The Figurative Artist's Handbook

The Figurative Artist's Handbook
ISBN: 9781580934527
Publication Date: 28 March 2017

An Authoritative, Comprehensive Guide for Contemporary Figurative Artists

Mastering the figure is an essential tool for any serious visual artist. At a time when renewed interest in figurative art is surging throughout the art world, author Robert Zeller presents The Figurative Artists Handbookthe first comprehensive guide to figure drawing and painting to appear in decades.

Illustrated with Zellers own exquisite drawings and paintings as well as works by nearly 100 historical and contemporary figurative art masters, the handbook is also a treasure trove of the finest figurative art of the past and the present day. Included are Michelangelo, Pieter Brueghel the Elder, Peter Paul Rubens, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Gustav Klimt, Edward Hopper, Andrew Loomis, Andrew Wyeth, Lucian Freud, Odd Nerdrum, Eric Fischl, Bo Bartlett, Steven Assael, John Currin, and many others.

Original and thoroughly modern in his approach, Zeller brings together three figure-drawing methods long thought to be at odds, synthesizing these seemingly incompatible techniques to achieve a cohesive and complete understanding of the human figure. Although all three methods underlie contemporary fine-arts practice and education, no artists handbook has ever combined them before:

The Study of Gesture (Disegno): Rooted in the Italian Mannerist style of the 16th and 17th centuries, the gestural method emphasizes life, rhythm, and movement in the human body.

The Structural Approach: A mainstay of 20th- and 21st-century art instruction, this method applies an architectural perspective to the body, using a block conception for anatomically sound, solid figures.

The Atelier Method: Based on the training ...