Focusing on some of the most interesting conceptual technical trends in wood working today, Against the Grain includes approximately 65 vessels, sculptures, furniture, and installations, created since 2000, which provocatively defy categories and celebrate the visual dynamics of wood. The book demonstrates how contemporary creators have engaged the medium of wood in strategies that might be described as “postmodern,” employing mimicry, assemblage, virtuosity, and whimsy (with a serious purpose). Environmental issues also are prominently addressed. Artists represented include Derek Bencomo, Gary Carsley, Hunt Clark, Piet Hein Eek, David Ellsworth, Sebastian Errazuriz, Bud Latven, Mark Lindquist, Thomas Loeser, Sarah Oppenheimer, William Pope.L, Martin Puryear, Marc Andre Robinson, Laurel Roth, Betye Saar, Courtney Smith, Elisa Strozyk, Alison Elizabeth Taylor, and Ursula von Rydingsvard.

Norman Pirollo, wood artist, describes his fascinating journey of transitioning from full-time employment to being self-employed as a wood artist. He currently creates wood art and sculptural work in his studio. Norman faced many obstacles throughout the journey where apprehension about the decision was often at the forefront. Perseverance, fate and critical decisions combined to map out the direction he followed later in life. Often seeking creative outlets, working as a multidisciplinary artist ultimately became his vocation. Norman Pirollo chronicles his fascinating journey over a fifteen-year period. Follow the riveting story of how his technology career evolved into a multidisciplinary art career including furniture making, sculpture, photo art and ultimately wood art. Read how Norman, through determination and perseverance, finally attained his goal of becoming an artist in the genre of wood art. Delving into and studying art history has provided him the art language and background to develop his own vision of wood art. Discover how he immersed himself into the contemporary art movement to develop a style and voice of his own. Find out how, through twists and turns, Norman acquired the skills and techniques to become an award-winning wood artist and sculptor today. The opportunity to work at something he truly enjoys has ultimately brought him solace and independence. Author: Norman Pirollo www.woodskills.com Norman has written several books and has been featured in publications over the years. Quiet Woodworking (New Art Press) Hand Tool Woodworking (New Art Press) Start Woodworking (New Art Press) Craftisian Interview (Norman Pirollo) HackSpace Magazine - Make With Wood April 2020 Woodworking: From Design To Making (New Art Press) Woodworking With Hand Tools 2018 (Fine Woodworking) The Wood Artist: Creating Art Through Wood (New Art Press) From Hi-Tech to Lo-Tech: A Woodworker's Journey (NAP) Start Your Own Woodworking Business (NAP) Rooted: Contemporary Studio Furniture (Schiffer Publishing) Canadian Woodworking magazine Jan. 2015 Our Homes magazine Fall 2014 NICHE Magazine Winter 2013 FWW Magazine - 4 Bench Jigs for Handplanes FWW Magazine - Essential Shopmade Jigs Woodwork magazine (2008) Wood Art Today 2 (Schiffer Books) 500 Cabinets ( Lark Books) Studio Furniture: Today's Leading Woodworkers Canadian Interiors Design Source Guide Ottawa Life magazine (Profile, work) 2012 Panoram Italia magazine Our Homes magazine (2011) Craft Journal (2009) Woodworker's Journal (2006)

Unpacking the history of performance art and celebrating the work of contemporary practitioners--a must-read for both art lovers and students alike Stunningly beautiful, deeply puzzling, powerfully moving, or intensely unsettling--performance art can evoke a wide variety of responses. In this important survey, Catherine Wood, one of the world's leading curators and writers in this field, provides the broadest and most up-to-date insight into the subject yet published. Wood proposes performance not as a genre separate from object-making but as a medium that has profoundly influenced the shape of contemporary art. From the spectacular forms of intimacy performed by Marina Abramović to the painting processions initiated by Ei Arakawa and the social activism of Tania Bruguera, hugely divergent practices have emerged in the past 30 years that embrace the worlds of sculpture and painting, spectacle, and protest. Shifting the focus from "I" to "We" and then "It," Performance in Contemporary Art is divided into sections that examine the perspective of the individual, the social, and the object. Wood looks at histories of performance through the lens of contemporary practitioners: the Japanese Gutai group in the 1950s, Brazilian neo-concretism in the 1960s, and the feminist performance at Womanhouse in the United States in the 1970s are key examples of historical precedents that have been revisited, reformed, or rejected by contemporary artists in the 21st century.

The social and political climate in which Wood's art flourished bears certain striking similarities to America today, as national identity and the tension between urban and rural areas reemerge as polarizing issues in a country facing the consequences of globalization and the technological revolution. Wood portrayed the tension and alienation of contemporary experience. By fusing meticulously observed reality with fables of childhood, he crafted unsettling images of estrangement and apprehension that pictorially manifest the anxiety of modern life.

