Royal Academy of Arts – serie

With an eclectic practice embracing urban planning, public sculpture and industrial design, Ian Ritchie CBE RA is one of Britains most visionary architects. Published here for the first time, his poems, aphorisms and etchings witness a profound engagement with the built environment. Ritchie writes poetry in order to better understand a project, using words to investigate the particularities or challenges of a site, and the process of composition to bring ideas into focus. His calligraphic etchings imagine the shape or spirit of commissions in simple but powerful strokes. Variably pragmatic and philosophical, often witty, his aphorisms on work and life from the importance of light to the nature and possibility of progress reveal a modernists belief in the potential of architecture to improve society. These are lines of thought, committed to paper before any designing begins. They demonstrate that, for Ritchie, being an architect is many more things besides. Ian Ritchie CBE RA is an internationally acclaimed architect. His built designs include the Leipzig Glass Hall, the Spire of Dublin, the elevator shafts for the Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, and the RSC Courtyard Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, winner of the RIBA National Award in 2007.

The fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm according to David Hockney are like no other version you will have read before. Although inspired by earlier illustrators of the tales, from Arthur Rackham to Edmund Dulac, Hockney's extraordinary etchings re-imagine these strange and supernatural stories for a modern audience, capturing their distinctive atmosphere in a style that is recognisably the artist's own. Reprinted for the first time since its original publication in 1969, Hockney's book brings together some well-known tales - Rapunzel, Rumpelstiltskin - with others that are less familiar. Informed by great art of the past, attuned to idiosyncrasies of character and incident, and fresh in execution and content, his illustrations invite us to read each one as if for the first time.

Chris Orr MBE RA is one of Britain's foremost printmakers. In this definitive book he and Robert Hewison explore his remarkable printmaking career, from his early experiments as a student in the 1960s, when he first discovered how etching could enhance his drawing, to his later innovations in lithography, silkscreen and digital printing, and his ingenious use of long-forgotten processes. Hewison also considers the significant contribution that Orr has made to printmaking as a teacher, first at Cardiff College of Art and then in London at Central St Martins and the Royal College of Art, where he was Professor of Printmaking from 1998 to 2008. Illustrated with over 150 of Orr's theatrical, witty and wilfully allusive prints, this book looks for the first time in depth at the gloriously original output of a ceaseless inventor.

The first publication devoted to the work of Sydney Lee RA (18661949), this fully illustrated and annotated catalogue raisonne of his prints offers a long overdue appraisal of his contribution to British art. Primarily a painter, Lee was widely acclaimed during his lifetime for his virtuosic prints of landscapes, town scenes and historic buildings, executed in a remarkable variety of sizes and media. From the Colosseum in Rome to the summit of Snowdon and the windmills of Kent, he travelled throughout Britain and Europe in search of subjects both epic and picturesque. A leading authority on printmaking and a committed collector of Lees prints, Robert Meyrick here identifies the precise locations of these subjects, and for the first time establishes an accurate chronology of Lees printed oeuvre. In an accompanying essay Meyrick examines the artists reputation, while placing his work in the context of artistic practice in Britain and beyond.