After all the quite innovative books on oil painting that have started to appear, it’s rather nice to find something that takes a rather more traditional approach.
Working largely in impasto and using more subdued colours than some of his contemporaries, James Horton paints a broad selection of landscape subjects both in the UK and across Europe. His demonstrations are fairly compact, showing the main stages of the construction of the painting rather than going into a lot of detail about individual brush-strokes and this well suits his style of painting which is not, itself, over-detailed. Each section – skies, water, trees & foliage, hills & mountains, seas & beaches, seasons – finishes off with a small gallery of complementary works which also illustrate the subject in question.
This is not a basic introduction to oil painting (there are plenty of those), but rather a look at a particular style that’s worthy of further investigation by those with a basic grasp of the medium.
First published 2007
£9.99
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