Water Paper Paint: Exploring Creativity with Watercolor and Mixed Media

Studio artist Smith Jones presents a new kind of art how-to book, in which she tackles many of the intangibles of the creative process but from a practical point of view. She is not constrained by any one medium, and she encourages readers to stretch beyond their boundaries. Various drawing, watercolor, and collage materials, as well as different methods, subject matters, and ways to display completed work, are discussed. This book will appeal to artists who want to rekindle their creative spirit, and it could inspire hobbyists and scrapbookers to take a next step. (Library Journal)
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100 Best Paintings in New York

100 Best Paintings in New York combines art history, commentary, and tourists' guide to provide you with a deeper understanding and appreciation of New York's greatest works of art. The descriptions draw attention to fascinating details in each work and look at why, where, or for what occasion they were painted. A biographical chronology of each artist accompanies the essays as well as a sample listing of works by other contemporary painters. From Jan van Eyck to Mark Rothko, from Diego Velazquez to Georgia O'Keefe, 100 Best Paintings in New York covers the complete spectrum of masterpieces in New York's great galleries.
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Glories of the Hudson: Frederic Edwin Church's Views from Olana

In 1609, Henry Hudson sailed up the river that now bears his name. The exhibition and its accompanying publication Glories of the Hudson: Frederic Edwin Church's Views from Olana mark the quadricentennial of his discovery by highlighting Frederic Church's sketches of the prospect from his hilltop home overlooking the river. Church made his first sketch of the Hudson River and Catskill Mountains from Red Hill—the south end of the property that became his home, Olana—in 1845, on a sketching expedition suggested by his teacher Thomas Cole. Returning to the Hudson Valley in 1860 as the nation's most famous and best-paid artist, Church settled on a farm on the lower slope of the Sienghenbergh, securing for himself and his new wife a splendid vantage point for studying, sketching, and painting the river.

Church continued to add land to his property, attaining new and varied vistas of the river, and crowned the estate with a Persian-inspired house designed to frame splendid views of the Hudson River and Catskill Mountains. Church never tired of his views of the river, documenting his passion for the Hudson in paintings, oil sketches, and drawings. From Olana, he observed the transformations wrought by the changing seasons, weather, and light, capturing chilly winter snows, brilliant sunsets, and passing storms in sketches executed with a few brushstrokes or autumn colors and clear winter light in more finished easel paintings. The best of these are reproduced here, in eighty-three illustrations, sixty-nine in full color, some of them published for the first time. The essay by Evelyn D. Trebilcock and Valerie A. Balint, the introduction by Kenneth John Myers, and the foreword by John K. Howat together provide an absorbing narrative of the development of the Hudson River School and its most successful artist. (Cornell University Press)
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