At first glance this is a book that does exactly what its title promises: it assembles—visually, insistently—four hundred discrete answers to a single set of questions about colour, form and surface. But read as a sculptural essay rather than merely a compendium, 400 Polymer Clay Designs offers a fuller argument about what a low-cost, thermoplastic … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – 400 Polymer Clay Designs: A Collection of Dynamic & Colourful Work by Lark Press
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Penland Book of Ceramics: Masterclasses in Ceramic Techniques by Lark Press
The Penland Book of Ceramics is less a manual than a curated conversation: a communal atlas of gesture, material, and the apprentice's slow apprenticeship into the logic of clay. Brought together under the auspices of a school whose name has become shorthand for intensive craft pedagogy, this volume reads like a series of masterclasses transcribed … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Penland Book of Ceramics: Masterclasses in Ceramic Techniques by Lark Press
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Japanese Wood-Fired Ceramics by Marc Lancet
Marc Lancet’s Japanese Wood-Fired Ceramics reads less like a technical manual and more like a close, sustained meditation on a living craft. The book invites the reader into the humid, smoky hinterlands of Japanese kiln culture — into the pungent vocabulary of ash, flame, and clay — and does so with a critic’s attention to … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Japanese Wood-Fired Ceramics by Marc Lancet
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Lowlife Paradise: The Works of Glenn Barr by La Luz de Jesus & Last Gasp
Lowlife Paradise: The Works of Glenn Barr arrives, for readers and viewers alike, as more than a catalogue raisonné or a retrospective: it is a focused attempt to translate a restless, pictorial imagination into the language of the book. Glenn Barr’s work—at once cartoonish and baroque, playful and implacably strange—resists tidy taxonomies; this volume, by … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Lowlife Paradise: The Works of Glenn Barr by La Luz de Jesus & Last Gasp
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Bottomless Cocktail: The Art of Shag by La Luz de Jesus & Last Gasp
Bottomless Cocktail: The Art of Shag stages Josh Agle’s work as more than a sequence of retro postcards; it presents a sustained aesthetic argument about pleasure, style, and the uneasy seductions of American postwar fantasy. La Luz de Jesus and Last Gasp have collected images that at first glance read as playful pastiche — bright … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Bottomless Cocktail: The Art of Shag by La Luz de Jesus & Last Gasp
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Glenn Barr’s Haunted Paradise by La Luz de Jesus & Last Gasp
Glenn Barr’s Haunted Paradise reads like a visual novella: a tightly edited, obsessively staged universe in which mid-century glamour and urban rot coexist, and where the human figure—often a femme fatale, a weary vixen, or a mechanized other—functions less as subject than as cultural index. The book, co-published by La Luz de Jesus and Last … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Glenn Barr’s Haunted Paradise by La Luz de Jesus & Last Gasp
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Musings of a Curious Aesthete by Leonard Koren
Leonard Koren’s Musings of a Curious Aesthete reads like the work of a practiced conversationalist who has spent a lifetime whispering provocations into the ear of design and culture. Part memoir, part aesthetic tract, the book collects short, nimble essays that move from recollection to critique with the lightness of a sketchbook and the stubborn … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Musings of a Curious Aesthete by Leonard Koren
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Wabi-Sabi: Further Thoughts by Leonard Koren
Leonard Koren’s Wabi-Sabi: Further Thoughts reads less like a conventional monograph and more like an invitation to a practiced, patient conversation — half aphorism, half careful exegesis — with one of the thinnest and most capacious concepts in modern aesthetics. Where so many volumes try to define wabi-sabi by checklist or historical excavation, Koren treats … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Wabi-Sabi: Further Thoughts by Leonard Koren
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets, & Philosophers by Leonard Koren
Leonard Koren’s Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers reads less like a conventional treatise and more like a pocket anthology of aesthetic instructions and provocations — a distilled program for seeing differently. Its ambition is modest and precise: to translate a notoriously slippery Japanese sensibility into language useful to makers and thinkers in the … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets, & Philosophers by Leonard Koren
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – What Artists Do by Leonard Koren
Leonard Koren’s What Artists Do reads less like a conventional handbook and more like a pocket philosopher’s lecture delivered in fragments. The book is compact, aphoristic, and intentionally spare — a series of short meditations on the activities, habits, anxieties, and tiny triumphs that make up an artist’s working life. Koren does not attempt a … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – What Artists Do by Leonard Koren
The New Renaissance Mindset 