Brilliant Strokes: Chinese Paintings from the Mactaggart Art Collection.

Lisa Arsenault is a high-school English teacher who is involved in
several ministry campaigns to increase literacy.

This is the second in a series of publications dedicated to the analysis of a private donation of major Asian works to the University of Alberta. The folios in this edition contain works from the 15th to the late 20th centuries and include pen and ink illustrations of rural scenery, daily pursuits, and court life, as well as cameos of flowers, insects, and animals through the centuries.

It opens with the depiction and discussion of the 15th-century handscroll of a traditional cluster of houses in a secluded valley surrounded by mountains and shrouded in mist, and concludes with a dissertation on a major contemporary artist who uses traditional motifs in fresh new ways. (Permission from the copyright holder to reproduce this image was not available at the time of publication; nor was it for the image preceding it.) The number of works under discussion is quite small, but it is evident that they have been chosen as representational of important schools and epochs of art.

Despite high production values, there are some incidences of sloppy editing: for instance, discrepancies in dating are still extant. In one instance, according to the dates, an artist is throwing a party and immortalizing it in pictorial form one year after she has, in fact, died. However, in general, the level of writing is much superior to that of the first publication, and this author brings more emotional breadth to her assessment of the works under consideration. Her delight and evident joy when describing some of the works of art shine through the text. Her description of the merits of a painting of a cluster of grapes, for example, is particularly lyrical, and the reader is inspired to turn back to the illustration several times to get the full import. This is a valuable tool as a quick overview of several centuries of Chinese painting.