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In a Different Light reproduces in full colour Samuel Bak's remarkable new series of 55 drawings and painting in which he examines concepts such as creation, cruelty, mortality, morality, and accusation. These paintings are a struggle to understand, explain, and rebuild. Subjects include scriptural stories of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and their various encounters with their Creator; humankind's passage through Time and its changing role in existence; tikkun hao'lam-the enormous task of repairing the world; and Michelangelo's Creation of Adam, at whose centre God's and Adam's pointing fingers almost touch. Lawrence Langer develops our understanding of these rich and complicated stories and of the extraordinary artist and his personal vision.Imbued with the same rich colour palette and use of metaphors for which Bak is renowned, this body of work adds new symbols and characters to the artist's repertoire. Moreover, it asks difficult questions concerning divine compassion, human defiance, moral responsibility, and the role of the artist in society. These emotive images impel us to rethink our notions of history, and our way of seeing the past and present.
At my first sight of a painting by Samuel Bak, I had the keen sense that he was telling me stories with his brush. Now that at long last he has written this book, I find it no wonder that he has painted with his pen.... Among the tens and hundreds of books I have read about the pre-Shoah and post-Shoah period... Bak’s book is unique. Despite being suffused with a sense of loss, horror, degradation, and death, it is ultimately a sanguine, funny book, full of the love of life, rocking with an almost cathartic joy. At times I found myself bursting out laughing... a marvelous ode, a colorful hymn to the forces of life, love, creation, and the joys of the senses. —From the Foreword by Amos Oz...
""The paintings of The Game Continues provide stimulating commentary on the richness and the limits of metaphor in art. Samuel Bak's provocative chess-inspired landscapes illuminate the waste of war in a profaned world, and its impact on the human spirit. Peopled by pawns and knights, rooks and bishops, kings and queens, Bak's vision of conflict from the ancient to the modern era deflates romantic notions of heroic combat. His shattered chessboards rise dramatically out of a barren terrain, recording a decline in human majesty even as he invites us to reconstrue more fruitful imaginings.""--BOOK JACKET. ""The Game Continues reproduces in full color a new series of 52 chess paintings by Bak. Holocaust scholar Lawrence L. Langer guides and enriches our understanding of this unusual artist's complex vision.""--BOOK JACKET.
This lovely book presents essays and recent works in porcelain by Brother Thomas Bezanson, praised as "one of the greatest artists in the Western pottery world" by well-known Japanese ceramicist Tatsuzo Shimaoka. Brother Thomas explores his faith and the process of creation side by side with illustrations of the celebrated porcelain vases, plates, and tea bowls that are his life's work. The book also contains a nineteen-page photo essay on Brother Thomas at work in his studio by Bill Aron of Los Angeles, an introduction by Joan Chittister, and an illustrated index of the works of Brother Thomas now held in more than fifty museum collections around the world.
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Under the guidance of Master Potter and National Living Treasure Tatsuzo Shimaoka, Ken Matsuzaki has emerged as a leading figure in modern Japanese ceramics. Matsuzaki’s work reflects the heritage of traditional Japanese folk pottery while showcasing the artist’s creativity, intuition, and skill. Grounding his pieces in the Mingei pottery tradition, which emphasizes that the beauty of an object is found in its use, Matsuzaki has developed an individual style that honors tradition and builds on it in in new directions. This volume, which includes an in-depth interview with the artist, an essay by Professor Andrew Maske, and full-color illustrations, will introduce the reader to both the history and the future of Japanese ceramics.
In this examination of Samuel Bak’s most recent collection of paintings inspired by the little boy from the famous Stroop Report photo taken in the Warsaw Ghetto in April 1943. Gary A. Phillips and Danna Nolan Fewell consider the historical and visual implications of this iconic image and its contemporary evocations. A survivor of the Vilna liquidation and a child prodigy whose first exhibition was held in the Vilna Ghetto at age nine, Bak weaves together personal history and Jewish history to articulate an iconography of his Holocaust experience. Bak’s art preserves memory of the twentieth-century ruination of Jewish life and culture by way of an artistic passion and precision that stubbornly announces the creativity of the human spirit.
Art & Life: The Story of Samuel Bak traces the development of a child prodigy deeply shaped by the catastrophic events of the Shoah, from his early artistic influences to his years in the Vilna Ghetto and Landsberg DP Camp, his formal training in Israel and Paris, and his fruitful art career in Rome, New York, Switzerland, and Boston. Augmenting the rich existing literature on Bak, Art & Life explores—in thoughtful prose and through reproductions of both iconic and rarely seen work created between 1942 and 2022—how he navigated the prevailing art trends of the mid-twentieth century in search of his own pictorial language. It considers the personal, historical, and artistic currents that led Bak, now aged 90, to create an astonishing body of work that bears witness to cataclysmic events, embodies our common humanity of suffering and hope, and poses questions about the repair of the world.
'Colour is a power which directly influences the soul.' Wassily Kandinsky There's nothing like a unicorn to give life some colour. Relax, take a break and let your imagination soar... So Keep Calm and Colour Unicorns!
The dictionary says that a kiss is `a salute made by touching with the lips pressed closely together and suddenly parting them.' From this, it is quite obvious that, although a dictionary may know something about words, it knows nothing about kissing. In this rediscovered classic guide, originally published in 1936, Hugh Morris expounds on the wonderful ritual of osculation (better known as kissing). He explores why people kiss, how to prepare for a kiss, putting variety into your kissing, as well as some popular naughty kissing games. In his guide, you will discover a range of kisses, including the French Soul Kiss, the Eyelash Kiss, the Nip Kiss, the Dancing Kiss. You'll come away from this book wanting to discover the pain-pleasure of the Vacuum Kiss, include your friends in Electric Kissing Parties, and please your paramour with the Surprise Kiss! So, gird up your loins, pucker up your lips and let's to the kissing arena!