Sansom & Co – förlag

I have seen his status rise significantly in the art world and his reputation confirmed as one of the most exciting Abstract Expressionist painters to emerge in recent years. I have curated exhibitions in Cornwall for the last 24 years and rarely, if ever, have I seen an artist create more of a devoted following than David Mankin. His unique perspective on the Cornish landscape manages to provoke more depth of feeling, emotion, and excitement amongst art collectors and admirers, than most other artists I know.Sarah Brittain-MansbridgeDirector, Cornwall Contemporary GalleryDavid Mankin is a contemporary painter of abstract landscapes based in Cornwall. A series of sell-out shows and a fast-expanding international following has generated widespread interest in how Mankin creates his evocative paintings. David Mankin: Remembering in paint explores his creative process in detail providing the reader access to the sources and influences that inform his work.Reeve-Edwards looks into Mankin’s continually evolving studio practice: his sources, both external and internal, his methods, tools, and his materials. She places Mankin’s work and approach to painting within the wider context of the Action Painters and Abstract Expressionists of the mid-century, as well as exploring Mankin’s individual approach to abstract painting.Through its pages the reader can gain a remarkable insight into the artist’s work, process, and his profound attachment to the Cornish landscape.

Staffordshire is usually associated with the Potteries and the Black Country, the industrial heartland of the Midlands, yet it is also a county of gently rolling landscape with some of the most eccentric gardens in the country.

Geoffrey Clarke: a sculptor’s materials is the first monograph to address the full range of this artist’s work, from stained glass to sculpture, jewellery to textiles, land art to medals. Initially trained in stained glass, Geoffrey Clarke (1924–2014) came to international recognition in 1952, as one of the young British sculptors who exhibited at the Venice Biennale. He rapidly became one of the most frequently commissioned architectural sculptors of the mid-twentieth century, developing an innovative casting technique using aluminium and establishing his own foundry at his home in Suffolk. Clarke’s versatility secured him commissions from banks, offices, universities and cathedrals (most notably, Coventry), which he approached with characteristic verve. Many of these works, sadly neglected, are now finding new audiences: Spirit of Electricity (1958–61) and Spiral Nebula (1962) were both listed Grade II by Historic England in 2016.Judith LeGrove draws widely on new research, much of it from the sculptor’s archive, to illuminate Clarke’s working processes and place them in the context of not only his contemporaries but the broader history of the materials themselves. Clarke’s wide-ranging practice involved him in numerous prestigious commissions, competitions and exhibitions during a career of over fifty years. Geoffrey Clarke: a sculptor’s materials will be a significant contribution to understanding the making, exhibition and reception of twentieth-century art.This highly readable book will appeal to all those interested in post-war British art and design. It complements Judith LeGrove’s survey of Clarke’s graphic work, Geoffrey Clarke: a sculptor’s prints (Sansom, 2012).

Walks in the countryside in the area around Bristol. includes maps, photographs, and detailed routes

Peter Brown is a unique artist and a familiar figure on the pavements of Bath where he paints cityscapes from life, earning him the nickname ‘Pete the Street’. This book chronicles Peter’s work over two decades of painting the city that inspired him to return to painting, and that he calls home.Over 130 of Peter’s oil paintings and charcoal drawings are included in colour, accompanied by his anecdotes and experiences of painting in amongst the public on Bath’s streets and hills. It offers an insight into his method of working while dealing with all that plein air painting entails – all in Peter’s often humorous voice, always down-to-earth voice.A companion to his book of London paintings, this is coffee table book is the perfect gift for Bathonians, tourists and the many admirers of Peter’s work.

John Edgar Platt was one of the leading lights of 1920s and 1930s printmaking. This is the first book to consider his place in British 20th century printmaking and investigate the influence of Japanese woodblock printing on the output of Platt and his contemporaries. It features colour illustrations of all his printed work and two essays by print expert Hilary Chapman.A master of the colour woodblock print in the Japanese style, Platt combined eastern technique with a western design sensibility. His use of bold colour inspired one critic to praise the 'gamut of singing hues' found in his prints. Fellow colour woodblock artist Allen Seaby acknowledged that ‘There is no doubt that in your hands the wood print has been raised far above its former status’.The fusion of traditional European subject matter with the Japanese woodblock method enabled Platt to create some of the most original images in British printmaking. He found subjects to inspire him among the harbours and fishing boats of Cornwall and Devon and in warmer climes at St Tropez. During the 1930s he adopted a spare style based on blocks of flat colour to create strikingly modern works including Horse (1934), Lapwings (1936) and his masterpiece the triptych The Plough (1937).

