Strokes of Genius 9: Creative Discoveries (Strokes of Genius: The Best of Drawing)

It's not often that a ONE star review encourages you to buy a book, but it did so in this case. Reviewer John Cooney's mystifying categorisation of it as "awful" immediately made me want it - especially since I have two other volumes in this series, neither of which disappointed me.Nor does this one; a glance through Amazon's ever-so-helpful "Look Inside" feature was sufficient to assure me that this would be so (even though in this case it's very unrepresentative). I was left wondering which five drawings the dissatisfied reviewer liked. Perhaps it was the five that I didn't like - that's the way with art...There is often a fine line line between art and craft. and again it's a matter for personal evaluation. I do admire the drawings which are indistinguishable from hi-def photographs - but as a photographer as well as a painter, I have to ask myself, "what's the point" ? Except perhaps to showcase the craft skill. No harm in that, though. There's quite a bit of that type of work on display, especially in the portraits - of which there are too many for my taste; we have separate sections for child and other portraiture respectively, whilst landscape (my main interest) is under-represented, and lumped with urbanscapes.Drawing instruments being ideal for the lifelike depiction of fur and feather, we have plenty of that, too, but "painterly" pastel and charcoal work are on display throughout, albeit in a minority. It seems like just about every taste is catered for to some degree or another, with plenty of pleasingly contrasting styles.The drawing theme is stretched somewhat, even to include a wholly traditional watercolour, and an ingenious arrangement of white thread on a black ground - thread strokes ? It is, of course, becoming increasing difficult to pigeon-hole works of art by media, there being so many cross-overs, like water-colour pencils and oil pastels, not to mention acrylic, which can be made to look like just about anything. Perhaps publishers should stop trying.The title of this series is always going to be challenged, and is not well-chosen; "genius" is a word that shouldn't be over-used, and perhaps can't be correctly applied to any of the works shown here. Strokes of brilliance, perhaps.For myself, I can't have too many of these compendiums of disparate artworks, whatever the media and whatever the genre. The skill and patience on display in this volume is often awe-inspring, and in this particular category, at least, the baneful influence of modernism rarely makes inroads... I, too, have my prejudices.

A terrible book! These are not strokes of genius. I liked about 5 drawings in the entire book.

Strokes of Genius is a series of yearbooks for great examples of drawings. These are inspirational if you love to draw.

Always interesting and inspirational

I buy Strokes every year. It is very inspirational and I can hardly wait for the next one comingn out. Love the artists commentaries.

This artist continues to buy this excellent series about drawing techniques the the artist that do them.

So happy when I received the book