Designed to address the issues of how to paint and what to paint, PAINTING AS A LANGUAGE covers a wide range of information of central importance to beginning and intermediate painting instruction. The authors emphasize the value of the student's cognitive understanding of the process and potential of painting in the student's overall progress in the studio. Blending journal writing with painting and drawing exercises, they guide the student through selecting meaningful subject matter as well as becoming adept at shaping and interpreting that material through the language of painting.

An important reassessment of the later career and life of a beloved baroque artist Hailed as one of the most influential and expressive painters of the seventeenth century, Artemisia Gentileschi (1593–ca. 1656) has figured prominently in the art historical discourse of the past two decades. This attention to Artemisia, after many years of scholarly neglect, is partially due to interest in the dramatic details of her early life, including the widely publicized rape trial of her painting tutor, Agostino Tassi, and her admission to Florence’s esteemed Accademia del Disegno. While the artist’s early paintings have been extensively discussed, her later work has been largely dismissed. This beautifully illustrated and elegantly written book provides a revolutionary look at Artemisia’s later career, refuting longstanding assumptions about the artist. The fact that she was semi-illiterate has erroneously led scholars to assume a lack of literary and cultural education on her part. Stressing the importance of orality in Baroque culture and in Artemisia’s paintings, Locker argues for her important place in the cultural dialogue of the seventeenth century.

Chinese painting might be called "philosophy in action", for it is one of the highest expressions of Chinese spirituality. Both a medium for contemplation leading to self-transcendence and a microcosm embodying universal principles and primal forces, it is a means for making manifest the Chinese worldview. At the heart of this worldview is the notion of emptiness, the dynamic principle of transformation. Only through emptiness can things attain their full measure and human beings approach the universe at the level of totality. Focusing on the principle of emptiness, Francois Cheng uses semiotic analysis and textual explication to reveal the key themes and structures of Chinese aesthetics in the practice of pictorial art. Among the many Chinese writers, poets, and artists whose writings are quoted, he gives special emphasis to a great Ch'ing dynasty theoretician and painter, Shih-t'ao. Twenty-seven reproductions of the words of Shih-t'ao and other masters illustrate the interpretive commentary.

Abstract Painting: The Elements of Visual Language examines and articulates a vocabulary of visual elements from which you build images, abstract or otherwise. As you examine line, shape, pattern, texture, depth, and color in detail, you become more aware of the elements that make up a painting, and better able to observe your own work without judgment and self-criticism. Generously illustrated with over 200 color images, this book will open your eyes to a whole new way of seeing your paintings as they develop, allowing you to be more personally expressive and authentic in your artistic expression.

This study addresses itself to the formal (in the topological sense) aspect of literature and literary words, and concludes that if logos (discursive langauge) and mythos (literary language) are indeed contiguous complementary forms, they are then essentially no different from those forms with which the painter or sculptor deals in the formation of his art object.

"Like Dewey, he has revolted against the empiricist dogma and the Kantian dualisms which have compartmentalized philosophical thought. . . . Unlike Dewey, he has provided detailed incisive argumentation, and has shown just where the dogmas and dualisms break down." --Richard Rorty, The Yale Review

"The four essays in this volume constitute Derrida's most explicit and sustained reflection on the art work as pictorial artifact, a reflection partly by way of philosophical aesthetics (Kant, Heidegger), partly by way of a commentary on art works and art scholarship (Van Gogh, Adami, Titus-Carmel). The illustrations are excellent, and the translators, who clearly see their work as both a rendering and a transformation, add yet another dimension to this richly layered composition. Indispensable to collections emphasizing art criticism and aesthetics."—Alexander Gelley, Library Journal