Inspiring art books! New additions to my art library
Join me as I explore three art books that have captured my imagination lately: a celebration of self-taught artists, a vibrant take on contemporary landscapes, and a delicious sketchbook collection. From wonky cats to fields of purple flowers, I'm so excited about these books and how they're influencing my own creative journey.
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I have three books to share with you today. Let's do these one at a time.
This first one I was thrilled to bits with. We went to Louisiana to see an exhibition recently, and they had a huge table full of half-price art books. I spotted this one, which has actually been on my wish list for a while. It's called "Non Conformers: A New History of Self-Taught Artists". I have a particular weakness for self-taught artists, especially given that I am one myself. It's probably my favourite kind of art. I love the creativity and the complete randomness of it.
This book is just amazing and has some of my absolute favourite artists in it. It runs the gamut - there's everybody in here. There are a couple that I particularly wanted to show you that have been a huge influence on me. Ah, here we go - Niki de Saint Phalle. She makes these incredible sculptures, this kind of Gaudí-esque style. We were in Barcelona recently, and yeah, Park Güell - this is sort of reminiscent of that. She does these huge women. I have a book somewhere, which I'll show you in a later video, which is just her work. This particularly is her Tarot Park in Italy. They're just magnificent - so wonky and creative and exuberant. There's no pretension in them at all. They're just glorious.
There's somebody else here that really caught my eye. I love these - Prophet Isaiah Robertson. Just look at that. That's just pure joy of expression coming through. I love it so much.
I think Henry Darger is also in here. If you don't know Henry Darger, he's one to look up - a very interesting person, almost definitely neurodivergent. So obviously there's a special kinship there for me. He did these enormous works - it was like a whole epic book. Basically, no one ever saw it until after he died, and it was just this epic saga of little girls who have to save the world and these epic battles. Just incredible. He's really worth looking into. There's a wonderful documentary about him, which I can't remember the name of, but I'll put it in the description so you can check that out.
This whole book is just full of weird, wonderful, colourful, incredible art, and I can't wait to sit down and - is that a cat? Oh, wonky cat. Oh, I love a wonky cat. Fascinating, really beautiful, really exciting.
Next up we have "Contemporary Landscapes" by Soraya French. Landscapes is something that I've just started to dip my toe in. It's never appealed to me before, but I'm really enjoying seeing how various artists approach landscape. Soraya French manages to do landscapes that aren't your average. They're full of colour and abstraction and vibrancy.
I love the way she uses colour and abstraction. It reminds me a little bit of Joan Eardley, a little bit of Barbara Rae, a little bit of Emily Powell. There's just this gorgeous use of colour. One of the things that really fascinates me about art in general is how little information you need to give as an artist, and how much the brain of the viewer will fill in all the gaps for you. My default is always to do something quite detailed, and I'm always trying to pull back and lean into a sort of paucity of line, a paucity of information, and try to make the viewer a part of the artwork. I want your brain, when you look at a piece of my work, to do some of the work. So we're sort of co-creating this image together, and it means that everybody is going to have a slightly different interpretation of it. I find that really exciting.
Landscapes is not something that's ever really appealed to me, but recently, I've been getting into it. I'm intrigued and want to try and see if I can do something like the way I render flowers in my floral work, and see if I can do that with a more expanded scene with both countryside and cityscapes.
Everyone says, "Oh, I don't like purple," but purple is one of my favourite colours. I think it's beautiful, and this is stunning. So if you hate purple, sorry, you're wrong. Look at this - absolutely beautiful. I love the way that she creates this sense of depth and distance using very little information. She's not giving you much there at all, and yet somehow your brain sees the foreground, the mid-ground, the background. Beautiful.
Finally, this one has just arrived, and I'm super excited about it. Emma Carlisle is an illustrator. She has a Patreon, which I'm an enormous fan of. She's a lovely human being, incredibly generous with her knowledge and skills. She does these books of her sketchbooks, and they are absolutely beautiful. I have another one - she did this "Devon and Cornwall Sketchbooks", which I mean, I spent a lot of my formative years in the Southwest and grew up around Devon and Cornwall. So this was particularly interesting to me.
She's just published this new one, which is her sort of transitional sketches - the sketches that she felt over the course of the year have been the most meaningful to her practice generally. It's just beautiful sketchbook pages. You can see her experiments and figuring things out as she goes along. I think that's one of the most beautiful and impactful things about seeing an artist's sketchbook - you actually get to see the visual thought process, spot the patterns as they come up, and see just how people are solving problems.
Personally, I like it because there's often this idea that when you're an artist, especially if you're doing it professionally, every single piece of work you produce is supposed to be a masterpiece. It's absolutely not. 99% of what most artists produce is just play, ideas, scribbles, development. Sometimes it's very beautiful, but often it's just, "How do I solve this problem? What happens if I do this? What happens if I put this material with that material?"
Not every single page in your sketchbook is perfect. Not everything that comes out the end of your brush is perfect. And I think this is such a beautiful example of seeing the development. There's beauty in that as well. These images are lovely - I love her cats, obviously. But there's also the joy in seeing the mess, seeing how they progress, and seeing what happens as an artist does the work. Because that's what this is - this is the work, this is the practice, this is the development.
I'm so grateful to Emma and to every artist who shares their behind-the-scenes process. It's one of the things that inspired me to start this YouTube channel - just giving people an insight into what it actually looks like, because I've appreciated that so much from other people as well. So yeah, really beautiful book. I will spend a lot of time poring over this one and getting inspired. Emma Carlisle is fabulous.
