Ray Atkins (b.1937) is one of the least well known major painters of his generation. He studied at Bromley College of Art in Kent before gaining a post graduate place at the Slade despite having failed the National Diploma in Design in 1961. His first teaching post was at Reading University in 1965 where he lived and recorded in paint the huge upheavals that the town was undergoing, leading to a one person exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery, London in 1974.A teaching post at Falmouth Art School in 1974 led to a thirty four year stay in Cornwall where he painted the extraordinary landscape of the china clay country around St Austell with its collossal pits and mounds of micae.The desolation left over by the demise of the tin mining industry was also a major theme, The more intimate subjects of children, gardens, family life and inevitably the sea were also part of the oevre. The nineties also saw a long series of works on the theme of dance.To celebrate the uncelebrated was his dictum.Peter Davies follows Atkins’ journey from the dark but creative London period to the high spots in the eighties with a retrospective at the Royal West of England Academy and with work selected for the John Moores in Liverpool, a room at a Serpentine summer Show, and representation in shows at the Hayward gallery.The book also follows the tensions and problems arising from Atkins’ insistence on working direct from his subjects and places the artist’s career in the wider context of the twists and turns of events in the art world in the UK, Europe and beyond.In addition, David Stoker gives a personal account of his discovery of Atkins in France, leading to a growing friendship and a deep understanding and respect for the work.

Adam Bruce Thomson (1885-1976) was one of the most quietly impactful artists of his generation. Born in Edinburgh, he was among the earliest intake of students to train at the newly established Edinburgh College of Art. He went on to have a long-running teaching career at the College, supporting and encouraging successive cohorts. In his own practice, Thomson worked across a range of media, producing etchings, drawings, watercolours and oil paintings. A committed member of several artist-led societies, he exhibited widely and was well-respected by his peers. To date, however, his contribution to twentieth-century Scottish art remains largely unexplored.Adam Bruce Thomson: The Quiet Path celebrates the achievements of this talented yet modest figure. It provides an in-depth account of his life and career, charting his creative development and examining his role as a teacher, mentor and friend to other artists. The book is fully illustrated, and draws from previously unseen archival material. It accompanies a major exhibition at Edinburgh’s City Art Centre in 2024.

Harold Harvey, a true ‘son of Cornwall’, has been one of the most under-rated and least written about members of the Newlyn ‘School’ of artists which flourished from 1880 to 1930. The son of a bank manager, he grew up in Penance, and after studying under Norman Garstin and a spell in Paris, he settled to a quiet life in Newlyn with fellow-artist Gertrude, painting The Cornwall he knowS from the inside.In his introductory essay, Professor Kenneth McConkey sets Harvey in the context of the art moments of the time, and shows how his early ‘genre’ paintings of rustic and marine life, so characteristic of the early Newlyn artists, gradually gave way to more sophisticated subject matter – Harvey was noted for his sumptuous interiors – and a flatter and more decorative style of painting. His early work might be compared with that of Stanhope Forbes, while his later paintings show clear affinities with those of fellow painters such as Laura Knight and Dod Procter.Professor McConkey’s essay complements the first significant ‘life’ of Harold Harvey, researched and written by Peter Risdon and Pauline Sheppard, which is in turn illuminated by Peter Risdon’s painstakingly compiled catalogue raisonne of over 600 paintings.Harvey’s painting output was prodigious, and this book includes approximately 100 illustrations of his favoured subjects: the Cornish at work, children at play, and intimate interior scenes and conversation pieces. Many of his contemporaries in Newlyn were visiting ‘observers’, but for Harold Harvey, who rarely went outside the county even though a regular exhibitor at the Royal Academy, painting the Cornish world ‘because it was there’ was his whole life.

The artist Michael Sandle (b. 1936) is well known for his powerful and uncompromising sculptures such as A Twentieth Century Memorial (1971-78), The Drummer (1985) and Iraq: The Sound of Your Silence (2009). Sandle has also been a very prolific draughtsman over the years, making a large number of prints and drawings, both in relation to his sculpture and also apart from it. This new publication looks closely at his works on paper across his whole career. It presents his two-dimensional work from his early years whilst training at Douglas School of Art (1951-54), at the Slade School of Art (1956-59), where he studied painting and printing, and at the Atelier Patris in Paris (1960), right up to the present day. Alongside lithographs and etchings, it shows pages from his sketchbooks and many medium and larger format drawings.The book begins with a new and extensive ‘in conversation’ conducted between Sandle and the art historian and curator Jon Wood that looks in detail at the interconnected lives led by his prints, drawings and sculptures over the last sixty years. Their discussion focusses on the materials and techniques the artist has used, as well as on the subjects, concerns and contexts of this extraordinary body of work.

