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 – Matisse, Painter and Sculptor by Dorothy Kosinski

Dorothy Kosinski’s Matisse, Painter and Sculptor reads like a curator’s close-reading: richly attentive to objects, attentive to provenance and process, and driven by a desire to show how a single artist sustained two apparently distinct practices across a long career. Kosinski’s central move — to treat Matisse’s painting and sculpture not as separate chapters of a life … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Matisse, Painter and Sculptor by Dorothy Kosinski

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 Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Haring by Alexandra Kolossa

Alexandra Kolossa’s Haring reads like a choreography of image and intimacy: at once biographical sketch, ekphrastic meditation and elegy for an era in which art made itself at the street’s edge. The book resists the tidy architecture of conventional life-writing; instead Kolossa arranges her pages as a series of glances — quick, incandescent, then gone … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Haring by Alexandra Kolossa

The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Keep Going: 10 Ways to Stay Creative in Good Times and Bad by Austin Kleon

Austin Kleon’s Keep Going: 10 Ways to Stay Creative in Good Times and Bad (2019) completes the informal trilogy begun with Steal Like an Artist and Show Your Work. Where the earlier volumes championed the playful theft of ideas and the vulnerability of artistic visibility, Keep Going emerges as the most meditative of Kleon’s works, … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Keep Going: 10 Ways to Stay Creative in Good Times and Bad by Austin Kleon