In Celebration of Balance & Opposable Thumbs, Collection 1 by Joe Sorren is not merely an art collection—it is a philosophical atmosphere rendered in pigment, a meditation on fragility, wonder, and the strange dignity of awkwardness. To approach this book as a conventional monograph would be to miss its essential gesture; the artist is less … Continue reading T.A.E.’s Book Review – In Celebration of Balance & Opposable Thumbs, Collection 1 by Joe Sorren
T.A.E.’s Book Review – The Japanese Pottery Handbook by Penny Simpson, Lucy Kitto, and Kanji Sedeoka
The Japanese Pottery Handbook is the kind of book that quietly reveals its seriousness by refusing the vanity of seriousness. First published in 1979 and later revised in 2014, it presents itself not as an ornamental art book but as a working manual: compact, bilingual, and deliberately hands-on. That practical identity is not a limitation; … Continue reading T.A.E.’s Book Review – The Japanese Pottery Handbook by Penny Simpson, Lucy Kitto, and Kanji Sedeoka
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Setting Up Your Ceramic Studio: Ideas & Plans from Working Artists by Virginia Scotchie
Virginia Scotchie’s compact, image-rich manual reads less like a how-to pamphlet and more like a set of curated studio portraits: clear-eyed, practical, and quietly persuasive about the idea that a maker’s workspace is an extension of their thinking. She, herself a practicing ceramist, organizes the book around photographic tours, measured floor plans, and concise commentaries … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Setting Up Your Ceramic Studio: Ideas & Plans from Working Artists by Virginia Scotchie
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – American Surreal by Todd Schorr
The lavish monograph published by Last Gasp and issued as the catalogue to a mid-career retrospective at the San Jose Museum of Art is more than a handsome picture book: it stages a sustained argument about how “low” imagery—cartoons, B-movies, advertising—can be retooled into a repository for moral satire, visual allegory, and painterly virtuosity. The … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – American Surreal by Todd Schorr
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Dreamland by Todd Schorr
In Dreamland by Todd Schorr, the picture-book monograph performs a small, wicked miracle: it translates the tactile spectacle of Schorr’s paintings into a narrative argument about American visual fantasy — one in which commercial icons, childhood cartoons, and Old-Master technique collide and breed. The book is both a career statement and a provocation: sumptuous, obscene, … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Dreamland by Todd Schorr
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Cyrano de Bergerac by Edmond Rostand (with a bonus at the end: Cyrano’s “A Nose…” monologue)
Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac is at once a theatrical confection and a sharply worked tragedy of language. Written for the theatre — and written to be heard — the play glories in the sound of words: the quick thrusts of wit, the rolled cadence of heroic verse, the extravagant pyrotechnics of rhetoric. Yet beneath … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Cyrano de Bergerac by Edmond Rostand (with a bonus at the end: Cyrano’s “A Nose…” monologue)
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The World of Edward Gorey by Clifford Ross
Clifford Ross’s The World of Edward Gorey is less a conventional monograph than an act of tasteful conjuration: a careful, lovingly lit cabinet that sets an uncanny miniature theatre at the center of view. Ross treats Gorey not simply as an illustrator who doodled at the margins of Victorian melodrama, but as a singular authorial … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The World of Edward Gorey by Clifford Ross
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – In Montmartre: Picasso, Matisse and the Birth of Modernist Art by Sue Roe
Sue Roe’s In Montmartre: Picasso, Matisse and the Birth of Modernist Art is a capacious, elegiac portrait of a place and a moment. It threads biography, cultural history, and close-looking criticism to argue that Montmartre — with its cafés, studios, cheap lodgings and convivial degradations — was not merely backdrop but active engine of a … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – In Montmartre: Picasso, Matisse and the Birth of Modernist Art by Sue Roe
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The 20th Century Art Book from Phaidon Press
Phaidon's The 20th Century Art Book presents itself as an atlas of modernity: a compact compendium that tries, with admirable audacity, to put the century’s dizzying artistic revolutions into the reader’s hands. It is not a monograph, nor an exhaustive history; it is a curator’s pocket guide, a series of literary vignettes paired with image-plates, … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The 20th Century Art Book from Phaidon Press
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Art Book from Phaidon Press
Phaidon’s The Art Book is not a book that seeks to be read from first page to last as a single sustained argument; it is an atlas of encounters. Its achievement is simple and ambitious at once: to compress the dizzying plurality of visual practice into a portable, democratic form. The editors do not attempt … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Art Book from Phaidon Press
The New Renaissance Mindset 