art book review parka

Lines and Colors

Parka Blogs Art Book Reviews

Posted on December 4, 2008 Author cparker 2 Comments

The big selections of books available through the online sellers works well for finding a book that you already are familiar with and have decided to buy, but browsing , a practice of key importance to all book lovers, is hard to duplicate in the window of a web browser (despite the name).

This is particularly difficult in the case of art, illustration and design books.

The online booksellers have tried to make up for this in various ways with reviews, recommendations, ratings, and more recently, small visual excerpts form the books.

The latter, as exemplified by Amazon, is particularly bad at delivering on its premise, hampered perhaps by overzealous intellectual property lawyers and poor think-through on the part of the company. These “Look Inside” features usually disappoint, showing a table of contents, some opening pages and a bit of an index, but little (if any) of the heart of a book. I get the impression the preview pages are chosen by an algorithm or numeric formula, rather than a person.

Wouldn’t it be nice if there were a site where art related books are reviewed and described, accompanied by a few carefully chosen (by a human), high-resolution images that really give you an idea of the book’s visual content?

Enter Parka Blogs , a blog by Teih Yi Chie, an illustrator and cartoonist, blogging under the alias of Parka, who makes a point of doing just that.

The Art Book List is heavy on movie and animation concept art, illustration, anime and science fiction, but within that vein does a great job on the books that are reviewed. (If anyone starts a review blog like this for gallery and museum art books, please let me know!)

The reviews themselves are succinct and give a nice overview of the book. The killer feature though, is the selection of well-chosen images from the books, images that are actually representative of the books’ content (are you listening, big-time online booksellers?), and often supplemented with video “flip-throughs”, in which the entire book is quickly flipped through, giving you on overall impression of the amount and kind of images that make up the body of the book.

The still images are linked to larger versions on Flickr, the largest of which are nicely high resolusion, giving you a browsing experience that is next-best to actually having the book in your hands when deciding what to buy.

The Art Book list is divided into types of movies, individual studios (like Pixar and Studio Ghibli), as well as collections of work by individual concept artists, illustrators and others.

There is also a shorter list of Intsructional Books .

The site provides a list of relevant links; and the blog itself can also, of course, be read like a blog, browsing back by date or searching out topics of interest. In addition to the reviews, he covers topics of interest in similar veins. I came across Parka Blogs when he was kind enough to post a brief article about Lines and Colors a few days ago.

The Parka Blogs book reviews are accompanied by links to the reviewed books on Amazon. Purchases made through his links return a small percentage to the reviewer so he can, what else?, buy more books to enjoy and review.

(Images above: from Parka’s reviews of The Art of Star Wars Episode III Revenge of the Sith , Miyazaki’s Magical World , Covers by James Jean and The Art of Kung Fu Panda . See my posts on Hayao Miyazaki and James Jean .)

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Book Review: The Art and Soul of Dune

Submitted by Teoh Yi Chie on December 8, 2021 - 1:26pm

The Art and Soul of Dune is a 240-page hardcover companion to Denis Villeneuve 's 2020 Dune . This book features the concept art, film stills, behind-the-scenes photography and production stories on the making of the film.

There are two publishers for the book: Insights Editions and Titan Books . Both feature the same number of pages. The edition I'm reviewing is from Titan Books and comes with a glossy slipcase with a matte textured print of a sandworm on it. The glossy slipcase looks classy but it's also very susceptible to fingerprints.

This is an excellent artbook packed with beautiful visuals. There's almost and equal mix of art and film stills. The art direction and visual aesthetics sometimes make it difficult to tell the art from the film stills. There are also many behind-the-scenes photos on the film making process, such as photos of the location sets, Baron's full-body prosthetics, how they filmed the oil bath scene, and more.

Many have claimed that Dune the novel is not something you can make into a movie. Well, we have that movie now and you can read all about how the film was made with the extensive text which includes interviews with the film makers. Author Tanya Lapointe did a great job putting this book together. She also authored two Blade Runner 2049 artbooks and that film was also directed by (her husband) Denis Villeneuve.

