ART & ARCHITECTURE INTERVIEWS for FIVE BOOKS, ESSAYS, FIELD NOTES

No. 12 - Five Years of Conversations about Art, Architecture, Design… and Surfing

Five years ago this month I launched Appel, a site to collect my interviews for Five Books, as well as other odds and ends. Ten years ago I made my first serious attempt at oil painting. This newsletter marks a kind of milestone.

This site is merging with a new studio website. The new site will also be a window for my painting and drawing. The newsletters were only ever intermittent to begin with. That won’t change. I’ll continue to feature Five Books interviews, and also flag upcoming exhibits, workshops and new work from the studio. Thank you to everyone who came along for the ride so far. I hope you stick around. For anyone new to the newsletter, welcome.

I’m super grateful to Sophie, Cal, Juliet and the entire team at Five Books for the opportunity to be a part of their wonderful literary enterprise. It is the most extensive book recommendation site out there - a veritable encyclopedia, the best books on everything.

Below I highlight my most recent interviews, which did not get their own dedicated newsletters. Life had other plans. Here’s a link to all 33 art, architecture and design-related Five Books interviews I’ve done to date. Somehow, although they don’t feature here, a couple interviews on Surfing and Wanderlust snuck into the mix too.

INTERVIEW | In Conversation with Ulinka Rublack| 5.1.24

Albrecht Dürer

Albrecht Dürer was the archetype of the Renaissance man, but also the prototypical artist-merchant, and very much a man of the world, says historian Ulinka Rublack. Dürer's self-portraits, particularly the Christ-like image from 1500, have branded him as art history's ultimate narcissist, but this is a view that does justice to neither his work nor to the complex and conflicted creative individual that he was, she says. She recommends books on Dürer's Renaissance that reveal a much more nuanced artist and a richer sense of the times in which he lived and created.

INTERVIEW | In Conversation with Chris Stevens | 11.10.23

Modern British Painting

Artists the world over interpreted Modernism in very distinctive ways, explains the expert curator Chris Stephens. In Britain, painters like David Hockney and Francis Bacon worked in transatlantic dialogue with their contemporaries in the US, producing "English-accented echoes." Here, Stephens selects five of the best books on Modern British painting that illuminate its place within a global movement.

INTERVIEW | In Conversation with Andrea Kantrowitz | 23.12.22

Drawing as Thought

Doodling is no mere pastime; drawing is a form of thinking. In fact, visuospatial reasoning underlies all thinking, as this selection of books about drawing from painter and scholar Andrea Kantrowitz shows us. Just pick up a pencil and draw!

INTERVIEW | In Conversation with Kevin Bethune| 5.6.22

Design with a capital D

When we think of design, we often think of objects, typefaces and graphic art. In fact, Kevin G. Bethune argues, design is an essential human activity that goes far beyond that to encompass designing institutions and social structures, a continuum that extends from the material world to our civic existence and the ways in which we collaborate to solve problems and achieve collective ends.