Bookshelf 5. For visual artists
& craftspeople

Titles that might be of interest or use to you – or both. There are books that give artists an opportunity to talk about their work, and then ones that help you put projects together, ones that explore art in other settings including in schools, public art, and arts in health, and finally, ones that seek to explain art!

Artists on Their Work

Private Views: Artists Working Today
Ed by Judith Palmer
Pub Serpent's Tail 2004 £14.99 ISBN 185242821X
Interviews with and essays by, a wide range of contemporary artists - across all art forms. "And they said you’d never make it… celebrating Britain’s top artists". There are moving personal stories and humorous observations that confound many of the received myths about the life of the artist, and show shared patterns of experience and outlook across disciplines and generations. To be reviewed.
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Art, Not Chance: Nine Artists Diaries
Edited by Paul Allen, photographs by Hugo Glendinning (Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, 2001, ISBN 0903319942

This book has grown out of the Gulbenkian Foundation’s grants programme ‘Time to Experiment’ to encourage professional artists (from all art forms) to set aside time simply to test new concepts. Nine artists were asked to keep a regular record of how they make their work and here are the results in diary form. They make fascinating reading, provide insights into artists’ processes, and much food for thought. Review

On Creativity: Interviews Exploring the Process
By John Tusa
Pub Methuen 2004 2nd edition ISBN 0413773485

What do we mean by creativity? Can we define it, or at least say what its distinguishing features are? Whey does it matter? What separates the genuinely creative artist from the rest of us? These questions are explored in interviews with some of the greatest creative minds of our time: Howard Hodgkin, Anthony Caro, Elliott Carter, Eve Arnold, David Sylvester, Nicholas Grimshaw, Milos Forman, Paula Rego, Harrison Birtwistle, Frank Auerbach, Tony Harrison, Muriel Spark. There is also an interesting piece by John Tusa himself on Creativity.

Putting Projects Together and Practical Matters

Partnerships for Learning: A guide to evaluating arts education projects
By Felicity Woolf
Pub Arts Council England, revised and updated 2003 free ISBN 0728707918
Written to assist people involved in arts education projects understand evaluation clearly and to evaluate effectively, according to their particular needs. It divides evaluation into 5 stages - planning, collecting evidence, assembling and interpreting, reflecting and moving forward, reporting and sharing. Well-designed and with useful summaries, much of the information here could be very useful in other contexts too. There are reminders of pros and cons of various methods, and mini case studies of good practice. Excellent as an introduction or a refresher on the subject, this is a useful addition to the material available on evaluation, and particularly good on its respect for partners' differing measures of success.
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Art & People: A Practical Guide To Setting Up And Running Art Projects in the Community
Second Edition revised, edited and updated by artist Christine Wilkinson and Rebecca Cairns, Lara Eldridge Pub: Slough Borough Council 2003 ISBN 0904164071 £12
To paraphrase a current advert for outdoor paints ‘it does what it says on the cover’ providing a step-by-step resource for setting up and running an art project (using any art form), within the community. I would recommend Art and People to anyone who wants to, or is, working in this area and needs a reliable and reassuring method of checking that none of the eggs they have tossed into the air during a project, hit the floor.
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Culture and Learning: Creating arts and heritage education projects
Pub: Arts Council of England 2002 ISBN 0 7287 0885 X Free
This is designed to be useful to the full range of artists, organisations and groups involved in arts and heritage projects for the first time. However experienced practitioners will still find inspiration and useful checklists, budget headings, project planner etc here. The well-written text is interspersed with case studies of innovative projects. What also really impressed me were the contacts lists for sources of further information.
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Just About Managing: Effective management for voluntary organisations and community groups
by Sandy Adirondack
Pub: LVSC 2006 4th Edition £25
JAM as it is called by its publishers, has been providing support and ideas to managers of small voluntary and community organisations for years. It is jam packed full of wisdom, drawn from a wealth of personal experience, and some management theory. I find that I return to it again and again, and am always rewarded by finding timely reminders, useful checklists, new ideas or inspiration from it.
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Get Sorted
By Ruth Jones
Pub Artsplan 2004 ISBN 0954775104

How to get organised, sort the budget and go for funding for your Youth Arts project! The guide is written for anyone who has a good idea for a youth arts project and it outlines all the necessary steps to make a success of it. This book is also very useful to those interested in arts management or participatory arts practice as it gives an excellent introduction to what work in this area is all about. It is well-presented and has a friendly style to it.

Sharing the Experience: How to Set up and run arts projects linking young and older people
By Susan Langford and Sue Mayo
Pub Magic Me 2001 ISBN 095386801X

A practical handbook for anyone who wants to start an intergenerational project or add this approach to their existing work. The book is designed for creative thinkers and practitioners working in the arts, education, care, health, regeneration, community development and other sectors. Based on Magic Me’s 12 years experience of projects, the book is full of insightful stories and examples from work on housing estates, in nursing and residential homes, days centres, schools and youth groups. Its approach is applicable to any art form.

The Internet and the Artist
By Karen Taylor
Pub: Eyelevel books 2002 £9.99 ISBN 1902528158

A well-written and nicely produced little guide to showing artwork on the internet. It weighs up the pros and cons of the web and explains internet galleries. There’s information on contracts and copyright, checklists to help you get the most from the Net and interviews with experts. There’s a useful glossary of all those “technoterms and weblish.”

