Brief Lessons in Seeing Differently || Frances Ambler

This is that rare beast, a book which is as valuable to the artist as it is to the art consumer.

Under a series of heads – See things in a fresh light, Learn the advantages of a different angle, Give yourself time and be still, etc – Frances Ambler provides advice on how to improve the quality of your art. Each section is short, as the title implies, and provides an outline that’s effectively a model for further study. Go away and think about it is her message. Much of it could also apply to ways of looking at paintings, hence the convenient dual appeal.

It’s an excellent idea and succeeds admirably in its aim to be thought-provoking. The use of examples adds weight to the arguments, but you’d better hope you have access to the artists and works cited as there are only a few illustrations, and those are grouped together at the back. To be fair, including more would take this beyond the realm of the budget pocket book into a larger, possibly coffee table tome. To avoid it simply being a large slab of text, the designers have used typographic tricks which you might find annoying if you hang around too long.

For all that, it’s a fun book, which I think is what it intends. After all, as Frances says, “The mundane becomes special as soon as you pay attention to it”.

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Urban Drawing || Phil Dean

“Tate Sketch Club”, it says prominently and promisingly at the top of the cover of this rather excellent guide. The front flap also promotes a life drawing volume in the same series. But for recent events one suspects the series, which has much to recommend it, would be more widely populated. Still, at least future volumes are something to look forward to.

The information sheet tells me that Phil is theshoreditchsketcher.com and that’s very much of the moment. Inner city, hipster and online – I’m positively aching.

Arch comments aside, he’s also very good – it’s absolutely essential that, if you’re going to put the name of a prestigious institution to a series of guides (and it’s becoming increasingly common) that the authors are top-notch. Phil’s style is that of the urban sketcher – very freehand, movement in straight lines, buildings ancient and modern, people – where they appear – engrossed in their diurnal lives.

The author biography tells us that Phil is a graphic designer and runs his own creative agency and this shows up in the drawings – they have a feeling of an architectural impression – those imagined scenes of idealised life designed to get public and planners onside. That, however, is no bad thing as this is mainly about buildings and there’s a softer edge than I’ve implied. I said of people “when they appear” because Phil is not Adebanji Alade and his subject is mainly the built environment, on which he’s very sound. He works in pen and pencil, is good with half-tones and can do very good figure work when he wants to. He also manages to knock the tricky subject of perspective off in only a few paragraphs too. He can talk the talk as well as draw the draw.

Urban sketching is very much the business of the moment – I can remember when books on townscapes were the hardest sell in the business. Quite whether books on it will go down quite so well with everyone working from home remains to be seen. This, though, concentrating on structures rather than crowds, may be just what you were look for right now.

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In 50 Works – Van Gogh/Matisse || John Cauman

There’s no shortage of books on the Old Masters, from scholarly interpretations to coffee-table collections of works.

Think of these, therefore, as manageable and affordable primers that contain enough biographical and analytical information to satisfy without overwhelming and which ultimately stand or fall on the curatorial ability of the author – to put it simply, how good is he at making a truly representative selection of the artist’s work?

There’s no definite answer to that question, as long as styles and chronology are respected (it’s worth noting that the illustrations appear in date order and, indeed, are dated). Your own favourites may be omitted, potentially leaving you shouting at the page. On the other hand, sometimes someone else’s view can lend perspective to your own – or maybe you just want the heavy lifting done for you.

However, it does work and, while not quite at pocket-money prices, these are genuinely good value and sit nicely in what is – let’s not be shy about this – a crowded market.

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St Ives- the art and the artists || Chris Stephens

Published in conjunction with the Tate, who very much have skin in this game, this thorough but eminently accessible volume presents an overview of the artists who have worked in St Ives.

The approach is broadly chronological, but is not so rigid that schools, groupings and movements cannot be accommodated. There is, inevitably, a lot of information and this is not something for those who would prefer a coffee table book concentrating on the works themselves, although it is comprehensively illustrated. At the same time, it is not so academic as to be of interest only to the dedicated historian of the period. This is a difficult balance to achieve, but something Chris Stephens has pulled off really rather admirably.

Although the main period of the St Ives school covered only some twenty-five years, the story continues into the 1960s and concludes with the opening of Tate St Ives in 1993. The names you’d expect to find are all here: Barbara Hepworth, Ben Nicholson, Peter Lanyon and Patrick Heron, but so too are less well-known names as well as sources of influence from Europe and elsewhere.

This is a story worth telling and, although much has been written about the art of St Ives, none of it has quite encompassed the arc of history that is contained here.

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Patrick Heron || Andrew Wilson & Sarah Matson

This guide to the life and work of Patrick Heron – regarded by many as one of the Twentieth Century’s greatest artists – has been published to coincide with what the blurb describes as a major retrospective at Tate St Ives and the Turner Contemporary, Margate. Having seen the exhibition, I’d say it’s more of an easily-manageable introduction to the artist’s work but that it is, in many ways, all the better for it.

Patrick Heron can be a bit of a challenge for the newcomer. Look for objects and themes and you won’t necessarily find them. I was immensely aided by the show’s notes, which helpfully tell us that, for Heron, the image was the image and that shapes and edges are not just more important than representation, but the work’s raison d’être itself. Knowing that provides an instant way in and it becomes possible to appreciate Heron’s use of format and colour as well as his method of application, often involving small brushes on large canvasses. Splashing paint around, this is not.

I’ve had this book sitting on the shelf for rather longer than I intended, but I’m glad of that because it means I can now say that it’s a fantastic introduction to Patrick Heron’s work as well as his place in relation to the French and American painting that strongly influenced him.

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