From the author of Direct Watercolor and The Urban Sketcher, as well as the popular art-blog CitizenSketcher.com.Marc Taro Holmes is an internationally collected, award-winning watercolorist, and an elected member of the Canadian Society of Painters in Watercolour and the Society of Canadian Artists.He is also the creator of social media watercolor painting marathon #30x30DirectWatercolor2019. An open call to anyone, to paint thirty paintings in thirty days in the month of June. The APOCALYPSE VARIATIONS is a collection of Marc's paintings from the 2019 event. The book is both a love letter to watercolor painting and a darkly pessimistic rendition of contemporary landscape painting.Unlike his previous books, this is not a how-to for beginners. This is Marc's first fine art monograph. An art book in the old tradition. You will find large reproductions of the paintings, paired with close-up detail shots and preparatory sketches. In the text, Marc discusses the thinking behind the paintings with complete honesty. It's likely that lovers of his previous work will be surprised at his new direction. Or perhaps not, if they have been following Marc's social media and reading between the lines.Please, do not purchase this book expecting Marc's chatty online-instructor-mode full of helpful encouragement for aspiring artists. There are no tips-and-tricks or self-training programs. For that sort of thing, please visit Marc's website CitizenSketcher.com.This book is meant as inspiration to anyone seriously interested in expressive watercolor painting, or, for fellow studio artists dealing with the issues of painting in series and making relevant contemporary work. > Please note: Some readers with a strong preference for image brightness and contrast, or the ability to zoom, may prefer to experience the Amazon Kindle e-book edition on a full-color tablet, laptop or personal computer. This paper edition is for art book-collectors who want a hard copy in their library. It is a self-published title printed on Amazon's standard, white, 100gsm paper with a glossy card stock cover. Thanks, ~Marc

Michael Allred (b. 1962) stands out for his blend of spiritual and philosophical approaches with an art style reminiscent of 1960s era superhero comics, which creates a mixture of both postmodernism and nostalgia. His childhood came during an era where pop art and camp embraced elements of kitsch and pastiche and introduced them into the lexicon of popular culture. Allred's use of both in his work as a cartoonist on his signature comic book Madman in the early 1990s offset the veiled autobiography of his own spiritual journey through Mormonism and struggles with existentialism. Thematically, Allred's work deals heavily with the afterlife as his creations struggle with the grander questions--whether his modern Frankenstein hero Madman, cosmic rock 'n' roller Red Rocket 7, the undead heroine of iZombie (co-created with writer Chris Roberson), or the cast of superhero team book The Atomics. Allred also enjoys a position in the creator-driven generation that informs the current batch of independent cartoonists and has experienced his own brush with a major Hollywood studio's aborted film adaptation of Madman. Allred's other brushes with Hollywood include an independent adaptation of his comic book The G-Men from Hell, an appearance as himself in Kevin Smith's romantic comedy Chasing Amy (where he provided illustrations for a fictitious comic book), the television adaptation of iZombie, and an ongoing relationship with director Robert Rodriguez on a future Madman film. Michael Allred: Conversations features several interviews with the cartoonist from the early days of Madman's success through to his current mainstream work for Marvel Comics. To read them is to not only witness the ever-changing state of the comic book industry, but also to document Allred's growth as a creative genius.

Armageddon, and a map of millennial consciousness.

