A visually dazzling artistic odyssey, full of sharp insights and warmhearted encouragement.
Hard work is shown to be the key to success in Berends’ lavishly illustrated meditation on artistic labor.
The author, a Dutch painter now living on the Caribbean island of Curaçao, presents a 150-day journal covering the run-up to anexhibition of new paintings on the theme of “beach life” on display on the island’s seashore. The book is effectively a study of her hands-on creative process, which emphasizes open-ended, improvisatory experiments to see what looks interesting (“try not to think about a possible end result and just do things that come to you”), rather than angsty rumination. She began with simple, offhand abstract exercises on paper, featuring eclectic motifs from pastel blobs and blood-red drips to rectilinear stencil patterns. She worked in a profusion of eclectic materials, techniques, and formats: watercolors, oils, and oil bars (pressed oil paints used like crayons); diluted acrylics in a spray bottle; embossed rolling pins that imprint patterns in paint; images torn out of other pieces that she incorporates into new collages; and postcards, enlarged and printed to serve as backdrops. After a few weeks, Berends introduced figurative elements, mainly focusing on images of children goofing around at the beach (her favorite subjects include a young girl in a pink bathing suit, often peering intently at sand and water). In the journal’s concluding weeks, the artist brought together these strands in exuberant paintings of frolicking bathers with richly textured abstract motifs and the postcards, adding visual energy. Berends enriches her narrative with color photos of her studio, exercises, and the stages of her developing paintings, along with tips on everything from the quality of one’s brushes to the disposal of turpentine.
Berends’ journal is, in part, an engrossing account of an artist’s craft. Writing in limpid, straightforward prose, she presents readers with simple, practical descriptions of materials and techniques, as well as evocative musings on conundrums of visual effect: “One of the hardest things I find to recreate is the color of white when in shadow. It quickly turns to blue, and you lose the feel of it being white fabric in the shadow.” The book is also full of wisdom on the psychology of creativity, from the imperative to lurch from doubt and inertia into action (“The only thing to do is START!...The blank paper or canvas dares you to fail!”) to the hard lesson that the work of refining what seems like a masterpiece is never truly finished (“a good start to a painting is nothing more than that: a good start”). The photographs provide a splendid display of Berends’ work. Her paintings, especially the human subjects, sometimes leave a slightly rough-hewn impression, with figures and faces often decomposed into broad plats of color. Yet in closeups, they’re a riot of rich detail, full of swirling brush strokes and complex, intricate colors. Artists will find much food for thought here, while casual readers will find a feast for the eyes.
A visually dazzling artistic odyssey, full of sharp insights and warmhearted encouragement.Pub Date: June 30, 2024
ISBN: 9798329027228
Page Count: 200
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: March 7, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.
Avuncular observations on matters historical from the late popularizer of the past.
McCullough made a fine career of storytelling his way through past events and the great men (and occasional woman) of long-ago American history. In that regard, to say nothing of his eschewing modern technology in favor of the typewriter (“I love the way the bell rings every time I swing the carriage lever”), he might be thought of as belonging to a past age himself. In this set of occasional pieces, including various speeches and genial essays on what to read and how to write, he strikes a strong tone as an old-fashioned moralist: “Indifference to history isn’t just ignorant, it’s rude,” he thunders. “It’s a form of ingratitude.” There are some charming reminiscences in here. One concerns cajoling his way into a meeting with Arthur Schlesinger in order to pitch a speech to presidential candidate John F. Kennedy: Where Richard Nixon “has no character and no convictions,” he opined, Kennedy “is appealing to our best instincts.” McCullough allows that it wasn’t the strongest of ideas, but Schlesinger told him to write up a speech anyway, and when it got to Kennedy, “he gave a speech in which there was one paragraph that had once sentence written by me.” Some of McCullough’s appreciations here are of writers who are not much read these days, such as Herman Wouk and Paul Horgan; a long piece concerns a president who’s been largely lost in the shuffle too, Harry Truman, whose decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan McCullough defends. At his best here, McCullough uses history as a way to orient thinking about the present, and with luck to good ends: “I am a short-range pessimist and a long-range optimist. I sincerely believe that we may be on the way to a very different and far better time.”
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781668098998
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
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