The Pocket Scavenger by Keri Smith

I now spend my time looking at the ground for stuff.  This is a book version of the scavenger hunts you used to go on as a kid, with a bit of a twist.  You are given items to find and attach into the book and then invited to randomly select an alteration such as adding text or triangles.  It's been good fun, I'm 38 and am happily looking for things with my 9 year old who is as delighted as I am when we find something.  My only concern is hygeine and making sure in using this you didn't cut yourself.  It is also a bit American orientated, I think British rubbish is a bit different in quality.  It does make you look at the world differently, I now see all those bits and pieces in the gutters I would have ignored before.

The Art of Wonder: A History of Seeing by Julian Spalding

Spalding has written an art history book that is totally different, exchanging chronology for a narrative about how our ancestors responded to phenomena such as the changing seasons, day and night, birth and death and sun and moon and made sense of it with the medium of art.


The first chapters after the Introduction are thematic: the stars, our vision of the world, the sun and moon, death and darkness, before moving on to modern art and the exchanging of representation of reality for expression of the internal world of the artist.

It is a difficult book to describe, Spalding writes idiosyncratically bringing together diverse strands from across the entire panapoly of human history, and I may not agree with all his jumps of the imagination but I enjoyed it throroughly because it made me think and appreciate the power of art not as a luxury but as something far more fundamental to our needs as human beings since the earliest human history.

Art and Propaganda by Toby Clark


Clark writes a comprehensive coverage of art propaganda in chronological form.

The first chapter charts propaganda's beginnings in suffrage, the avant garde and revolution, chapter 2 covers Fascism, chapter 3 Communism, chapter 4 Wartime, and chapter 5 up to the present day, protest art, Vietnam, AIDS and feminism.

In some ways this is a really good book, covering the art of propaganda through its most potent forms in Nazi Germany, wartime Britain and communist USSR to the present day, but I felt it was also a bit lacking.  As a book about art I would have lot more commentary on how the pieces of art worked, explanation of symbolism, interpretation of the use of light, colour etc.  Clark just gives historical background to each piece which is useful but incomplete.

The last chapter fails to address street art, a major form of protest.  Also, there is not enough coverage of the monumental statuary and architecture of fascism and communism.  Could have been a much better book.

Learning to Paint and Draw by Hazel Harrison

As a newbie kind of lost in the world of materials and techniques but desperate to express myself this is a brilliant book, covering briefly many aspects of drawing and painting, using watercolours, pastels, graphite and coloured pencils, oils and acrylics, and pastels.  A really good starting point.

Power of Art by Simon Schama

A great introduction to looking at paintings, this book is a companion to a BBC tv series (which I haven't seen) but stands on its own as an introduction to monumental works of art by Caravaggio, Bernini, Rembrandt, David, Turner, Van Gogh, Picasso and Rothko.

I'd always shied away from Caravaggio but was able to admit to myself my fear of his sheer power and sensuality and to enjoy it. I learned about the beauty of Bernini's sculpture and renewed my acquaintance with Van Gogh's delicious and disturbing viscerality and Picasso's timeless denunciation: Guernica.

My only concern is that Schama does at times appear to equate extremity of personality with extremity of vision, as if you cannot be an amazing painter without having a disturbing personal life, and I don't think this is necessarily correct