Love/Hate
I have disliked, even hated this picture since I was very young. I have never known very much about it or the artist but something visually about it has always caused me to feel uneasy. I have narrowed it down to the shading on the golden, orangey form of the merry-go-round, horses and figures....
Tingatinga
Tingatinga is a painting style originally from Dar es Salaam in Tanzania. Named after its founder Edward Said Tingatinga, it is characterized by cheaply produced canvases depicting funny, caricatured, brightly rendered images of native wildlife, people and scenery. Untitled, above, makes use of an unusually deep blue background against which the streaks of white feathers, yellow beaks and the...
Arshile Gorky
Starting in the 1920s, New York City was the centre of art practice in America, and had art students cramming in to live amongst the artistic milieu. They wanted to move away from more staid ‘mechanical drawing’ techniques practiced in the rest of America, and, ’for obvious utilitarian reasons’, join a bohemia which was focused around...
Édouard Manet and The Representation of Modern Women
The representation of women in the history of art has been full of assumed constraints, social expectations and political manipulations which toward the end of the 19th century in Paris were shaped by an underlying social current. This was manifested in the production of one of the most notorious representations of women. Manet’s Olympia...
Brutalism
It’s funny to think that the council estate I grew up in was once considered an innovative architectural style and progressive social housing project. Surprising, because if you are unlucky enough to visit Roehampton on a commonly overcast day you will start to develop acute claustrophobia and depression from the grey structures that surround...
Gerhard Richter: Panorama @ Tate, Modern
Tate Modern 6 October 2011 – 8 January 2012 “For Baudelaire Manet was the painter of modern life, for me Richter is the painter of modern life“* I don’t think I would say Richter is my painter of modern life but I would say his masterful manipulation of paint and image says a lot about...
Power Drawing
I went to the British Museum recently and discovered a room I have been meaning to visit for a while to verify that it actually exists! And it does – hidden in the back of the Prints and Drawing room (room 90) is an archive of drawings, prints and etchings which you are not only able to see...
Arbiter Of Taste
Charles Saatchi’s recent deluded rant about the “vulgar and vile” art world was misguided because all he seemed to do is bemoan his standing in the upper echelons of uber rich art collectors. I think this is distasteful in the current social climate where artists and art institutions are struggling to survive. He...
