-step method of stretching your own canvases. Reimer covers the importance of practicing three crucial steps—drawing, underpainting and overpainting—as well as critical self-evaluation and knowing when to put down the brush. To generate ideas, she suggests listening to music and picturing the “sounds as shapes” or placing limits on your use of color, tools, materials and media to help discover various possibilities. Reimer’s at her best discussing the “color compass” and the visual harmony of complementary, related and tertiary colors. She also explains how organic subjects display warmer, redder hues, while inorganic subjects are marked by cooler, bluer colors. Surrounded as a child by Viking mythology, Reimer conducts an ancestral conversation as she appropriates ancient motifs into her bright, minimal work, shown here alongside her more representative flower watercolors. Although intended for “serious artists” unable “to obtain a formal arts education,” the author provides useful information and advice for anyone with “the urge to paint.” Her discussions on the meaning and interpretation of paintings would be great for kids just discovering abstraction and tremendous help to anyone who can’t understand why a Pollock or a Rothko affects them the way it does.
An educational, eye-catching primer on how to look at art and “see as an artist.”Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2011
ISBN: 978-1463526580
Page Count: 134
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 29, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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