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 Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Making and Installing Handmade Tiles by Angelica Pozo

Angelica Pozo’s Making and Installing Handmade Tiles sits at an interesting crossroads: part technical manual, part artist’s manifesto, and part visual essay. The book announces itself as a practical companion for the person at the wheel or the trowel, but its most enduring achievement is how it insists that technique and meaning are inseparable. The … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Making and Installing Handmade Tiles by Angelica Pozo

The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Fired Up with Raku: Over 300 Raku Recipes. by Irene Poulton

Irene Poulton’s Fired Up with Raku: Over 300 Raku Recipes reads, at first glance, like a practical compendium; read closely, it reveals itself as a meditation on the paradox at the heart of raku work — the persistent human desire to name, measure, and reproduce a process whose aesthetic power depends on chance. She gives … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Fired Up with Raku: Over 300 Raku Recipes. by Irene Poulton

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 Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Taboo: The Art of Tiki, edited by Martin McIntosh with an introduction by Sven A. Kirsten

"Taboo: The Art of Tiki" is at once a curatorial flourish and a cultural document: a small, handsome volume that archives a particular late-20th-century fascination with Pacific iconography as refracted through the sensibilities of Lowbrow and pop-surrealist artists. Edited by Martin McIntosh with an introduction by Sven A. Kirsten, and credited with contributions from figures … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Taboo: The Art of Tiki, edited by Martin McIntosh with an introduction by Sven A. Kirsten

The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Masters: Earthenware: Major Works by Leading Artists, Curated by Matthias Ostermann and edited by Ray Hemachandra

Masters: Earthenware arrives not as a dry handbook but as a museum catalogue written in the idiom of the studio. Curated by Matthias Ostermann and edited by Ray Hemachandra, the volume assembles compact, richly illustrated mini-retrospectives that together argue for earthenware as a lively, experimental, and emotionally capacious medium rather than a mere step on … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Masters: Earthenware: Major Works by Leading Artists, Curated by Matthias Ostermann and edited by Ray Hemachandra

The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Édouard Manet: 1832–1883 — The First of the Moderns by Gilles Néret

Gilles Néret’s compact monograph—published in Taschen’s widely circulated Basic Art series under the title Édouard Manet: 1832–1883 — The First of the Moderns—functions less as a revisionist manifesto than as a lucid, image-forward argument for a familiar claim: that Manet inaugurates modern painting by refusing the consolations of academic narrative and classical imitation.  The central … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Édouard Manet: 1832–1883 — The First of the Moderns by Gilles Néret