● A Limited Edition version of The Art and Soul of Dune, featuring an exclusive cloth cover with ornate, foil-stamped Atreides and Harkonnen symbols. ● An exclusive companion volume titled simply Dune, featuring the candid and intimate on-set photography of Oscar-nominated director of photography Greig Fraser, accompanied by Josh Brolin’s personal perspective and recollections of the production. This volume, designed, custom printed, and hand bound with a variety of fine Japanese papers, provides an authentic and tactile experience that reflects the aesthetics of the film. ● A signed and numbered signature card individually inscribed by director Denis Villeneuve, author and executive producer Tanya Lapointe, star Josh Brolin, and director of photography Greig Fraser. (Note: The first printing signature card included star Timothée Chalamet.) ● A unique, cloth-bound reproduction of the Fremkit instruction booklet prop created for the movie, featuring 80 pages of exclusive unseen art from the film. ● Packaged in an elaborate deluxe clamshell case wrapped in saifu cloth featuring copper-stamped bespoke imagery based on the Bene Gesserit designs created for the movie.

This book was borrowed from Basheer Graphic Books for review purposes. You can order the book from them. Check with Basheer on Facebook .

The Art and Soul of Dune is available at Amazon ( US | CA | UK | DE | FR | IT | ES | AU | JP | CN )

Visit Amazon to check out more reviews.

The links below are affiliate links, which means I earn some commission from each purchase, but at no extra cost to you.

Here are direct links to the book: Amazon.com | Amazon.ca | Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.de | Amazon.fr | Amazon.it | Amazon.es | Amazon.com.au | Amazon.co.jp | Amazon.cn

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• art book reviews
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• insight editions
• basheer sponsored
• denis villeneuve
• tanya lapointe

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The Coming World: Ecology as the New Politics 2030–2100 at Garage Museum, Moscow

Tom Jeffreys Reviews 28 November 2019 ArtReview

The rhetoric of environmental emergency can be adopted not only by artists or activists calling for systemic change but also by the politicians and multinational conglomerates intent on preventing it. In declaring ‘ecology as the new politics’, then, exactly what kind of politics are Garage MCA curators Snejana Krasteva and Ekaterina Lazareva advocating? And what kind of ecology?

The Coming World is a wide-ranging exhibition, maybe too wide. It takes over the entire museum, its galleries and atrium, and even sprawls outside, into Gorky Park. Hoardings have been emblazoned with stirring quotations by artists and thinkers. Allora & Calzadilla have scattered yellow artificial flowers across the concrete outside Garage. Yet in offering such a multiplicity of responses, words like ‘politics’ and ‘ecology’ begin to lose their specificity.

Upstairs, the exhibition is divided into discrete sections. Behind a closed door, an introductory gallery gives a haphazard tour of nature and aesthetics. This is least interesting when it treads familiar art-historical terrain (not another Dutch landscape!) and strongest when favouring the idiosyncratic. A black-and-white documentary photograph of three men holding their noses is powerful in its silliness. It shows an action by Gnezdo, a short-lived satirical art collective of the Soviet era. The title is a neat summary: A Minute of Not Breathing to Protect the Environment (1977).

Across Garage’s main gallery, water is a central concern in the works of Hans Haacke, Tita Salina, Allan Sekula and others. Like Gnezdo, Critical Art Ensemble’s Environmental Triage (2018–19) stands out for the complex ramifications of its simple idea and for probing the limits of individual agency. The work presents samples from four water sources, each facing different problems: Moscow tap water; Moskva River; the Volga; and Lake Baikal, an icon of Russian natural beauty threatened by industry and development. There is a short text on each, and in a nod to Haacke, visitors are encouraged to vote for the one most important to them. But what does participating actually achieve? To me, visiting oligarchic Russia from Brexit Britain, this impotent performance of democratic choice is quietly devastating.

The exhibition’s boldest curatorial gambit is its least successful. Housed within an architectural structure whose curves nod to 1960s space aesthetics, ‘Profiles of the Future’ is a series of capsules each given over to a single artist. The result is a procession of works by Patricia Piccinini, Pamela Rosenkranz, Tomás Saraceno and more. Where most rooms contain a single piece, Sergei Kishchenko presents a small solo show that includes blown-up photographs of seeds, sculptures made from tufa limestone reminiscent of Palaeolithic Venus figurines – their toes sunk into plinths of earth – and video. The works have developed out of the artist’s long engagement with agriculture and the politics of reproduction: here, seeds, crops and fertility cults. Kishchenko’s is the richest, most intriguing contribution to this section of the exhibition. 

