Jane Jelley's Top Book Recommendations
Want to know what books Jane Jelley recommends on their reading list? We've researched interviews, social media posts, podcasts, and articles to build a comprehensive list of Jane Jelley's favorite book recommendations of all time.
Virtually every day in the fall of 1907, Rainer Maria Rilke returned to a Paris gallery to view a Cézanne exhibition. Nearly as frequently, he wrote dense and joyful letters to his wife, Clara Westhoff, expressing his dismay before the paintings and his ensuing revelations about art and life.
Rilke was knowledgeable...
moreRecommended by Jane Jelley, and 1 others. Jane JelleyI found Rilke inspirational, because he talks about painting in a really extraordinary way. Cézanne himself said that ‘talking about art is almost useless’. Art is a visual thing, and writing is not: the two are very different. And yet, Rilke somehow is able to express in words the way Cézanne’s paintings made him understand the world. (Source)
Recommended by Jane Jelley, and 1 others. Jane JelleyThere are many things as an artist you can’t discover or explain by yourself along the way, like how a bright colour can appear to be lighter than it is, or the science behind making your picture look as if something is receding. Margaret Livingstone explains tricks of the eye: questions of luminance, depth and colour; and does so in terms of our vision system. All the time painters have a... (Source)
Recommended by Jane Jelley, and 1 others. Jane JelleyCennini wrote his ‘Book of the Art’ around 1390 or so. It seems that he really had tried things out himself. I chose a new translation by Lara Broecke, who has been very careful in her work. There was no single, original manuscript of Cennino Cennini’s work, only a number of copies. What Broecke did was to look at them all, and work out the best translation of elements from each, and to be quite... (Source)
For example: Cleopatra used saffron—a source of the color yellow—for seduction. Extracted from an Afghan mine, the blue “ultramarine” paint used by Michelangelo was so expensive he couldn’t afford to buy it himself. Since ancient times, carmine red—still found in lipsticks and Cherry Coke today—has come from the blood of insects. less
Recommended by Jane Jelley, and 1 others. Jane JelleyIf you’re going to do any kind of experimentation about a 17th-century painter, you’ve really got to know something about the materials they’re working with. One of the many books I looked at was Victoria Finlay’s. She not only documented what colours Vermeer used, she went to find them in the real world. So her book is a travelogue. She’s rushing around the world trying to find the source of... (Source)
In Vermeer's Camera, Philip Steadman traces the development of the camera obscura--first described by Leonaro da Vinci--weighs the arguments that scholars have made for and against Vermeer's use of the camera, and offers a fascinating examination of the... more
Recommended by Jane Jelley, and 1 others. Jane JelleyPhilip Steadman also took a practical approach in his book Vermeer’s Camera (2001) to determine whether Vermeer used a lens. The reason people think it possible, or even likely, is because Vermeer’s work has qualities that stand out, qualities which are unusual, and which could be related to the use of optics. In particular we see an extraordinary sensitivity to light, and a sense that we are... (Source)
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