Art

Huw Lewis-Jones's collection of fictional islands from literature, cartography, and mythology. Beautiful maps, wild stories, and a reminder that the impulse to imagine places that don't exist is as old as the impulse to explore places that do.

Jeremy Collins's illustrated exploration of climbing — each route rendered as art, each summit as a drawing. Collins is a climber who draws and a drawer who climbs, and this book is the rare place where both practices converge.

Huw Lewis-Jones's collection of field sketches by explorers, naturalists, and adventurers. Darwin's finches, Shackleton's ice, botanical illustrations from the Amazon. The drawings people made before cameras, when seeing meant drawing.

Huw Lewis-Jones on the visual culture of Arctic exploration — the paintings, photographs, maps, and illustrations that shaped how the world imagined the north. A history of seeing ice.

If you’ve skied, you’ve seen and used the art of James Niehues. The lifelong Coloradan wielded the paintbrush that created more than 260 of the mountain portraits that grace some of the world’s greatest ski areas’ maps. Niehues was a struggling freelance artist and designer living in Denver in the 1980s and trying to support a family when he approached ski map legend Bill Brown. Fortuitously, Brown was ready to leave mapmaking, and he symbolically handed over the brush. Thirty years and many, many trail maps later, Niehues is the legend and this 2019 book celebrates his work in nearly 300 lushly printed pages. It moves quickly through his background and technique before getting to the heart of the matter: all those mountain paintings, each on its own page, with no trail names to mar the topography.

Field sketches from centuries of ocean voyaging — navigators, naturalists, and sailors drawing what they saw before cameras existed. Lewis-Jones curates the art of observation at sea.