Arts & Creativity

A new book of stunning and unique travel portraits documenting the body in time. This beautifully bound hardback volume is printed in black and white on archival quality paper. Accompanying text provides an interesting insight for the reader.

The Artist's Way provides a twelve-week course that guides you through the process of recovering your creative self. It aims to dispel the 'I'm not talented enough' conditioning that holds many people back and helps you to unleash your own inner artist. Its step-by-step approach enables you to transform your life, overcome any artistic blocks you may suffer from, including limiting beliefs, fear, sabotage, jealousy and guilt, and replace them with self confidence and productivity. It helps demystify the creative process by making i... read more

Being a writer is good because you get paid to write stuff up, you can stay home and work in your pajamas and you get to travel because it's research. Being a writer is bad when you're sitting all by yourself staring at a blank page. Brigid Lowry knows the highs and lows of being a writer, but she still thinks it's a joy. In this book she takes you on a journey to discover yourself and what you really want to say AND how to make it juicy and original. So, what do you need to begin? Where can you find ideas? How can you make your wr... read more

This book is a rare and fascinating picture of contemporary New Zealand artists in their studios. It provides new insights into the practical aspects of how artists embark on their creative processes. The 24 painters and sculptors were chosen by well-known writer and art commentator Richard Wolfe and photographer Stephen Robinson.

In eighty-two brilliant, disturbing, and compassionate photographs, extended as if across the time it takes for a baby to wake up and recognise the grandfather who is waiting with the child to cross a busy, dangerous street, Peter Black has composed one of the great photo-portraits of our time. A digital flâneur on high alert crisscrossing the complex urban landscape, Black has seen and loved the tender, sad, and often humorous details of life lived moment by moment on the streets of his home city.

In this gorgeously illustrated book, join Betty Churcher on a personal tour of her most beloved works, including masterpieces by Rembrandt, Goya, Manet, Velazquez, Courbet, Vermeer and Cezanne. A trained artist, Betty's sketches reveal the secrets within the artworks and the processes of their creation. With the gift for making art accessible that characterised her popular television series, she gently leads your eye to these paintings' intimate details, describing their kinship with other masterpieces and their place in the histor... read more

The Art Museum is the finest art collection ever assembled between two covers. This revolutionary and unprecedented virtual art museum in a book, features 1,000 oversized pages of over 2,700 works of art. It is the most comprehensive and visually spectacular history of world art ever published. Ten years in the making, this unique book was created with a global team of specialists in all fields of art, including museum curators and educators, who have collected together important works as they might be displayed in the ideal mus... read more

Still Life is a unique and hauntingly beautiful photographic study of the Antarctic huts that served as expedition bases for explorations led by Captain Robert Falcon Scott and Sir Ernest Shackleton.
At the turn of the twentieth century Antarctica was the focus of one of the last great races of exploration and discovery. Known as the 'heroic age', from 1895 to 1917 Antarctic explorers set off from their huts in search of adventure, science and glory but some, such as Scott, were never to return. The World Wars intervened and ... read more

"Girls! Girls! Girls!" explores the representation of girls in contemporary women's art. Since the 1990s, women artists have for the first time dominated the creation and evolution of work depicting female bodies, producing what are arguably the most challenging, critically debated, well publicized, and highly collected representations of females. The contemporary women artists discussed in this anthology are virtually rewriting the representation of women in art now, and they are doing so in ways that differ importantly from those... read more

My sculpture celebrates life in the South Pacific. New Zealand is surrounded by the sea - the works inspired by the ocean, the geographic isolation of New Zealand and informed by mythology, history and literature. By magnifying and abstracting the natural scale of life forms I draw attention to their fragility and vulnerability. The works refer to my concerns about ecology and survival and the delicate balance between sustainability and progress. The vessel form is a recurrent theme of my work and becomes a symbol of migratio... read more

