For a contemporary artist of serious aesthetic purpose, David Hockney enjoys immense public visibility. His personality, ideas about art, and inventiveness both of imagery and of techniques ranging from oil painting to photography to faxes are captured by Peter Clothier in this concise but comprehensive overview. From his theatrical early canvases to his more recent photographic collages and operatic set designs, Hockney has tackled the challenge of space on a grand scale. At the same time, much of his work has been devoted to the things most dear to him - friends, family, home, and studio. Invention, the driving force behind Hockney's art, is in good part play. This color-rich volume conveys Hockney's serious delight in making art that gives pleasure to both its creator and its audience.

This visually stunning book will be a revelation to admirers of Northwest visionary artist Morris Graves (b. 1910) who know him chiefly through his profoundly original, metaphysically charged paintings of chalices, birds, snakes, and other small creatures. Graves' national reputation began with the Museum of Modern Art's exhibition "Americans 1942 - 18 Artists from 9 States." Throughout his long career as one of America's most highly regarded painters of the transcendental, Graves has been less well known for his later flower paintings, represented here in more than fifty full-page color plates encompassing selected works from 1938 through 1992. A number of these paintings first captured public attention in 1983-84, during the course of a retrospective, "Morris Graves, Vision of the Inner Eye," organized by the Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C., which traveled to six major American museums. In the past decade, Graves' flower paintings have continued to command increasing critical and public acclaim. In the view of noted art critic Theodore F. Wolff, whose superb analysis informs this presentation, Graves has created several dozen of the finest American flower paintings of the century. A product of Graves' later years, these serene and radiantly beautiful paintings show distinct compositional parallels with a significant number of his early symbolic and metaphoric works. At the same time, they incorporate the dramatic shift in emphasis that took place in his art during the 1970s, when flowers and light began to embody his evolving sense of what color could be and could do. To a very real degree, notes Wolff, the flower paintings are Graves' culminating work, epitomizing and summarizing his lifelong attempts to translate the spiritually ineffable into pictorial form.

Georges Seurat, one of the most popular and admired of post-Impressionist painters, has been the focus of much attention in recent years. This book by Paul Smith views the artist in a new context and explodes some of the myths that have grown up about him. Challenging the assumption that Seurat

Briefly traces the careers of all three Wyeths, shows a selection of their work, and discusses their approach to painting

Presents paintings, pastels, and prints by the American impressionist and brief notes that explain the circumstances surrounding each composition

The author of Writing Down the Bones presents a meditation on the painter's sensibility, exploring her own artistic methods and how they relate to her life, illustrated by more than sixty full-color reproductions of her paintings. Original.