Books on art

I've just given away a couple of Keith Fenwick's books, as it happens - I've rationalized my library a bit, basically, and I think I've absorbed all I can of Keith's approach. I've also - and how this hurt! - thrown out a great weight of old magazines, dating back some 10 years: the Artist, Leisure Painter, Artists' and Illustrators, International Art magazine.... I tried hard to find someone who might be interested, but no one was .... I suspect I just had too many. So they've all gone to the recycling plant - such a waste, because there was a wealth of material in their pages.... but I've read and re-read them, sucked them dry almost; even so, I'm going to regret it. I simply don't have the room, unfortunately. Fortunately, you can download a lot of magazines now: and you can store things on memory sticks, portable hard drives, DVDs, CDs, even the Kindle. It's never going to be the same, but there it is. Paper is heavy - I have thousands of books already in a two room flat with added bathroom (and you can't really store printed matter in there, although I did think about it) and a halt had to be called. At least the books have gone to the RSPCA shop in Ventnor, if anyone's interested!

I stopped buying books after the first half a dozen all started from square one, the "advanced" ones assumed I was at professional level and those in between didn't really seem to follow on from anything else. I have a subscription to The Artist, find stuff on Youtube and I hang around here. I'm getting better :-)

That's an interesting comment, to me at least, because someone asked me where he could find a book about oil painting from the basics, which didn't treat the reader as an idiot. And I couldn't; so I wrote one - an e-book, and it needs revising because it was a couple of years ago now; quite an effort on my part, but there it is; it's gone down pretty well with most of those who read it. I think the issue is as you describe (sorry if this reads like a plug, and to an extent it probably is!): there's very little in my opinion which takes you from raw beginner level up to the stage at which you can really go on from there, as it were .... they all seem to stop, if they're for beginners, at a very basic level, while the more advanced ones are just about hopeless for a beginner - and there's a gap between the two sorts of book. Well, I attempted to fill it. It's something I'm quite proud of, but - it was a lot of work, and so far while I've talked about doing a follow-up, or another book on acrylics, laziness has supervened. But I'll have a crack at it again one day. The magazines seem to me to offer a similar problem - I think this is inevitable; in theory, you've got Leisure Painter, aimed at the amateur and learner; and The Artist, aimed at the professional (to take the two magazines connected to this site). But you can't really go on and on doing the same sort of thing or your publication won't develop and grow; and readers will get bored with it. So both magazines have some articles that are almost interchangeable - could have appeared in either, just happened to be published in one rather than the other. There are things they don't cover - because the writers of magazine articles do the same as writers of books - they don't necessarily think like the people for whom they're writing; so you get the basic stuff, and the more advanced, and there still isn't that much between the two (actually, there's not really that much for the total beginner, either: the not unreasonable assumption is made that if you've subscribed to a painting magazine you're probably serious about painting and don't need the very basic information; which anyway you can't just keep repeating, issue after issue). It's a highly skilled job, editing monthly magazines like these - I wouldn't want to do it: what level, what tone, do you strike? How do you vary it? How do you determine what your readers need? I'd rather publish books than magazines, given the choice. There's an inevitable overlap anyway because of course we're all learning; no one knows it all; most of us can't expect to learn a fraction of all there is to know. So I could have kept all my magazines (if I were able to build an extension to my flat...) but beyond a certain point you don't necessarily benefit from your collection of books or magazines: that's the awful point at which you have to pick up your brushes and palette and do it yourself: you've absorbed enough and need to start creating. Where the magazines score, though, is in the inspiration and encouragement you get every month as they drop through your letterbox; that's why I collected them for so long, certainly - they gave me new ideas, but most of all they reminded me of what I was supposed to be doing with my time and encouraged me to stop procrastinating and get on with it. And that, I think, is their real value: they remind you that you're part of a fellowship of artists, and they give you a push.

I've got around fifty books on art. About half give advice on painting, the remainder are about the artists themselves (Hockney, Caravaggio, Hopper, David Gentleman) or books such as The Art Book, or The History of Art. My most recent purchase was Daily Painting by Carol Marine: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Daily-Painting-Creative-Productive-Successful/dp/0770435335/ref=sr_1_1/280-1104810-3462008?ie=UTF8&qid=1451373116&sr=8-1&keywords=carol+marine To me, books are a more useful reference source than DVDs. I think the quality of DVDs varies a lot, in that some very good artists can paint well but don't make very interesting DVDs. As for magazines, I used to subscribe to The Artist. Now I switch between The Artist and Artists and Illustrators, depending on which interests me most when they are published each month. I used to keep them for reference, now I don't bother, I just pass them on to a friend.

Sisley and Pisarro - two of my favourires - I never tire of looking at their work. There were quite a number of books published by David and Charles (their Atelier series) featuring modern artists (I have Chamberlain,Curtis,Yardley, & Pamela Kay) which just feature their work without any of the how-to-do-it waffle. I also have books by D&C on Wesson and Seago.I must look up D&C and see what else they have published. Another book which I treasure is by Ron Ranson (rancid Ron as an international artist friend of mine used to refer to him although I never used to know why) which features the work of many different contemporary artists. As for the how-to-do-it books these seem to have gradually departed my shelves and the few I do still have have been kept for the examples of the artists work.