80 books like Acrylic Revolution

My mixed media journey began as a kid growing up in a family of scientists and artists. I always loved to combine things, adding unusual objects to my mud sculptures and later mixing things up as a chemistry student. I created some wild concoctions as a bartender and then eventually as an acrylic painter. I began as a traditional oil painter, but I moved on to painting murals on walls, and cutting stones and metalwork. I introduced the other art students to some great construction sites where we would scavenge materials and give them new life. This passion led me to write six books on mixed media.

My mixed media journey began as a kid growing up in a family of scientists and artists. I always loved to combine things, adding unusual objects to my mud sculptures and later mixing things up as a chemistry student. I created some wild concoctions as a bartender and then eventually as an acrylic painter. I began as a traditional oil painter, but I moved on to painting murals on walls, and cutting stones and metalwork. I introduced the other art students to some great construction sites where we would scavenge materials and give them new life. This passion led me to write six books on mixed media.

My mixed media journey began as a kid growing up in a family of scientists and artists. I always loved to combine things, adding unusual objects to my mud sculptures and later mixing things up as a chemistry student. I created some wild concoctions as a bartender and then eventually as an acrylic painter. I began as a traditional oil painter, but I moved on to painting murals on walls, and cutting stones and metalwork. I introduced the other art students to some great construction sites where we would scavenge materials and give them new life. This passion led me to write six books on mixed media.

My mixed media journey began as a kid growing up in a family of scientists and artists. I always loved to combine things, adding unusual objects to my mud sculptures and later mixing things up as a chemistry student. I created some wild concoctions as a bartender and then eventually as an acrylic painter. I began as a traditional oil painter, but I moved on to painting murals on walls, and cutting stones and metalwork. I introduced the other art students to some great construction sites where we would scavenge materials and give them new life. This passion led me to write six books on mixed media.

I have always been a dog person. Sometimes, I think I am a dog whisperer, as I feel like the dogs in my life have always understood me, just like I understood them. They were often so human-like that I wondered what they did at the house when I was out. So, it didn’t take much of a leap to come up with the idea of “Dudley’s Day at Home,” where Dudley and his best cat pal, Buttercup, enjoy lots of human activities while Sam and his mother are away. 

I spent two years researching and creating the graphic novel Black Dog: The Dreams of Paul Nash for the 14-18Now Foundations WW1 centenary art commissions, and then touring a live permanence work evolved from the book. We grew up a few miles from each other, and he convalesced after the war where I live now, and I share his sense of place, and we appear to have shared many life experiences, with the obvious exception being his time in the trenches - that was the huge black hole I tried to understand with this work.

I’ve lived in cities all my adult life and currently divide my time between Paris and Philadelphia. And while those two cities are strikingly different places, they have in common the fact that they are both great walking cities –- urban centers that can be explored on foot and easily enjoyed by pedestrians. Walking cities, I believe, provide not only an ideal context for today’s tourists but also a model for a future in which urban dwellers become less reliant on automobiles and urban centers more open to foot traffic than to vehicular pollution and congestion. The books I’ll recommend deal in various ways with the building and rebuilding of visionary cities, and of Paris in particular.

I am a very realistic person, curious by nature, who loves a good thrill. A good twist—no matter the genre—that has all the above recommendations captures my attention. A feel-good chick flick or book does nothing for my curious side but adds a twist or two and you have me hooked. Love at war is that kind of book. It has a few twists that touch on important topics and leave you with a few thoughts to think about afterward. Life is not only marshmallows and sprinklers. Life is real and I like my books like that, too. Therefore, I call myself a multi-genre author. I don’t want to be bound by one genre.

I’ve been obsessed with art since I was a kid. When I look at art, I see stories, not just about what I’m seeing, but about what it was like when the painting was created: was the artist tired, grumpy, frustrated? Why’d they paint it the way they did? Sadly, my artistic talent is limited, but fortunately, I can tell stories. After visiting William Orpen’s painting of Mona Dunn at the Beaverbrook Art Gallery, I couldn’t help wondering why he made her look so pensive. The only way I could answer that question was by writing my own story about Mona and the other paintings in the gallery!

I'm a social anthropologist who has lived, dreamed, and worked in Syria most of her life. Having spent my childhood in Damascus I always yearned to return. After completing my PhD at the University of California, Los Angeles, in the economy of modern Bedouin Tribes, I won a Fulbright award to teach at the University of Damascus. Since then, Damascus has been at the centre of my academic and social life. I met my husband there, a British helicopter pilot, sent there to learn Arabic. I'm an emeritus professor of anthropology and forced migration at the University of Oxford and my research has been on the forced migrant communities who make up Syria’s cosmopolitan society.