Nine American figurative (in the sense of representational) artists talk about themselves and their work, how they produce it and their aims, as recorded in taped interviews with poet Mark Strand. The artists: William Bailey, Jack Beal, Jane Freilicher, Philip Pearlstein, ALex Katz, Lennart Anderson, Louisa Matthiasdottir, Wayne Thiebaud and Neil Welliver.

This is an informative and illuminating study, covering aspects of what inspires and influences each artist down to the such facts that one likes to work listening to records. It is well illustrated with one hundred and eleven full colour paintings and further seventy eight black and white pictures of drawings, pastels and paintings; all well captioned. Almost all the illustrations are of a good size, mostly full page and making good use of the large page format. What I particularly like is the range of work included for each artist, in some cases showing in just twenty or so images a greater diversity than some monographs on some of the artists.

This is a substantial and well produced book, it includes brief chronologies for each artist, but no bibliography nor index. The colour illustrations of are good quality but some of the monochromes suffer from the dense areas of black typical of much printing of the period (1983).

ISBN 0517547597. 240pp. 28cm x 26.6cm (11" x 10.5") ( )