James Cahill

The first major survey to reveal the ways in which Classical mythology has inspired art throughout the last 2,500 years From the films of Woody Allen and the Coen Brothers to Margaret Atwood's books and Arcade Fire's songs, Classical Greek and Roman myths continue to be a source of cultural inspiration. The struggles of heroes, both triumphant and tragic, with gods, monsters, and fate, exert a particular grip on our imagination. Visual artists have long expressed and reworked these foundational stories. This is the first book to unite myth-inspired artworks by ancient, modern, and contemporary artists, from Botticelli and Caravaggio to Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst.

What if you could sit down with your favourite artist and ask them anything you liked - Life? Work? Inspiration? Based on new interviews and archival material from a huge roster of artists, this book does exactly that. Is art a `career', a vocation or something else entirely? Do you need a studio or a dealer, and how do you find one? Does financial success - or the lack of it - change you? Should you read the reviews? Encompassing every stage of an artist's life - from early works to debut shows and mid- and late-career stages - this book allows artists to answer these key questions.

David Hockney is the most famous living British artist. And he is arguably one of the more famous American artists as well. Emerging from the north of England in the 1960s, he made quite a splash in Swinging London as a portaitist, and went on to make a even bigger splash in Los Angeles when he moved there in the 1970s. His figurative paintings of the 1970s and 1980s captured the zeitgeist of West Coast living, while he also explored new avenues by constructing mosaics out of polaroids. By the beginning of the millennium, he returned to his Yorkshire roots, embarking on a new period of painting. This came to an end with the death by misadventure in his home of a young studio assistant in 2013. He went 'home' to LA and has in the intervening years begun a new period of contemplative portraiture.