This book showcases one of the treasures of Southampton City ArtGallery’s nationally-important Designated fine art collection: SirEdward Coley Burne-Jones’s Perseus Series.Burne-Jones (1833–98) was a British artist and designer closelyassociated with the later phase of the Pre-Raphaelite movement. In1875 the politician Lord Arthur Balfour commissioned Burne-Jones,whose work was often inspired by mythology and legend, to create aseries of paintings for his London home. The artist chose to re-tellthe story of the Perseus myth in William Morris’s poem ‘The EarthlyParadise’ and worked on the project for ten years but it was nevercompleted. Southampton City Art Gallery has ten full-size studies ingouache, ‘cartoons’ which Burne-Jones made to perfect his designsbefore beginning the final paintings in oil.The book includes an essay about Burne-Jones, the commission andan account of the epic Perseus story with detailed descriptions ofeach of the works in narrative form.

Walking book of country walks around Bristol. With OS maps and detailed directions.

John Hitchens achieved early acclaim in the 1960s and 70s when his work was represented by Marjorie Parr and Montpelier Studios, both in London. A series of successful exhibitions led to acquisitions of his work by many public and private collections in the UK and overseas. Since the 1990s John Hitchens’ work became increasingly studio-based and abstract, but still influenced by the landscape of the South Downs and the woodlands that surround his studio and that he has known since childhood. His main subject and source of inspiration is the landscape of the British Isles, its hills and field patterns, woodland, sea, the night sky and forms in nature. The book traces the artists’ journey from early descriptive paintings to increasingly abstract ways of interpreting landscape, reducing its forms to lines, circles and patterns. In his recent paintings John Hitchens has developed a unique personal form of abstraction and imagined landscape forms which sets it apart from conventional abstract painting. Much of this new body of work has never been exhibited and remains little known.

After a period of ‘darkness’ when Liverpool – the second city of the British Empire – lacked the kind of annual public art exhibition enjoyed by many of Britain’s other provincial centres, light dawned in 1871 when a group of town councillors gambled with public funds to create the first Liverpool Autumn Exhibition. Hailed a success, the exhibition would go on to become an annual event and a cultural institution, the Royal Academy of the North of England. From 1877 the history of the Autumn Exhibition was intertwined with that of Liverpool’s Walker Art Gallery, but it was during its first six years of growth that its immense popularity was sealed. This new study anatomises those six little-known Victorian art exhibitions, and assembles images of the key, and representative, works that were seen and sold in them.

Innumerable artists have found refuge in Britain during the past hundred and fifty years, escaping dispossession, torture, intellectual oppression or war. Their arrival frequently enriched art in Britain. Following the isolation of most émigrés in the First World War, artists who escaped Nazism in the 1930s became part of art communities in places as far apart as Hampstead, Glasgow, Merthyr Tydfil, the Swansea valley and St Ives. Gabo and Mondrian influenced Nicholson, Hepworth and Lanyon, while younger artists were inspired by radical ideas of Kurt Schwitters and John Heartfield and by the Expressionists Bloch, Herman, Kokoshcka and Koppel. Lotte Reiniger brought innovations in animation and Bill Brandt and Felix Man showed the potential of documentary photography. Refugees have come since from China, Eastern Europe, Latin America, Africa and the Middle East. The experiences of artist refugees have followed many patterns. Some stayed a short time and moved on, some made their lives in Britain, teaching, exhibiting and inspiring. In the 1940s, refugees contributed to the war effort and the defeat of fascism. The stories of later refugees’ contributions to British art are still unfolding.

The book offers both the non-specialist and specialist reader an accessible and affordable, concise introduction to the artist’s life and work, written by an established expert on British modern art. Alongside a biographical overview, shorter chapters explore key aspects of her work in more depth. Currently no such book on the artist exists.Barns-Graham’s contribution to the story of ‘St Ives’ modernism has been relatively overlooked. The book provides an opportunity to assess her work as a woman artist in an overtly masculine, post-war art world milieu, and tells how, following early promise and success, she overcame personal and professional challenges in mid-career to achieve recognition at the end of her life.

This book of collected writings by Patrick George, artist and Professor of Fine Art at the Slade School includes his private thoughts on painting from the landscape, his ideas for teaching the course which he ran for many years at the Slade, why and what to teach and how it related to contemporary art and to the history of art.It includes extracts from his notebooks – which he used for more than 70 years to record his thoughts on the ‘whole business’ of painting and drawing – and his notes for a lecture given at the Slade on Likeness, articles on his method of working and published essays on drawing and painting written for catalogues.

