Sara Steele: Blueprints For Paradise (ISBN 1594901171)

New to Ms. Steele:
Stunning! Vibrant! The best words that come to mind. I was given this as a gift and have now purchased several to give as gifts (Xmas and two birthdays). It's my favorite gift to give right now.

This artist book is GREAT!!!:
So many of Sara Steele's wonderful, vibrant pieces of art! The book is lovely... To have so many of her images in one place is a delight! If you love art then you most definitely will love this book and especially if you love the watercolors of Sara Steele it is a must! You will love the information that is in the book also..well written by wonderful people.. So do yourself a favor and get several as you will want to give them to your friends as well!

Musician Looks at the Blueprints:
As a jazz pianist who has seen Sara Steele's work closeup in its large form, I would describe it, in its overall collection form in this book, as holographic. The book, given the adequate size of the pages, accurately translates this quality. As a non-painter, it seems to me that overall Sara's work is of a certain rare type whose constituent paintings each reflect a certain completion in and of themselves, yet when taken together, don't present a linear evolutionary scheme. Her development over the years looks more like one of spontaneous emergence, with several different identifiable styles each going its own way. I feel the holographic quality is achieved in this collection because a number of the works also point to the reality of supra-mental organizational paradigms: emotional, wordless, irreducible. For me, her work is an affective testimony in form, color and motion. It can be still. Yet it also moves. Sometimes it is edgy, sometimes soft. Sometimes strident, sometimes introverted. The florals are intricate, the washes and dissolves (if these are even art terms) very different, ethereal. This collection presents still lifes, intricate florals, landscapes, abstract designs, washes and broad strokes. There is a great deal of variety here and, as Sara relates in the introduction, some of the techniques required are complex, difficult and mercurial. Some years ago Ms. Steele explained to me how she makes the sharp watercolor 'color line.' Having the technique explained to me felt like a religious experience. The abstract images invite the viewer to explore certain moods, some of which can exude powerful emotions. For instance, "Arianna (longing like Icarus, seeing like a Hawk) incarnates the collage-like mystical realism of a dream world which I found completely destablizing. It jolted me with a taste of something larger than my day-to-day ego. This is what good art does. It creates riotous immediacy and invites people to be courageous captains and not merely passengers on the ships of their own lives. Despite the immediacy, power and sometimes jolting experience of Steele's palette or subject matter, I feel safe in viewing these works. This is important to me because I try to give all of myself to art forms that I choose to interact with. I eschew the shallow popularizers of archetypal forms who may present abstracted symbols of infinities in completely incoherent ways, like atheist rock stars on stage hanging trinket golden crosses from their necks. The interview prepending the art itself provides a grounded moral context for who Sara is, how she lives and what she believes. It shows us the person standing alongside the art. There is a real person here -- pictures of Sara with her brushes. Where Steele is going next may be anyone's guess. This collection though, shows us an artist who has mastered a variety of forms, and is now expanding into a broad universal context. This collection directs our eyes to a horizon where that segment of humanity is going who believe that the journey is inward, yet grounded in this very real planet. It pulls the viewer out of normal space-time and suggests places of mental rest that reach deep inside the roots of the earth. In reattaches modernity to humus, the moist, spongy stuff of life, and challenges us to question the electronic nihilism and manic crazes of the industrialized psyche. Kip Leitner Philadelphia, PA, USA