More Wildlife Painting: Techniques of Modern Masters

Emphasizing the all-important details of rendering wildlife, the book devotes separate sections to animals' eyes, whiskers, beaks, fur, and so on. Sketches, studies, and reference photos used by master painters show just how their bird and animal portraits evolved into magnificent finished works in watercolor, gouache, oil, pastel, or other mediums.

very nice and inspiring artwork but not enough detail about techniques used.......2006-07-25

Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid, Russian expatriates who have been working together for more than 30 years, have a knack, writes art curator Mia Fineman, for "transforming the solemn rituals of high art into high comedy." It was with the utmost seriousness, however, that the two, on reading of the elephants' plight, traveled to Thailand and established the Thai Elephant Art School, through whose offices elephants create pop-art masterpieces with palette, brush, and trunk. (Elephants, it seems, have a well-known gift for the visual arts and, in the Thai case, adore the work of Vasily Kandinsky.) Sold to collectors on the world market, pachyderm-painted pieces generated $75,000 at a single early auction, the proceeds of which were used to establish and maintain sanctuaries throughout Thailand.

Illustrated with elephantine artwork and more than 100 photographs documenting Komar and Melamid's project, this book makes a wonderfully offbeat gift, and one of a very good cause. --Gregory McNamee

For centuries elephants in Thailand have been revered as a nationalsymbol, worshiped as living gods and employed as beasts of burden in the nation's thriving timber industry. But when logging was banned in Thailand in 1990, these noble animals fell on hard times. Reduced to performing tricks for tourists by day and illegal heavy labor by night, Thailand's elephants were exhausted, malnourished, and dying in alarming numbers.

Hearing of their plight, a pair of unlikely heroes came to the rescue, Wildly eccentric Russian emigre artists Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid devised a brilliant scheme: to create the world's first quadruped occupational retraining program-a network of art schools for unemployed elephants. Taking a cue from elephant trainers in a number of American zoos, Komar and Melamid taught the animals to hold brushes in their trunks and apply paint to canvas. And the results were astonishing: Not only did the elephants' paintings closely resemble the expansive gestural work of such Abstract Expressionist artists as Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Franz Kline, but the pachyderm painters also began to develop clearly distinct regional styles-lyrical and expressive in the northern Thai school, subtle and atmospheric in the east, dynamic and angst ridden in the central school.

Sanctioned by the World Wildlife Fund, the Asian Elephant Art and Conservation Project has been a remarkable success; paintings by some of the most talented elephant artists have been auctioned at Christie's for thousands of dollars, generating funds to provide proper care for the elephants and support for their trainers.

When Elephants Paint follows Komar and Melamid and their eclectic entourage through Thailand's lush jungles and steaming cities, describing the odd encounters and creative cajoling that helped turn this seemingly whimsical idea into a concrete, beneficial reality. Illustrated with more than 100 photographs, including actual elephant paintings, this riotously funny and provocative book offers a valuable lesson in wildlife conservation and startling revelations about the nature of art itself.

During the past century the western world has shown an unprecedented interest in wildlife and its identification and conservation, and the art of the era has both stimulated and reflected this interest. This stunning book examines the various forms of wildlife art—from photographic hyper-realism to the abstract—each illustrated by paintings or prints that best represent the genre.

Nicholas Hammond points out that in the nineteenth century, wildlife art was primarily of interest to the wealthy, and animals were commonly depicted in paintings as quarry or as fierce beasts at odds with humans. Now artists are more likely to focus on the vulnerability of animals to people in order to further the cause of their conservation and the preservation of their habitats. Hammond provides a masterly analysis of the wildlife art of this century, discussing the differences in the traditions of North American and European wildlife art; changes in printing processes over time; the growth of illustrated magazines; the establishment of commercial galleries; and the changes in styles and approaches. He then presents a survey of artists from Bruno Liljefors and Archibald Thorburn to Chagall and Picasso. The book concludes with a selection of brief biographies of the more influential artists of the century, including most of those whose work is depicted in the preceding pages. More than 140 paintings or prints are reproduced in color, representing the work of 89 artists.

Published in association with Christopher Helm/A & C Black