Recommendations based on "The Creative Act: A Way of Being: The Sunday Times bestseller"
Based on your reading history, we think you will also enjoy the following books.
By Joseph Gordon-Levitt
From hitRECord, the immensely popular open collaborative production company, and its founder, Golden Globe-nominated actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt, comes The Tiny Book of Tiny Stories: Volume 1.The universe is not made of atoms; it’s made of tiny stories.To create The Tiny Book of Tiny Stories: Volume 1, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, known within the hitRECord community as RegularJOE—directed thousands of collaborators to tell tiny stories through words and art. With the help of the entire creative collective, Gordon-Levitt culled, edited and curated over 8,500 contributions into this finely tuned collection of original art from 67 contributors. Reminiscent of the 6-Word Memoir series, The Tiny Book of Tiny Stories: Volume 1 brings together art and voices from around the world to unite and tell stories that defy size.
By Michael Freeman
Design is the single most important factor in creating a successful photograph. The ability to see the potential for a strong picture and then organize the graphic elements into an effective, compelling composition has always been one of the key skills in making photographs.Digital photography has brought a new, exciting aspect to design - first because the instant feedback from a digital camera allows immediate appraisal and improvement; and second because image-editing tools make it possible to alter and enhance the design after the shutter has been pressed. This has had a profound effect on the way digital photographers take pictures.Now published in sixteen languages, The Photographer's Eye continues to speak to photographers everywhere. Reaching 100,000 copies in print in the US alone, and 300,000+ worldwide, it shows how anyone can develop the ability to see and shoot great digital photographs. The book explores all the traditional approaches to composition and design, but crucially, it also addresses the new digital technique of shooting in the knowledge that a picture will later be edited, manipulated, or montaged to result in a final image that may be very different from the one seen in the viewfinder.
By Classics Penguin
This box set of the 50 books in the new Penguin Modern series celebrates the pioneering spirit of the Penguin Modern Classics list and its iconic authors. Including avant-garde essays, radical polemics, newly translated poetry and great fiction, here are brilliant and diverse voices from across the globe. Ground-breaking and original in their day, their words still have the power to move, challenge and inspire.
By Verlyn Klinkenborg
Most of what you think you know about writing is useless. It’s the harmful debris of your education—a mixture of half-truths, myths, and false assumptions that prevents you from writing well. Drawing on years of experience as a writer and teacher of writing, Verlyn Klinkenborg offers an approach to writing that will change the way you work and think. There is no gospel, no orthodoxy, no dogma in this book. What you’ll find here isn’t the way to write. Instead, you’ll find a way to clear your mind of illusions about writing and discover how you write.Several Short Sentences About Writing is a book of first steps and experiments. They will revolutionize the way you think and perceive, and they will change forever the sense of your own authority as a writer. This is a book full of learning, but it’s also a book full of unlearning—a way to recover the vivid, rhythmic, poetic sense of language you once possessed.An indispensable and unique book that will give you a clear understanding of how to think about what you do when you write and how to improve the quality of your writing.
By Gabrielle de la Puente, The White Pube, Zarina Muhammad
At a moment in which working as a professional artist is an increasingly unattainable luxury, art criticism duo The White Pube investigate why so many artists try anyway. Labelled \"the Diet Prada of the art world\" by British Vogue, in Poor Artists writers Gabrielle de la Puente and Zarina Muhammad ridicule a contemporary art world that has turned art into artworks, art schools into art universities, and creative expression into cut-throat competition. Poor Artists follows aspiring artist Quest Talukdar as she embarks on a surreal journey into the creative industry, where she must decide whether she cares more about success or staying true to herself. Featuring dialogue from anonymous interviews with real people who have all had to ask themselves the same question - including a Turner Prize winner or two, a recluse, a Venice Biennale fraudster, a communist messiah, a ghost, and a literal knight - The White Pube tell the story of art like never before.
By Nick Cave
A journey in images and words into the creative world of musician, storyteller, and cultural icon Nick Cave. One of the world's most celebrated artists, Nick Cave has enthralled and intrigued fans for more than four decades. With Stranger Than Kindness he reveals his innermost creative process as never before. Vibrant, evocative, and startlingly intimate, this remarkable volume peels back the layers of a unique artist, illuminating the inspiration that drives his work and exploring his many universes, both real and imagined. Featuring full color reproductions of original artwork, handwritten lyrics, photographs, and collected personal artifacts, Stranger Than Kindness ponders the origins of our deepest influences--what shapes our lives and makes us who we are--and celebrates the curiosity and power of the creative spirit.