This beautiful book, of paintings by Alice Mumford and poems by Sue Leigh, brings together exciting new work from the two makers. Collaboration is perhaps not the right word for a project in which paintings and poems sit side by side, each illuminating the other. Onlooker and reader are offered another glimpse, another view which may change the experience of looking and reading. The book includes conversations between painter and poet in which they discuss their experience of working in their different media and consider the limitations and possibilities of each. They talk about their sources of inspiration, how they might choose a subject (or does it choose them?), and the process that surrounds the making of their work. What do they share in their creative lives and how do they differ? The work of these two contemporary artists celebrates the intimacy and beauty that can be found in our everyday lives.

Altdorf’s earliest poems, written during military service and as a prisoner of war, reflected on nature, poetry and art. Beginning a new life, post-war, as an artist, Altdorf explored how the human figure might be depicted through increasingly abstract representations. Similarly, he refined his poetry to create ‘a new, free, melodic’ language’ with ‘a simple, song-like beauty’. Presenting Altdorf’s poetry alongside his art reveals a powerfully interconnected vision shaped but not defined by war: a humanitarian outlook informed by a profound spiritual belief.

From sculpture to woodcuts, glass design to poetry, the work of German artist Egon Altdorf crossed boundaries. ‘Making culture behind the barbed wire’ was how Altdorf endured wartime captivity, inspiring a life dedicated to art that was innovative, spiritual and redemptive. Exhibiting in London alongside sculptors Barbara Hepworth, Lynn Chadwick and Reg Butler at the Unknown Political Prisoner exhibition (1953), he adopted an increasingly abstract approach, rooted in Biblical symbolism yet embracing different faiths, notably in designs for the outstanding interior of Wiesbaden’s new synagogue. Exploring Altdorf’s work in ten interdisciplinary chapters, this book illuminates the still-overlooked contribution of artists who reshaped postwar existence: the lost generation.

Kenneth Draper (b.1944) is one of the most innovative artists of his generation. For over six decades he has worked equally with sculpture, painting and drawing. He describes himself as an ‘abstract artist working from the landscape’, reflecting the spirit of places where he has lived, worked or travelled, from London’s urban landscape to India, the United States, northern England, France, Egypt and Menorca. Born in Derbyshire, Draper studied at the Royal College of Art, rapidly establishing a place in the London art scene. He was the youngest artist to exhibit in British Sculptors ’72 at the Royal Academy, having held his first solo exhibition at the Redfern Gallery three years earlier. Colour, always an integral aspect of his sculpture, came to the fore in works inspired by a visit to India, in large pastel drawings, and in three-dimensional works exploring gravity, illusion and structural ambiguity. Draper’s recent works on paper range from enigmatic, interior-focused studies in pencil to dazzling colour pieces that further blur the boundaries between the drawn and the constructed. Kenneth Draper: On the Edge of Sculpture is the first monograph to address the full range of an artist whose legacy is a fearlessly exhilarating exploration of landscape and the forces of nature.

Peter Howson has established a formidable reputation as one of his generation's leading figurative painters. Many of his paintings derive inspiration from the streets of Glasgow, where he was brought up. He is renowned for his penetrating insight into the human condition, and his heroic portrayals of the mighty and the lowly. His experiences of abuse - whether self-inflicted and substance-related or the traumatic events of his childhood - have moulded his view of the world and afforded him an affinity with those individuals who are classed as somehow 'on the edge'. His ability to speak to those on the margins is proof of his enduring skill at capturing the maverick, the excessive and the non-conformist. In 1992 he was commissioned by the Imperial War Museum to record the conflict in the former Yugoslavia. He was appointed official British war artist for Bosnia in 1993 and in 1996 was awarded Doctor of Letters at The University of Strathclyde. His work is in numerous international private and public collections.This publication is the first major statement about Howson’s work for almost twenty years and accompanies a major retrospective at Edinburgh City Art Centre. It illustrates his consummate skill in a range of media and documents his religious work as well as his graphic responses to recent global events.

Stanhope Alexander Forbes has always been known as ‘the Father of the Newlyn School’. His presence as its figure-head, guiding hand and representative to the wider world made him famous but this book celebrates his own work – the paintings he made through a long life lived in and around the fishing village of Newlyn. It marks the centenary of seventy years since his death in 1947 with the largest survey of his paintings ever produced. Forbes was born in 1857 and arrived in Newlyn in 1884 as an ambitious young painter who, like others at the time, was looking away from academic traditions towards a fresh approach. His most essential tenet, followed throughout his life, was that he must always work directly in the open air. In Newlyn a colony of artists coalesced around Forbes’ tall, gentlemanly figure. Somehow his demeanour, even as a young man, exuded leadership. He was articulate, fair-minded and generous with support for other artists. He met and fell in love with the Canadian-born painter Elizabeth Armstrong and they were married in 1889. Together they set up a School of Painting and attracted a steady stream of new artists and enthusiastic amateurs.