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 – Art Lab for Kids: 52 Creative Adventures in Drawing, Painting, Printmaking, Paper, and Mixed Media by Susan Schwake
Susan Schwake’s approach in this compact manual is quietly ambitious: deliver fine-art experiences in short, repeatable labs so that a parent, teacher, or small-group leader can run a semester’s worth of explorations with minimal prep and maximum creative payoff. The book is organized as six units (Drawing; Painting; Printmaking; Paper; Mixed Media; plus usage/how-to material) … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Art Lab for Kids: 52 Creative Adventures in Drawing, Painting, Printmaking, Paper, and Mixed Media by Susan Schwake
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 – 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 – Slab Techniques by Jim Robison
Jim Robison’s Slab Techniques is a concise, unpretentious primer that manages the useful trick of being both immediately practical and quietly provocative. Presented as part of the Ceramics Handbooks series, the book lays out slab building not as a single method but as a family of choices — a toolkit of decisions about clay, joinery, … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Slab Techniques by Jim Robison
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Ceramics for Beginners: Wheel Throwing by Emily Reason
Emily Reason’s Ceramics for Beginners: Wheel Throwing arrives — or feels as if it arrives — at the crossroads between a how-to manual and a cultivated meditation on craft. On the surface it is a pedagogical text: clear sequences of steps, attentive photographs (or visual descriptions), and practical troubleshooting for the awkward moments every novice … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Ceramics for Beginners: Wheel Throwing by Emily Reason
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Anthony Quinn’s Ceramic Design Course
Anthony Quinn’s Ceramic Design Course presents itself less as a conventional how-to manual and more as a practiced teacher’s syllabus made beautifully portable. Its ambition—bridging the tactile minutiae of clay work with the larger problems of form, function and aesthetic intention—makes it an especially welcome book for the contemporary ceramicist who wants technique to serve … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Anthony Quinn’s Ceramic Design Course
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Ceramics for Beginners: Surfaces, Glazes & Firing by Angelica Pozo
Angelica Pozo’s Ceramics for Beginners: Surfaces, Glazes & Firing reads at first like a craftsman’s primer and, on closer inspection, performs the subtler work of a modest modus operandi. It is both a handbook and a primer in temper — practical, kindly, and quietly persuasive. Where many how-to volumes insist on mastery as a destination, … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Ceramics for Beginners: Surfaces, Glazes & Firing by Angelica Pozo
The New Renaissance Mindset 