This book features the paintings and drawings created by The Arborealists – an informal group ofprofessional artists with an interest in painting trees and woodland – in Lady Park, an ancient, seminaturalwood on the slopes and cliffs of the Wye Gorge on the borders of England and Wales.Uniquely, the wood, which has been left to grow naturally for up to 150 years, has been studied indetail since 1944 and the fortunes of hundreds of individual trees have been tracked for three-quartersof a century. The artworks are matched with a commentary by George Peterken, who has led theresearch since the 1980s. Both artists and ecologists observe trees and woods closely, but express theirunderstanding of the wood in totally different forms. The two interests came together to deepen theirunderstanding of each other and their different perspectives in an interest they share and promote abroader interest and understanding of native woodlands generally. Elm disease, the great drought of1976, storms, snow and now ash disease have taken their toll on the ageing beech, oak, lime, ash, yew,hazel and many other species, many of which now lie prone in great heaps of dead wood and regrowth.

This third volume of work by Desmond Morris (b. 1928) covers his late years, work produced between 2012 and 2020. It is unusual for artists of an advanced age to be as productive as they were when they were young but with Morris the opposite has been the case; between the ages of 84 and 92 he has produced over 1000 works.He is quoted as saying that, if he ever found the precision of his work was waning, he would give up, but he has managed to maintain the same technical level as he did in earlier days. And he still works late into the night, as he has always done, developing endless imaginative variations of the strange biomorphic world that he first entered in 1946.

This is an update and review of the first major study of the life and art of London-born painter and collagist Francis Davison (1919–1984). After reading English and Anthropology at Cambridge, he wrote poetry, and took up drawing in 1946. On marriage to artist Margaret Mellis in 1948, the couple settled in Suffolk where they ran a smallholding at Syleham before moving to Southwold. By the early 1950s Davison’s paintings had become simplified shapes and it was not long before he ceased painting in favour of working in collage. Over the next 20 years reference to landscape disappeared and the colour range was extended. Davison relied entirely on found, used and unpainted papers, which were cut and fitted with great exactitude. By the end of his life he had developed a method of tearing paper that gave him complete mastery over his material. A very private man, Davison shunned publicity and insisted that only the most basic information should accompany the showing of his work. Reflecting this, he never received the recognition his work deserved, and there was only one substantial exhibition during his lifetime – at the Hayward Gallery in 1983 – but critical attention has grown since his death in the mid-1980s. Davison’s work was greatly admired by many of his contemporaries, most notably Patrick Heron and Roger Hilton. He is now seen as a major abstract collagist, with exhibitions at many public and commercial galleries. His work is held in the Arts Council collection.

Houses and Gardens along the river at Twickenhamshire

History of housing in Bristol from Victorian period

Balkan Fabrications explores the nature and place of Fra Newbery’s move to Balkan subjects in the 1920s. In so doing it simultaneously focuses on the work of his wife, Jessie Newbery, the original head of embroidery at Glasgow, whose interest in Balkan textiles proved an inspiration for her husband’s painterly experiments. Through probing the Newberys’ interpretations of folk crafts and conventions of southeastern Europe, the book considers what they, and others whose gazes were similarly directed, have to say about notions of womanhood and modernity. Thereby it also reveals the refinement of their respective eyes as it charts their discernment of threads of quotidian beauty.From their home in Corfe Castle, Dorset, the Newberys articulated a visual language that is shown to fit with the early-twentieth-century context of European, not least British, interest in the ways of the Balkan peoples. By highlighting political motivations as well as artistic responses Howard paints a picture of diverse, sometimes conflicting, ideas and values with wide-reaching ramifications. Parallels and alternatives to the Newberys’ creative expression of concern for the observed Balkan designs and customs are revealed through a survey of work by other, under-appreciated, artists. While most of these are British and female, e.g. De Courcy Lewthwaite Dewar, Kathleen Mann, Annie Dickinson, Ethel Mairet and Jean Milne, their art is examined alongside that of several from the peninsula (e.g. Ivan Meštrović, Nadežda Petrović, Lena Jovićić and Valcho Antonov) who convey counterpart constructions of Balkan identity. Howard’s text uncovers the couple’s notions of ‘what is art’, and, with these, a fresh understanding for the relations between art and life that is as pertinent today as it was in their era.

