Arcadia Public Library

Chronicles the life of children's illustrator and author Beatrix Potter, examining how art influenced her young life.

" 'It's the very process of looking at something that makes it beautiful.' -David Hockney. Growing up under the gray skies of England during WWII, David Hockney used art to brighten his world. He discovered that the more he looked and drew, the more he could see beyond the surface to find beauty, possibility, and new perspectives. In the most ordinary things, whether a splash of water, a changing landscape, or the face of a friend, David always found...

Filmed over three years, this documentary is an unprecedented record of a major artist at work. It captures David Hockney's return from California to paint his native Yorkshire, outside, through the seasons and in all weathers. It tells the story of a homecoming and gives a revealing portrait of what inspires and motivates today's greatest living British-born artist.

Academy Award winner Tilda Swinton personally conducts an intimatecinematic commemoration of the life, times, and work of UK filmmaker,artist, and renegade Derek Jarman in Derek. Both a "heartbreaking and giddily alive biopic" and an "accomplished homage" (Art forum), Isaac Julien's Derek is a joyful requiem celebrating Derek Jarman's life, vision and legacy with the same maverick energy and affectionate creativity that made its subject one of the...

Until her unexpected death in 1996, Helen Chadwick was amongst the most sparkling, provocative and distinctive of artists. Her sensual and rigorously intellectual works explore desire, sexuality amd the body. Produced alongside a major retrospective exhibition, organised by London's Barbican Art Gallery, this film provides a rare opportunity to reflect on her art. Important installations are featured, such as Ego Geometria Sum, which uses photographs...

Stuart Brisley is perhaps best-known for his disturbing physical performances which pushed his body to extremes. But his work as an artist over four decades has embraced sculpture and installation, films and fictions, large-scale participatory projects and, most recently, the Web. Illustrated with archive footage and photographs, this profile of the artist explores his understandings of collaboration and community, of politics and the market, of humour...

Venice is the subject that dominates the later, glorious paintings and watercolours of J.M.W. Turner. Its shimmering light, its ethereal beauty and its faded magnificence inspired some of Turner's best-loved, most magical and most mysterious images. Turner was forty-four when he first became one of the many distinguished nineteenth-century visitors to Venice. During this 1819 trip and two further stays in 1833 and 1840, he created a host of brilliant...

Three spectacular canvases by Sandra Blow were one of the highlights of the 2006 Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. Sadly, this was her last show, as she died in August that year. This film was made in her studio in St. Ives as she was preparing to submit her works, and it captures her remarkable character and her fascinating reflections on a lifetime creating beautiful, rigorous, distinctive and joyous paintings. Sandra Blow spent a formative year...

Lisa Milroy’s paintings are pleasurable and provocative, clear but complex, immediate and yet richly subtle. In 2001 many of her major works were brought together for an important exhibition at Tate Liverpool; this film, the first about her work, was made alongside that show. Her earliest works are depictions of everyday objects: shoes in serried ranks, collections of lightbulbs and household hardware. Later canvases explore the process of depicting...

Graham Gussin creates art in an almost bewildering variety of media: film, sound, installation, events, photography, text, painting and more. The key early work Savannah (1990) features a wooden plaque and a wall light, while the production of the ambitious film projection Remote Viewer (2002) involved a trip to Iceland and the services of someone with telepathic ability. Underpinning all of his subtle, witty, often disarmingly beautiful work is a...