The curators aimed, according to the exhibition guide, to present ‘various scenarios for possible action’, but in creating a linear walkway in which no work speaks to any other, there is an inexorable sense – Kishchenko aside – that we are simply trudging onwards, with barely time to pause. Such a sense of inevitability is no basis for a politics of action.

The Coming World: Ecology as the New Politics 2030–2100 , Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow, 28 June – 1 December 2019

From the December 2019 issue of ArtReview

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John Barth, innovative postmodernist novelist, dies at 93

The Associated Press

ANNAPOLIS, Md. — John Barth, the playfully erudite author whose darkly comic and complicated novels revolved around the art of literature and launched countless debates over the art of fiction, died Tuesday. He was 93.

Johns Hopkins University, where Barth was an emeritus professor of English and creative writing, confirmed his death in a statement.

Along with William Gass , Stanley Elkin and other peers, Barth was part of a wave of writers in the 1960s who challenged standards of language and plot. The author of 20 books including "Giles Goat-Boy" and "The Sot-Weed Factor," Barth was a college writing instructor who advocated for postmodernism to literature, saying old forms were used up and new approaches were needed.

Barth's passion for literary theory and his innovative but complicated novels made him a writer's writer. Barth said he felt like Scheherazade in "The Thousand and One Nights," desperately trying to survive by creating literature.

He created a best-seller in 1966 with "Giles Goat-Boy," which turned a college campus into a microcosm of a world threatened by the Cold War, and made a hero of a character who is part goat.

The following year, he wrote a postmodern manifesto, "The Literature of Exhaustion," which argued that the traditional novel suffered from a "used-upness of certain forms." The influential Atlantic Monthly essay described the postmodern writer as one who "confronts an intellectual dead end and employs it against itself to accomplish new human work."

He clarified in another essay 13 years later, "The Literature of Replenishment," that he didn't mean the novel was dead — just sorely in need of a new approach.

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"I like to remind misreaders of my earlier essay that written literature is in fact about 4,500 years old (give or take a few centuries depending on one's definition of literature), but that we have no way of knowing whether 4,500 years constitutes senility, maturity, youth, or mere infancy," Barth wrote.

Barth frequently explored the relationship between storyteller and audience in parodies and satire. He said he was inspired by "The Thousand and One Nights," which he discovered while working in the classics library of Johns Hopkins University.

"It is a quixotic high-wire act to hope, at this late hour of the century, to write literary material and contend with declining readership and a publishing world where businesses are owned by other businesses," Barth told The Associated Press in 1991.

Barth pursued jazz at the Juilliard School of Music in New York, but found he didn't have a great talent for music, and so turned to creative writing, a craft he taught at Penn State University, SUNY Buffalo, Boston University and Johns Hopkins.

His first novel, "The Floating Opera," was nominated for a National Book Award. He was nominated again for a 1968 short story collection, "Lost in the Funhouse," and won in 1973 for "Chimera," three short novels focused on myth.

His breakthrough work was 1960's "The Sot-Weed Factor," a parody of historical fiction with a multitude of plot twists and ribald hijinks. The sprawling, picaresque story uses 18th-century literary conventions to chronicle the adventures of Ebenezer Cooke, who takes possession of a tobacco farm in Maryland.

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Barth was born on Maryland's Eastern Shore and set many of his works there. Both his 1982 "Sabbatical: A Romance" and his 1987 "The Tidewater Tales" feature couples sailing on the Chesapeake Bay.

Barth also challenged literary conventions in his 1979 epistolary novel "Letters," in which characters from his first six novels wrote to each other, and he inserted himself as a character as well.

"My ideal postmodernist author neither merely repudiates nor merely imitates either his twentieth-century modernist parents or his nineteenth-century premodernist grandparents. He has the first half of our century under his belt, but not on his back."

Barth kept writing in the 21st century.

In 2008, he published "The Development," a collection of short stories about retirees in a gated community. "Final Fridays," published in 2012, was his third collection of non-fiction essays.