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Creation: Art Since the Beginning - John-Paul Stonard A fully illustrated, panoramic world history of art from ancient civilisation to the present day, exploring the remarkable endurance of humankind's creative impulse.Some fifty thousand years ago, on an island in modern-day Indonesia, an early human used red ochre pigment to capture the likeness of a native pig on a limestone cave wall.Around the same time, across the globe in Europe, another human retrieved a lump of charcoal from an old fire and sketched four galloping horses. It was like a light turning on in the human mind.Our instinct to produce images in response to nature allowed the earliest Homo sapiens to understand the world around us, and to thrive. Now, the art historian John-Paul Stonard has travelled across continents to take us on a panoramic journey through the history of art - from ancient Anatolian standing stones to a Qing Dynasty ink handscroll, from a drawing by a Kiowa artist from the Great Plains to a post-independence Congolese painting.Lavishly illustrated throughout, with a mixture of black and white and full colour images, Creation is an ambitious, thrilling and landmark work that leads us from Benin to Belgium, China to Constantinople, Mexico to Mesopotamia. Journeying from pre-history to the present day, it explores the remarkable endurance of humankind's creative impulse, and asks how - and why - we create. About the Author John-Paul Stonard trained as a painter before completing a doctorate in art history at the Courtauld Institute of Art. From 2005 to 2010, he worked as an editor at the Burlington Magazine, where he remains a member of the Consultative Committee. His writing has regularly appeared in the London Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement, Burlington Magazine and Apollo. John-Paul's publications include Fault Lines: Art in Germany 1945-55; Germany Divided: Baselitz and his Generation; Chatsworth, Arcadia, Now; and, as editor and contributor, The Books that Shaped Art History. Over a period of four years he travelled extensively to see the objects described in Creation, from Japan to Mexico, Cairo to Madrid, China to Moscow, writing the book as he went.