In Scotland’s Outer Hebrides on the rugged Isle of Lewis, five powerful award-winning monuments commemorate the island’s Land Heroes. Their courageous struggle for Land Law Reform resulted in the thriving Gaelic speaking community that Lewis encompasses today.The intention of this book is twofold: through the photography of Robin Gillanders, the design, setting and materials of these ‘sentinels in stone’ are brought together for all to enjoy, while essays by distinguished Scottish art historians, and Gaelic speaking island historian Dr Joni Buchannan, tell a vivid story of the events commemorated by each monument, examining their iconography, and exploring each work within the context of a wider cultural rebellion against the hegemony of imposed values.Compelled by Memory also pays tribute to the artist Will Maclean. He oversaw all five memorials installed between 1994 and 2019, initially designing those at Balallan, Aignish and Gress River, and then with fellow artist Marian Leven designed An Sùileachan on the west coast. They were joined by the sculptor Arthur Watson in undertaking the meditational site to mark the centenary of the tragic loss of HMV Iolaire, wrecked in a terrible storm on New Year’s Day 1919, just outside Stornoway Harbour.In each case the projects grew from wide consultation. Maclean took no fee, working in cooperation with a team of Lewis men – archaeologists, historians and the stone mason James Crawford – to fulfil the brief honouring their ancestors through these narratives in stone, to create a group of the finest examples of land art in the British Isles.

Collection of 24 walks, with maps, around the bristol area

This beautiful book, of paintings by Alice Mumford and poems by Sue Leigh, brings together exciting new work from the two makers. Collaboration is perhaps not the right word for a project in which paintings and poems sit side by side, each illuminating the other. Onlooker and reader are offered another glimpse, another view which may change the experience of looking and reading.The book includes conversations between painter and poet in which they discuss their experience of working in their different media and consider the limitations and possibilities of each. They talk about their sources of inspiration, how they might choose a subject (or does it choose them?), and the process that surrounds the making of their work. What do they share in their creative lives and how do they differ? The work of these two contemporary artists celebrates the intimacy and beauty that can be found in our everyday lives.

From sculpture to woodcuts, glass design to poetry, the work of German artist Egon Altdorf crossed boundaries. ‘Making culture behind the barbed wire’ was how Altdorf endured wartime captivity, inspiring a life dedicated to art that was innovative, spiritual and redemptive. Exhibiting in London alongside sculptors Barbara Hepworth, Lynn Chadwick and Reg Butler at the Unknown Political Prisoner exhibition (1953), he adopted an increasingly abstract approach, rooted in Biblical symbolism yet embracing different faiths, notably in designs for the outstanding interior of Wiesbaden’s new synagogue. Exploring Altdorf’s work in ten interdisciplinary chapters, this book illuminates the still-overlooked contribution of artists who reshaped postwar existence: the lost generation.

Altdorf’s earliest poems, written during military service and as a prisoner of war, reflected on nature, poetry and art. Beginning a new life, post-war, as an artist, Altdorf explored how the human figure might be depicted through increasingly abstract representations. Similarly, he refined his poetry to create ‘a new, free, melodic’ language’ with ‘a simple, song-like beauty’. Presenting Altdorf’s poetry alongside his art reveals a powerfully interconnected vision shaped but not defined by war: a humanitarian outlook informed by a profound spiritual belief.

Harold Harvey, a true ‘son of Cornwall’, has been one of the most under-rated and least written about members of the Newlyn ‘School’ of artists which flourished from 1880 to 1930\. The son of a bank manager, he grew up in Penance, and after studying under Norman Garstin and a spell in Paris, he settled to a quiet life in Newlyn with fellow-artist Gertrude, painting The Cornwall he knowS from the inside.In his introductory essay, Professor Kenneth McConkey sets Harvey in the context of the art moments of the time, and shows how his early ‘genre’ paintings of rustic and marine life, so characteristic of the early Newlyn artists, gradually gave way to more sophisticated subject matter – Harvey was noted for his sumptuous interiors – and a flatter and more decorative style of painting. His early work might be compared with that of Stanhope Forbes, while his later paintings show clear affinities with those of fellow painters such as Laura Knight and Dod Procter.Professor McConkey’s essay complements the first significant ‘life’ of Harold Harvey, researched and written by Peter Risdon and Pauline Sheppard, which is in turn illuminated by Peter Risdon’s painstakingly compiled catalogue raisonne of over 600 paintings.Harvey’s painting output was prodigious, and this book includes approximately 100 illustrations of his favoured subjects: the Cornish at work, children at play, and intimate interior scenes and conversation pieces. Many of his contemporaries in Newlyn were visiting ‘observers’, but for Harold Harvey, who rarely went outside the county even though a regular exhibitor at the Royal Academy, painting the Cornish world ‘because it was there’ was his whole life.

