Books like Art & fear by David Bayles

Steal Like an Artist is a visually engaging guide that translates Austin Kleon’s viral lecture into actionable advice for writers, artists, designers, entrepreneurs and anyone who wants to make things in the digital age.

Elizabeth Gilbert shares her personal creative process, guiding readers to embrace curiosity, overcome fear, and unlock hidden inspiration through practical attitudes and habits for a more creative, passionate life.

The Artist’s Way offers a practical, twelve‑week guide of creative exercises and reflective practices designed to help writers, musicians, painters and other artists unlock and sustain their creative potential.

A curated collection of the daily habits and routines that powered some of history’s most influential artists, writers, musicians, and thinkers.

Creative Confidence shows how every person can unlock and apply their creative potential in business and everyday life, using insights and examples from IDEO’s design practice.

In his fascinating last book, Edward Said looks at a selection of essays, poems, novels, films, and operas to determine what late style may explain about the evolution of the creative life. He discusses how the approaching death of an artist can make its way "with anachronism and anomaly" into his work, as was the case in the late work of Thomas Mann, Richard Strauss, Jean Genet, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, and C. P. Cavafy. Said examines Beethoven's Missa Solemnis, Genet's Le captif amoureux and Les paravents, Mozart's Cosi fan tutte, Visconti's film of Lampedusa's The Leopard, Euripides' The Bacchae and Iphigenia at Aulis, and Thomas Mann's Death in Venice, among other works.He points out that one can also find an "unearthly serenity," in last works, for example, in Sophocles, Shakespeare, Rembrandt, Matisse, Bach, and Wagner, which, as Said puts it, "crown a lifetime of aesthetic endeavor." But in On Late Style he concentrates on artistic lateness as "intransigence, difficulty, and unresolved contradiction." He also writes about Theodor Adorno and about Glenn Gould, who chose to stop performing, thereby creating his own form of lateness. Said makes clear that most of the works discussed are rife with deep conflict and an almost impenetrable complexity. In fact, he feels that lateness is often "a form of exile." These works frequently stood in direct contrast to what was popular at the time, but they were forerunners of what was to come in each artist's particular discipline--works of true genius.Eloquent and impassioned, brilliantly reasoned and revelatory, On Late Style is Edward Said's own great last work.From the Hardcover edition.

"The early work of seven very different visual artists, John Everett Millais, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Picasso, Michael Rothenstein, Gerard Hoffnung, Sarah Raphael and David Downes, is here presented in a series of case studies which investigate historical and contemporary attitudes to the teaching of drawing to young children. In this fascinating study, Sheila Paine, a former President of the National Society for Education in Art and Design, shares the experience of a lifetime's work in art education, to explore the mysteries of drawing fluency, its often precocious beginnings and the personal, social and cultural circumstances which help or hinder its development." "Most children enjoy drawing and use it to express a wide range of experiences and emotions. Drawing can offer an avenue of expression where words fail. So why do so many people stop drawing after the early school years? In Artists Emerging, Sheila Paine investigates how seven artists found ways to sustain and develop their drawing skill and expressive potential. The close study of these drawings reveals the sequences of their progress and their eventual achievement. The example of the successful intuitive strategies of these artists has much to offer everyone teaching drawing or wishing to learn."--Jacket.