Celtic Art is the only indigenous British art form of global significance. This book is a visually appealing appeal for the establishment of this great national art in schools and colleges where the history of decoration is taught. Until recently, the classically oriented artistic community has regarded the abstract, figurative, and symbolic style of the Celtic artist as something mysterious, an ancient survival largely ignored in art histories.

Contemporary trends away from realism and the younger generation's interest in psychedelic and art nouveau styles create favorable ground for the revival of Celtic art, which highlights the widespread interest in this new edition. When this book was first published, it was characterized as a "true grammar of decoration". It is certainly a necessary reference and practical handbook for the art student and craftsman seeking simple construction methods for arranging complex decorative shapes.

The complete chronology of symbols includes spirals, arrow shapes, steps, and keys up to interatomic grids, which are unique to this particular Celtic school. There are also sections dealing with zoomorphic designs, authentic Celtic weaves, ceramics, and other areas in which the author pioneered in his time.

The book deals with the Pict school of artist-craftsmen, who carved pagan symbols such as the Bull of Burghead and, in the early Christian era, designed outstanding examples of monumental sculpture like the Aberlemno Cross and the Ardagh Chalice. The interatomic grids, thanks to their perfection and beauty due to the use of mathematical formulas, are unique in Celtic Art and are found nowhere else from the regions occupied by the Picts.

Their outstanding achievement in art was the fine combined use of artistic, geometric, and mathematical methods with magic, imagination, and logic, functioning both to teach and adorn. Although incidental to the main educational process of this book, there is also an empowering challenge to the art historian and archaeologist. The author admits that the evidence revealed by these investigations regarding art has uncovered a previously unexpected culture of high sophistication in pre-Roman Britain, posing as many questions as it answers.

Who were the Picts? Where do the Asian roots of Celtic Art originate from? The instinctive need for decoration is one of the most basic human impulses that seems to have atavistic roots in the primitive creative and imaginative trait that separates man from beast.