We don't have to know what a painting is if we know how it makes us feel. A fun, fascinating survey of abstract art, Journeys to Abstraction offers a behind-the-scenes look at how contemporary artists break free from literal depiction to rejoice in the pure expressive power of color, line and texture. • 58 artists share 100 striking abstract paintings, along with the ideas, inspirations and diverse working processes behind them. • Covers a wide variety of traditional and non-traditional media and techniques, including watercolor, collage, acrylics, ink and more. • Four step-by-step demonstrations show how abstract pieces come together from start to finish. Discover how artists paint, pour, scrape, spray, carve, stamp, collage and otherwise build complex layers of texture and meaning. Painting with egg cartons, turning acrylic paints into shards of "stained glass," incorporating old "failed" paintings into fresh finished pieces...anything goes in abstract art! Marked by an inspiring freedom of form and content, this is a liberating book for any artist in search of new, dynamic forms of self-expression.

Discover how artists paint, pour, scrape, spray, carve, stamp, collage and otherwise build complex layers of texture and meaning. Painting with egg cartons, turning acrylic paints into shards of "stained glass," incorporating old "failed paintings into fresh finished pieces... anything goes in abstract art! Marked by an inspiring freedom of form and content, this is a liberating book for any artist in search of new, dynamic forms of self-expression.

If you yearn to say yes to your deepest expression in your art and life, this self-help book is for you. Dr. Hillis guides you past resistance on your artist's journey so you can finally trust yourself, develop confidence and cultivate deep exploration and experimentation in your art. Bonus resource library with videos lessons and book club guide.

No discipline has been more uniformly derided for a longer period than metaphysics. Of the ancient and medieval sciences now in disrepute, even astrology and alchemy get better press. The most devastating--and currently the most influential--attack on metaphysics has come from a broad spectrum of thinkers including Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Arendt, Levinas, Derrida, and Milbank, who have argued that metaphysics is the root of modern nihilism and totalitarianism. Anthony Mansueto puts this claim to the test, developing a historical sociology of metaphysics that analyzes the social basis and political valence of metaphysical systems. Mansueto does this globally and cross-culturally, engaging not only the Hellenic tradition and its extension into medieval Christendom and Dar-al-Islam, but also the Indian and Chinese traditions. Specifically, Mansueto argues that far from representing the roots of nihilism or modern state terror, metaphysics emerges (and continues to be necessary) as a way to ground meaning and value in societies--especially in market societies in which these have become problematic. Metaphysics tends to restrain exploitation and to encourage the redirection of surplus toward activities that promote development of human capacities. Knowing God: The Journey of the Dialectic concludes with an outline of a new dialectical metaphysics that reconciles a Buddhist metaphysics of interdependence in the Hua-yen tradition with a historicized metaphysics of Esse, yielding results that look startlingly like the dao xue, or neo-Confucianism of Song China. Mansueto shows how such a metaphysics can ground meaning and value while answering postmodern concerns to safeguard difference.

The creative life is not easy. From the outside it can seem romantic and exciting, but in fact it is a unique journey filled with doubts and dreams and complex challenges that most people never imagine. From the obvious issues of making a living and dealing with rejection, to more rarified questions like how to know when a work is finished and the delicate balance between inspiration and craft, the creative artist – whether writer, painter, actor, or dancer – lives in a world of profound questions and subtle choices. The Artist’s Journey takes you into this world with an emotional honesty that few books offer. At once practical and spiritual, it is a rare exploration of the inner landscape of the artistic experience and an essential guidebook to the artist's journey, for creative artists in all fields, whether young or old, accomplished or just beginning.

The acclaimed author of A Tour of the Calculus and The Infinite Ascent offers an enlightening and enthralling tour of the basics of mathematics, and reveals a world of fascination in fundamental mathematical ideas. One, Two, Three is David Berlinski’s captivating exploration of the foundation of mathematics, its fundamental ideas, and why they matter. By unraveling the complex answers to these most elementary questions—What is a number? How do addition, subtraction, and other functions actually work? What are geometry and logic?—Berlinski reveals the intricacy behind their seemingly simple exteriors. Peppered with enlightening historical anecdotes and asides on some of history’s most fascinating mathematicians, One, Two, Three, revels in the beauty of numbers as Berlinski shows us how and why these often slippery concepts are as essential to the field of mathematics as to who we are.

A critical study of the work of Polish theatre director Tadeusz Kantor, which includes an analysis of the corpus of Kantor's work plus a collection of the director's essays. These essays comment on work then in progress, describing how Kantor challenged traditional theatrical forms.

In this collection, Stations on the Journey of Inquiry, David Burrell launches a revolutionary reinterpretation of how any inquiry proceeds, boldly critiquing presumptuous theories of knowledge, language, and ethics. While his later publications, Analogy and Philosophical Language (1973) and Aquinas: God and Action (1979), elucidate Aquinas's linguistic theology, these early writings show what often escapes articulation: how one comes to understanding and "takes" a judgment. Although Aquinas serves as an axial figure for Burrell's expansive corpus of scholarship spanning more than fifty years, this selection of essays presents other positions and counterpositions to whom his own philosophical theology is beholden: Plato, Aristotle, Cajetan, Kant, Peirce, Moore, Wittgenstein, Sellars, Weiss, Ross, McInerny, and Lonergan. With renewed interest in philosophy of language by postmodern thinkers as well as in the wake of Mulhall's Stanton Lectures on Wittgenstein and "Grammatical Thomism," the publication of these formative writings proves timely for the academy at large. Burrell invites us to reconsider not only the way in which we conduct an inquiry, but what it is we take language to be and how we take responsibility for what we say.

An engaging look at three women artists' pathbreaking explorationof abstraction