Open Studios: a gem worth polishing
Arts Council of England 2003 ISBN 0728709155 £8
An interesting read, this small publication looks at the value of open studios, and at findings from recent research. It offers a range of successful case studies and provides a listing of events from around England.
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Art in Other Settings

Artists in Residence:A Teachers Handbook
By Sally J Manser and Hannah Wilmot
Pub London Arts Board & St Katherine & Shadwell Trust 1999 £5.00 ISBN 094778425X
Supported by the Times Educational Supplement, this handbook is designed for all teachers – primary, secondary and tertiary – who want to work with artists in schools, from one-off visits to long residencies. It is also of relevance to the musicians and others artists working in schools. It discusses benefits, points of consideration, choosing an art form and artist, planning, collaboration, budgeting and funding, as well as managing, documenting and evaluating projects. The final pages list sources of advice and funding along with a sample contract and evaluation form.
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Artists in Schools, A Handbook for Teachers and Artists
By Caroline Sharp and Karen Dust
Pub: National Foundation for Educational Research 1997 £10 ISBN 0700514139
Written for both teachers (at primary and secondary levels) who want to work with any artist – visual, performing, literary, media or multimedia – and also for the artist themselves. Taken from these two angles, a full understanding of the project is gained by both parties, and therefore enhances each one’s preparation and approach. The book covers benefits, types of involvement, full practical project planning and co-ordination, monitoring, development and evaluation. Checklists, sample contracts and evaluation reports are included, and there is a detailed listing of resources and contacts.
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Re Views: Artists and Public Spaces
Pub Black Dog Publishing 2005 ISBN 190477220X £19.95
Re Views Artists and Public Spaces provides an extensive overview of projects where artists have engaged new thinking and practices for the build environment and public space. Addressing the subject of public art from the artist’s perspective, and emphasising process as well as product, Re Views explores artistic practice beyond the studio, addressing the importance of research time for artists, the relationship between artist and audience, collaboration between artists and other design professionals, and the contribution artists can make to the future of our towns and cities. Edited by Artpoint, a visual arts commissioning agency, and using selected Artpoint projects as case studies, this book brings together work by an exciting range of artists, curators, writers and critics.
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Art in Public Spaces: Public Art in Slough
Pub: Slough Borough Council ISBN 0904164098 £5.50
A beautifully produced slim booklet that records in words and pictures the impressive start Slough has made on its programme of public art. With a brief description of what public art is, why it is important and how it is commissioned and then information on and illustrations of a dozen individual art pieces.
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Helping to Heal: the arts in healthcare Photographs
By Jerry Hardman-Jones
Commissioned by Arts for Health
Pub: Sheeran Lock Fine Art Consultants 1995 £5 ISBN 951711490 Out of stock
The publication accompanied an exhibition of the same name. It has an essay on Arts in Health Care, descriptions of projects in hospitals and stunning photographs. It gives an insight into this area of work with very memorable images.

Explaining Art

But is it Art? An introduction to Art Theory
by Cynthia Freeland, Pub Oxford University Press 2001, ISBN 0192853678 £8.99

A provocative and clever title is immediately attractive, especially one that is colourfully set on a minimalist white background. It seems to reinforce the promise of clarity and resolution, rather like a self-help book that suggests that the reader’s life will be transformed. In short, it is instantly seductive. Review

Art & Illusion: A study in the psychology of pictorial representation
By E H Gombrich
Pub Phaidon 6th Edition 2002 ISBN 0714842087 £14.95
A classic study of image-making. First published in the 1960s, the text applies the findings of experimental science to the understanding of art and in tackling complex ideas and theoretical issues, Gombrich is rigorous; yet he always retains a sense of wonder at the inexhaustible capacity of the human brain, and at the subtlety of the relationships involved in seeing the world and in making and seeing art.
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Drawing on the Artist Within: How to Release Your Hidden Creativity
By Betty Edwards
Pub Harper Collins 1986 ISBN 0006372643

The results of an art teacher becoming fascinated by the problem of helping people to learn how to draw and finding out about new brain research into the functioning of the right and left hemispheres of the brain. This book is both an impressive system by which to teach yourself to draw and provides evidence-based arguments on a new look at the art of seeing. The author explores how looking at things in order to draw them accesses a different way of seeing and thinking, and this can then be applied more generally. A classic, very impressive, and beautifully illustrated.

Outsider Art: Spontaneous Alternatives
By Colin Rhodes
Pub: Thames and Hudson 2000 £7.95
ISBN 0500203342
Outsider art is the work produced outside of the mainstream of modern Western art by self-taught, untrained visionaries, spiritualists, eccentric recluses, folk artists, psychiatric patients, criminals and others beyond the imposed margins of society and the art market. Coined by Roger Cardinal in 1972, the term in English derived from Jean Dubuffet’s ‘Art Brut’ – literally ‘raw art’, ‘uncooked’ by culture, unaffected by fashion, unmoved by ‘artistic standards’. In this indispensable book Colin Rhodes surveys the history and reception of Outsider Art – first championed by Dubuffet and the Surrealists, now appreciated by a very wide public – while providing fresh critical insights into the achievements of both major figures and newly discovered artists.
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Art for the Nation: Exhibitions and the London public 1747-2001
By Brandon Taylor
Published by Manchester University Press 1999 ISBN 0719054532

An absorbing account of the growth of public culture in Great Britain analyses in fascinating detail the politics, geography and social life of metropolitan and national culture in the visual arts. From the birth of the Royal Academy of Arts in 1768, through the National Gallery (1824), the V & A (1852), Tate Millbank (1897) the ICA (1947), the Hayward (1968) to The Tate Modern (2001), a series of images of official British culture and its audiences are created.

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Bookshelf 5