Susan Owens

Winner of the Apollo Book of the Year Award 2024 Drawing is at the heart of human creativity. The most democratic form of art-making, it requires nothing more than a plain surface and a stub of pencil, a piece of chalk or an inky brush. Our prehistoric ancestors drew with natural pigments on the walls of caves, and every subsequent...

A gorgeously illustrated volume devoted to the natural history drawings and watercolours of Leonardo da Vinci and other outstanding artists of the Age of Discovery. From the fifteenth century onwards, as European explorers sailed forth on grand voyages of discovery, their encounters with exotic plants and animals fanned intense scientific interest. Scholars began to examine nature with fresh eyes, and...

A marvellous book Ali Smith Shaped by the cycle of the natural world, a fresh look at the life and work of John Constable to celebrate the 250th anniversary of his birth in 2026. As exhilarating as a lungful of oxygen: that's how some of his contemporaries felt about John Constable's paintings. Others, though, were baffled by his uncompromisingly fresh...

When we look at the landscape, what do we see? Do we experience the view over a valley or dappled sunlight on a path in the same way as those who were there before us? We have altered the countryside in innumerable ways over the last thousand years, and never more so than in the last hundred. How are these...

A revelatory cultural history revealing what spirits, ghosts and apparitions can tell us about our culture, and about ourselves. Ghosts are woven into the very fabric of life. In Britain, every town, village, and great house has a spectral resident, and their enduring popularity in literature, art, folklore, and film attests to their continuing power to fascinate, terrify, and inspire....