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Articles by Alice Mansfield

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About Alice Mansfield

A graduate of the Slade, Alice has painted and written about art all her life. With her children now having now grown up and departed the nest, she recently took up sculpture. More Posts

Symbolism in art

Recently I watched a programme called Decoding Turner in which a mechanical engineer and his wife advanced a theory that in Turner’s famous The Fighting Temeraire, on the prow of the vessel was concealed a picture of Napoleon. The art historian Andrew Graham Dixon peered at the picture and [...]

September 13, 2023 // 0 Comments

Artist talking about themselves

My late father – no mean watercolourist but above all a fine preceptor of humanity – once observed of a painter he knew: “I don’t think he is much good but he is very good at talking about his art “ Talking about art and doing it are two different skills. Picasso mixed with a [...]

August 30, 2023 // 0 Comments

Thunderclap & The Man who made Vermeers

Thunderclap by Observer Art Critic Laura Cumming is the story of the life and death of Dutch 17th century artist Carel Fabritius. In fact much more is known about his death in 1654 when his house collapsed after a gunpowder  depot explosion in Delft. As for his life, he was born in the village of [...]

July 25, 2023 // 0 Comments

After Impressionism

Yesterday I went to the After Impressionism exhibition at the National Gallery and was underwhelmed. Perhaps this was caused by waiting in the rain in the entrance queue; or the fact that I knew virtually every picture so the impact was lost; perhaps I could not see for whom the exhibition had been [...]

July 15, 2023 // 0 Comments

John Minton

Yesterday I watched a recording of Mark Gatiss’ appreciation of the artist Johnny Minton (1917-57) on BBC4. You may not have heard of him and therefore be surprised to learn that in the 1950s he was as well known as Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon. He was the life and soul of the party, an active [...]

July 12, 2023 // 0 Comments

Sussex Landscape/chalk, wood and water

This exhibition does very much what it says on the tin by sticking to landscapes of Sussex in water colours, chalk and woodcuts. It features artists who came to Sussex to paint – like Turner – and those who made their home in this most attractive of counties – John Constable, Ivon [...]

March 11, 2023 // 0 Comments

The memorial service for Ken Howard

Last Tuesday I attended the memorial service for Ken Howard which took place at St James Church Piccadilly and afterwards at the Royal  Academy. The church memorial takes an hour into which time you have to fit in prayers and the life of the person, in the case of Ken a full and long one. An [...]

December 8, 2022 // 0 Comments

The funeral of Ken Howard

Yesterday I travelled up to London for the funeral of the painter Ken Howard. The service was at St Mary’s Church,The Boltons, and the burial in the cemetery between Brompton and Fulham Road. Organised religion occupies the key points in life: birth (the christening service), manhood confirmation [...]

October 4, 2022 // 0 Comments

Sensationalists: The Bad Girls And Boys Of British Art/BBC 2

The Sensationalists, broadcast last night on BBC2, is the story of the YBAs (young British artists) – a movement originating in Goldsmith’s College of Art – whose prime mover was Damien Hirst. They fulminated against the traditional values of the art world, epitomised by Cork Street [...]

September 28, 2022 // 0 Comments

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