For the last ten years, urban sketcher Marc Taro Holmes has been on a mission to travel the world drawing and painting on location. Thousands of loyal readers worldwide have been following his award-winning blog at CitizenSketcher.com, learning from his freely shared articles featuring hundreds of sketchbook drawings and watercolor paintings, his first-hand experiments with field-sketching gear, free downloadable art-workshops, and numerous over-the-shoulder, step-by-step demonstrations Along the way Marc wrote the instant classic: The Urban Sketcher: Techniques for Seeing and Drawing on Location (4.6 stars 180+ reviews). Marc is also the presenter of two online courses: Travel Sketching in Mixed Media and Sketching People in Motion (available from Craftsy.com). With his latest book, Direct Watercolor Marc brings you a retrospective collection of over eighty of his watercolor paintings, painted side-by-side with fellow urban sketchers in ten different countries. This is the work of a plein-air painter at the top of his game, seen for the first time as a single body of work, and accompanied with his latest thoughts on the medium of watercolor. Also included - six completely new step-by-step demonstrations, systematically explaining his deceptively simple approach to painting. Marc shows you how to paint rapidly, with little or no preparation and the minimum of supplies, unlocking the secrets of spontaneous, expressive watercolor, with a unique personal vision. Whether you're already one of Marc's readers or are about to discover his boldly expressive approach, Direct Watercolor offers you the keys to unlocking your own adventures as a sketchbook artist, traveling watercolorist, or unconventional studio painter. Please note: This ebook version of Direct Watercolor is only suitable for full-color displays such as the Kindle Fire, or the Kindle app for tablets, phones, laptops, and computers.

Apocalypticism arose in ancient Judaism in the last centuries BCE and played a crucial role in the rise of Christianity. It is not only of historical interest: there has been a growing awareness, especially since the 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States, of the prevalence of apocalyptic beliefs in the contemporary world. To understand these beliefs, it is necessary to appreciate their complex roots in the ancient world, and the multi-faceted character of the phenomenon of apocalypticism. The Oxford Handbook of Apocalyptic Literature is a thematic and phenomenological exploration of apocalypticism in the Judaic and Christian traditions. Most of the volume is devoted to the apocalyptic literature of antiquity. Essays explore the relationship between apocalypticism and prophecy, wisdom and mysticism; the social function of apocalypticism and its role as resistance literature; apocalyptic rhetoric from both historical and postmodern perspectives; and apocalyptic theology, focusing on phenomena of determinism and dualism and exploring apocalyptic theology's role in ancient Judaism, early Christianity, and Gnosticism. The final chapters of the volume are devoted to the appropriation of apocalypticism in the modern world, reviewing the role of apocalypticism in contemporary Judaism and Christianity, and more broadly in popular culture, addressing the increasingly studied relation between apocalypticism and violence, and discussing the relationship between apocalypticism and trauma, which speaks to the underlying causes of the popularity of apocalyptic beliefs. This volume will further the understanding of a vital religious phenomenon too often dismissed as alien and irrational by secular western society.

The soul is so closely connected to life that one cannot think that it could ever be separated from life and, consequently, be mortal. Therefore, it can only be immortal. This argument from Plato's Phaedo for the immortality of the soul exhibits both a great strength and a great weakness. Its strength is that it is dif ficult for anyone to think that the soul could ever exist without life. Its weakness is, first, that not all religions accept a soul that remains the same as the center of the person - thus one speaks, for instance, in Buddhism of a "soulless theory of the human being" - and, second, that what is true does not depend on what we can think, but on what we recognize in experience and thought. The religions believe in the existence of a power that can work contrary to our experience that the soul in death is not separated from life. How the reli gions believe they can establish this continued life after death and how faith in this life is related in the religions to the interpretation of history, its progress, its apocalyptic end, and its eschatological completion and transfiguration is the theme of this book. In the culture of the West in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, faith in the secular progress of the technological control of nature and the economic or ganization of society was the enemy of faith in the immortality of the soul.

Preliminary Material /G. Mussies -- Introduction /G. Mussies -- Textual Criticism and Linguistics /G. Mussies -- Orthography /G. Mussies -- Phonology /G. Mussies -- Morphology-Introduction /G. Mussies -- The Substantive System /G. Mussies -- The Adjective System /G. Mussies -- Proper Names /G. Mussies -- Pronouns /G. Mussies -- The Numeral System /G. Mussies -- The Verb System /G. Mussies -- The Use of the Verb in the Apocalypse /G. Mussies -- Final Remarks /G. Mussies -- Indexes /G. Mussies.