When William sleeps, he becomes Pyjamaman, a superhero who helps you sleep at night using bedtime stories, your imagination and his ability to fly. This children's book is educational, has meaning, and encourages children to fall asleep using their bedtime stories. Why not read the book with your child and ask them what they think is meant by "not judging a book by its cover"? As well as an illustrated children's book which looks to encourage sleep and bedtime stories as part of a well-rounded education, we have also written a song for children to sing along to. The story is inspired by William, our son, who's bedtime routine used to consist of singing "its time for Pyjamaman", whilst he was getting ready for bed, getting into his pyjamas. We turned the brief one-line jingle into a song and an illustrated book concept that we have now brought to life to allow others to share. Children often dream about becoming a superhero and can use the concept of reading a bedtime story and getting to sleep as a way of bringing their dreams to life. It's time for Pyjamaman. If anyone can help you sleep, he can!

In The Fatal Englishman, his first work of nonfiction, Sebastian Faulks explores the lives of three remarkable men. Each had the seeds of greatness; each was a beacon to his generation and left something of value behind; yet each one died tragically young. Christopher Wood, only twenty-nine when he killed himself, was a painter who lived most of his short life in the beau monde of 1920s Paris, where his charm, good looks, and the dissolute life that followed them sometimes frustrated his ambition and achievement as an artist. Richard Hillary was a WWII fighter pilot who wrote a classic account of his experiences, The Last Enemy, but died in a mysterious training accident while defying doctor’s orders to stay grounded after horrific burn injuries; he was twenty-three. Jeremy Wolfenden, hailed by his contemporaries as the brightest Englishman of his generation, rejected the call of academia to become a hack journalist in Cold War Moscow. A spy, alcoholic, and open homosexual at a time when such activity was still illegal, he died at the age of thirty-one, a victim of his own recklessness and of the peculiar pressures of his time. Through the lives of these doomed young men, Faulks paints an oblique portrait of English society as it changed in the twentieth century, from the Victorian era to the modern world.

This survey of current trends in international woodworking explores the artists' inspirations and techniques. Veteran wood artists and newcomers are featured in hundreds of striking color photos. Includes carvers, turners, and sculptors of free standing and wall mounted sculptures, installation pieces, furniture, vessels, jars, vases, bowls, boxes, teapots, and much more. This useful and beautiful guide benefits buyers, art teachers, professors, museum curators, collectors, galleries, and artists alike. A resource guide in the back provides contact information.

He claimed to be “the plainest kind of fellow you can find. There isn’t a single thing I’ve done, or experienced,” said Grant Wood, “that’s been even the least bit exciting.” Wood was one of America’s most famous regionalist painters; to love his work was the equivalent of loving America itself. In his time, he was an “almost mythical figure,” recognized most supremely for his hard-boiled farm scene, American Gothic, a painting that has come to reflect the essence of America’s traditional values—a simple, decent, homespun tribute to our lost agrarian age. In this major new biography of America’s most acclaimed, and misunderstood, regionalist painter, Grant Wood is revealed to have been anything but plain, or simple . . . R. Tripp Evans reveals the true complexity of the man and the image Wood so carefully constructed of himself. Grant Wood called himself a farmer-painter but farming held little interest for him. He appeared to be a self-taught painter with his scenes of farmlands, farm workers, and folklore but he was classically trained, a sophisticated artist who had studied the Old Masters and Flemish art as well as impressionism. He lived a bohemian life and painted in Paris and Munich in the 1920s, fleeing what H. L. Mencken referred to as “the booboisie” of small-town America. We see Wood as an artist haunted and inspired by the images of childhood; by the complex relationship with his father (stern, pious, the “manliest of men”); with his sister and his beloved mother (Wood shared his studio and sleeping quarters with his mother until her death at seventy-seven; he was forty-four). We see Wood’s homosexuality and how his studied masculinity was a ruse that shaped his work. Here is Wood’s life and work explored more deeply and insightfully than ever before. Drawing on letters, the artist’s unfinished autobiography, his sister’s writings, and many never-before-seen documents, Evans’s book is a dimensional portrait of a deeply complicated artist who became a “National Symbol.” It is as well a portrait of the American art scene at a time when America’s Calvinistic spirit and provincialism saw Europe as decadent and artists were divided between red-blooded patriotic men and “hothouse aesthetes.” Thomas Hart Benton said of Grant Wood: “When this new America looks back for landmarks to help gauge its forward footsteps, it will find a monument standing up in the midst of the wreckage . . . This monument will be made out of Grant Wood’s works.”

The first publication to showcase the visual art of the Rolling Stones’ Ronnie Wood Ronnie Wood is one of the foremost rock guitarists in the world, but his artistic talents extend beyond music. Published together for the first time and in Wood’s seventieth year, here is the first comprehensive collection of paintings and other works that exudes the same irrepressible energy as the Rolling Stones themselves. Organized thematically, Ronnie Wood: Artist focuses on rock ’n’ roll performances and depictions of stage performances as only the band could witness. Additional chapters show both the breadth of his instincts and style in works on figures, landscapes, animal paintings, and sculptures. The artist himself provides the captions and insight into the thought and motivation behind each piece. An introduction is provided by Damien Hirst, one of the most successful contemporary artists of the modern era and a rabid fan and collector of Wood’s art. An afterword by guitar legend and Wood’s bandmate Keith Richards brings the book to its conclusion.