By Alex Coles
The first anthology to address the rise of the "design-art" phenomenon—the breakdown of boundaries between art and architectural, graphic, or product design begun in the Pop and Minimalist eras.This reader in Whitechapel's Documents of Contemporary Art series investigates the interchange between art and design. Since the the Pop and Minimalist eras—as the work of artists ranging from Andy Warhol to Dan Graham demonstrates—the traditional boundaries between art and architectural, graphic, and product design have dissolved in critically significant ways. Design and Art traces the rise of the "design-art" phenomenon through the writings of critics and practitioners active in both fields.The texts include writings by Paul Rand, Hal Foster, Miwon Kwon, and others that set the parameters of the debate; utopian visions, including those of architect Peter Cook and writer Douglas Coupland; project descriptions by artists (among them Tobias Rehberger and Jorge Pardo) juxtaposed with theoretical writings; surveys of group practices by such collectives as N55 and Superflex; and views of the artist as mediator—a role assumed in the past to be the province of the designer—as seen in work by Frederick Kiesler, Ed Ruscha, and others. Finally, a book that doesn't privilege either the art world or the design world but puts them in dialogue with each other.ContributorsDavid Bourdon, Peter Cook/Archigram, Douglas Coupland, Kees Dorst, Charles Eames, Experimental Jetset, Vilém Flusser, Hal Foster, Liam Gillick, Dan Graham, Clement Greenberg, Richard Hamilton, Donald Judd, Frederick Kiesler, Miwon Kwon, Maria Lind, M/M, N55, George Nelson, Lucy Orta, Jorge Pardo, Norman Potter, Rick Poynor, Paul Rand, Tobias Rehberger, Ed Ruscha, Joe Scanlan, Mary Anne Staniszewski, Superflex, Manfredo Tafuri, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Paul Virilio, Joep van Lieshout, Andy Warhol, Benjamin Weil, Mark Wigley, Andrea ZittelCopublished with Whitechapel Art Gallery, London
By Makoto Fujimura
From a widely celebrated artist, this dazzling book takes readers on a profound journey into the heart of creativity   When Makoto Fujimura painted as a child, he felt a mysterious electrical charge pass through him. Over decades of art making, writing, and reflecting in his studio, he has come to understand this charge as his Creator—a source he connects with most profoundly when making art. To be human is to be creative, Fujimura believes, and art making is a discipline of awareness, prayer, and praise by which we journey back to our original light.   In this book, Fujimura takes readers along on his meandering journey as an artist. We witness him making his “process-driven slow art”—using pulverized minerals, gold, or pigments made from oyster shell—as he considers the plants and wildlife on the land where he lives. He draws on Japanese aesthetics, modernist art, Christian theology, sado (art of tea), literature, ecology, and personal narrative, with inspiration ranging from William Blake’s poetry to the art of Mark Rothko and Josef Albers, and from the wisdom of Scripture and Japanese tea master Sen no Rikyū to the traditional Japanese painting technique called Nihonga.   Bringing together the author’s written reflections and his paintings, drawings, and photographs, Art Is invites us to see the world in prismatic and diverse lights, helping us navigate the fractured, divisive times we live in.
By George E. Lewis
Founded in 1965 and still active today, the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) is an American institution with an international reputation. George E. Lewis, who joined the collective as a teenager in 1971, establishes the full importance and vitality of the AACM with this communal history, written with a symphonic sweep that draws on a cross-generational chorus of voices and a rich collection of rare images. Moving from Chicago to New York to Paris, and from founding member Steve McCall’s kitchen table to Carnegie Hall, A Power Stronger Than Itself uncovers a vibrant, multicultural universe and brings to light a major piece of the history of avant-garde music and art.
By Simon Jennings
This is the definitive artist's reference source book on art materials and painting techniques with more than 1300 colour illustrations. Collins Complete Manual covers all the painting and drawing materials available to the artist today and also conveys the sheer joy and excitement of creating art. In addition, it contains a structured painting course from simple exercises to more advanced projects, with demonstrations by well-known practising artists who share their successes (and setbacks) with the reader. Contents include comprehensive information on drawing and painting media along with hints and tips on how to set up your own artist's studio. The book contains advice on making the most of colour, composition and drawing and sketching techniques in your work. There are even suggestions on what to paint and draw in order to get you started on that art project that is just waiting to happen. Collins Complete Manual is visually rich and exciting, practical and comprehensive, and no artist's studio should be without it.