Painting Ceramics by Simona Hill

I'll be honest there was not a lot of point me reading Book 28 Painting Ceramics because I had no intention of going anywhere near a ceramic with some paint.

I dutifully went through the book though as that is the mission I have set myself - to read a book from every bookcase in the library. Had I got access to all the equipment needed I might have attempted some of the mini projects in Painting Ceramics if I had had the free time. But I would have had to buy everything from scratch (the library doesn't extend to painting equipment sadly!). Besides I know from my time at school in the dreaded Art Block that whatever I produced would look nowhere as good as the beautiful items in the book.

I can see some point in painting ceramics because at least you can use the objects afterwards and making them look nice and original is a worthwhile thing to do. I hate to sound defeatist though but I just don't have the ability to do this sort of thing very well. It looks so easy in the book but I know I would struggle to emulate their efforts. My skills lie elsewhere, and I can make things in my own domain of knowledge look incredibly easy when most people's heads would melt even climbing the foothills of what I do best! We all have our own knowledge bastions but, of the things we don't know, some are definitely easier to take on board than others.

Painting Ceramics, like all these books in this part of the library, is not cheap to buy new and it's a great resource to have guidebooks like this available to take out and try for free. I award it 3 out of 10, which is no reflection on the book at all just on what I personally got from it.

I remain in the "arty" section of the library but move on to Art itself, and I have picked a book about Cezanne for book 29.

I would love to be able to understand and appreciate art more and that's been my position for most of my life.  Music I can enjoy but I struggle with Art and always have. I really got to understand classical music when I was a student by reading a book called The Lives of the Great Composers by Harold C. Schonberg. It's a wonderful book and I'd love to get an equivalent in art as the best way to understand music is to understand each composer's place in history. I have tried to find such a book before about the history of art but never managed to read one that hit the spot as well as Schonberg's masterpiece. Instead I have to read books like Cezanne which focus on one artist at a time. I have read quite a few books like this about one artist already, but not on this subject. Cezanne is fairly modern being from the Nineteenth Century so hopefully there is a good understanding of what made him tick and how it relates to his art in this book.