July 2007
I agree with this author when he says that teaching painting comprehensively from a book is impossible - there is just too much to learn. But a good primer can point a person in the right direction, and there is much that can be learned by reading about it, and then having a go.
Getting to know what you need, and then getting to grips with it is vital and there are quite a few pages devoted to this in here. These made for useful reading, and although there is quite a list of items it is made plain that you don't need them all. It is also explained what they are all for, something frequently absent in how-to books containing these exhaustive lists. Here it is all out in the open, and is akin to being part of a class which is surely about the best thing for a practical book of this type. Preparing canvas, working out of doors, what colors you need for certain views, viewfinders, composition are all covered in the same avuncular tone, which is just what is required. The staged paintings are always useful, and there are quite a few stages to each one showing how the work progresses and again taking the mystery away. This is a useful book for beginners and improvers who want to get under the skin of a notoriously elusive subject.
* Myshelf.com *
May 07
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.
* Artbookreview.net *