Take a trip through New Zealand art via Dick Frizzell's point of view. He shines a light on some of the works he's always loved - a number of which have seemed to miss muster in the usual round-ups. It's an eclectic bunch of paintings and begins with images he was drawn to (because that's what it was all about. images) back before he was told what he'd be better off looking at. From Peter McIntyre inviting him up onto the scaffolding to watch him painting the WWII mural in the Hastings War Memorial Library, through to discovering ... read more

Quilts generically known as tivaevae have been produced by women in the Cook Islands, the Hawaiian Islands, the Society Islands and elsewhere in Eastern Polynesia since the late 19th century, where they were a substitute for bark-cloth but also used in ways deeply invested in the new context of Christian domesticity. In the Cook Islands, quilts are stitched to be given away at funerals, at weddings and other events marking stages of loss and severance in the life of a person. Although often kept for years in trunks far away from th... read more

Across the great breadth of the Pacific, artists have always employed a wide variety of materials and techniques to create objects for specific purposes, from the domestic to the sacred, from the elegantly simple to the sumptuously ornate, and from the historic to the contemporary. In this book, the author draws on striking and colourful examples from the Pacific's major cultural regions: Polynesia, Melanesia and Micronesia, beginning with an introduction asking 'What is Pacific art?' Every artwork is reproduced in close detail wit... read more

European explorers of the Pacific in the 18th and early 19th centuries faced a problem - how to describe the people they met and report what they had seen and found. From Cook onwards, a serious expedition included artists and scientists in its ship's company. An ambitious journey of the 19th century was the third voyage of the French explorer Dumont d'Urville, from 1837 to 1840. It was just before the invention of photography, when phrenology, the study of people's skulls, was the latest thing. D'Urville chose to take on th... read more

Contemporary New Zealand Art 4 is the final book in a series that offers readers a comprehensive view of New Zealand artists working at the end of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st centuries. This volume features over 100 artworks reproduced in full colour representing twenty artists, both established and emerging, working in a variety of media - painting, photography, sculpture, installation and multimedia. Contemporary New Zealand Art 4 as with previous volumes shows a selection of each artist's work - the art they produced ... read more

Artistic genius, political activist, painter and decorator, mythic legend or notorious graffiti artist? The work of Banksy is unmistakable, except maybe when it's squatting in the Tate or New York's Metropolitan Museum. Banksy is responsible for decorating the streets, walls, bridges and zoos of towns and cites throughout the world. Witty and subversive, his stencils show monkeys with weapons of mass destruction, policeman with smiley faces, rats with drills and umbrellas. If you look hard enough, you'll find your own. His statemen... read more

It all started when I told my friend Art I would meet him on the corner of Fifth and Fifty-Third. I didn't see him. So I asked a lady walking up the avenue, "Have you seen Art?" "MoMA?" asked the lady. "Uh . . . no, he's just a friend." "Just down Fifty-Third Street here. In a beautiful new building. You can't miss it." When this address turns out to be the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, confusion and hilarity ensue. As the narrator continues looking for Art inside MoMA, he is introduced to well-known pieces of art such... read more

This is a stunning compilation of 100 images by photographer Gary Heery of Sydney florist Grandiflora's unique signature floral arrangements. Each image is accompanied by simple step-by-step instructions by Saskia Havekes, Grandiflora's owner, to assist readers replicate the arrangements in their own home.

184 pages. Published to coincide with the exhibition currently (September 2009) showing at the Australian Centrer for the Moving Image (ACMI) in Melbourne.

This book is both more and less than history, a work of imagination in its own right, a piece of movie literature that turns fact into romance.' Gavin Lambert was reviewing the first edition of David Thomson's monumental work in 1975. In the years since the fourth edition was published, careers have waxed and waned, reputations been made and lost, great movies produced, trends set and scorned. This fifth edition has 300 entirely new entries and every original entry has been re-examined. Thus the roster of directors, actors, produce... read more