The painter, Romi Behrens, lived in West Cornwall for nearly seventy years, voraciously painting the subjects around her every day. Her artistic career was as long as it was broad and spanned many genres, including still life, portraiture and landscape painting. This is the first monograph to pay homage to the extent of her career, providing a selected but characteristically-diverse range of visual and written material from the artist’s oeuvre and archives, starting with Romi's earliest paintings of her family, friends and the streets of Penzance and extending to religious themes done later in her life.Rachel Rose Smith gives chronological shape to the span of Romi’s work, analysing the varying relationships throughout between the person and her work, as it reflected the many identities she held, including painter, woman, wife and mother. The author also explores rich connections embedded within her ways of seeing to formative examples from the history of painting, including Rembrandt, Van Gogh, Matisse, Cezanne and Picasso, with whom she arguably worked in dialogue. Romi’s works, however, are very much her own throughout, with those forms of expression and attention learnt from precedents mingling with her own humour, flair and surrounding life. Romi’s Christian faith and the loving focus she gave to her many subjects, whether friends or inanimate objects, are similarly explored, revealing a body of work which is both tender and vibrant, as well as persistent and constantly on the move.

Herry Perry (1897-1962) is an important, but neglected, artist of the 1920s-50s. The book brings together all aspects of her art for the first time. She studied at the Central School of Arts and Crafts (now Central Saint Martins) from 1924-7 and was taught wood engraving there by Noel Rooke. Her first love was wood engraving but she quickly moved on to use the wide range of other skills she acquired at the Central. Her best known work is the posters she designed for Frank Pick at London Transport from 1927-38. She produced some sixty witty and inventive posters during this time. Some of these included birds-eye view maps of areas of London. She was also commissioned to paint murals, most famously two on R.M.S. Queen Mary in 1936, and also a map mural for Rothamsted Research Station in 1932 (which can still be seen there). She also illustrated various books, some of which were written by her. The text and illustrations often show her sense of humour. The Second World War and the death of Frank Pick in 1941 put an end to her poster work. After the War she painted a large number of pub signs for various London and Kent breweries.

John Hitchens achieved early acclaim in the 1960s and ’70s. A series of successful exhibitions led to acquisitions of his work by numerous public and private collections in the UK and overseas. From 1990 onwards he began to explore a new approach to painting, one that involved him working more closely with the land, with natural materials and objects found in the landscape. At the same time he developed a highly personal form of abstraction and imagined landscape forms, setting his work apart from more conventional abstract painting.Grounds for Art  provides the first  extensive survey of John Hitchens’ work from 1990 onwards in which he has radically pursued his painting in close relationship with the natural world. These works are deeply rooted in the rural environment of his home and the surrounding Sussex landscape. It fully illustrates the breadth and power of this recent work, featuring his paintings on shaped and mixed-media canvases, as well as the artist’s land art projects on the Sussex coast. Other chapters examine his work with wood, paintings on stones, and placements of found objects.Sandy Mallet’s text is based on extensive interviews with John Hitchens, and is supplemented with the artist’s own comments on his paintings.The book is the second major study of John Hitchens’ paintings. It follows five years after the publication of Aspects of Landscape, the first overview of the artist’s work, compiled to mark his 80th birthday in 2020.

In Walking & Talking John Dixon Hunt explores the here of the earth beneath our feet and, in a hinterland of thought and conversation, the elsewhere of the mind. He takes us on multiple journeys to both worlds in the company of great writers and artists: John Evelyn on his ascent of a lively Vesuvius in 1645; Daniel Defoe on his disappointing visit to Buxton and the Devil’s Arse; John Gay and William Hogarth in London; and Charles Dickens and the ‘inexhaustible food for speculation’ of Victorian street-life. In pursuit of elsewhere, the author follows mysterious, sometimes hidden paths (of the sort that native Australians call ‘dream tracks’), to reveal more malleable landscapes where walking indulges the mind as much as the body. It’s a place where landscape, poetry and thought cohere – sometimes literally in the sculpture of Ian Hamilton Finlay – where carefully plotted gardens invite the walker to enter a world of curated make-believe and city streets have as many stories as there are people. On wild Lakeland fells or in urban wandering, from the land of Wordsworth and Wainwright to the great wall of Teardrop Park by the site of New York’s twin towers, and from the great Picturesque parklands of England to a modern Devon garden of myth and metaphor, Walking & Talking is a beautifully illustrated companion to our simplest – and most complex – of pleasures.